 Chapter thirty-four of the Law and the Lady—the Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins, Chapter thirty-four, Glen Inch. Ah ha! said Benjamin complacently, so the lawyer thinks, as I do, that you will be highly impotent if you go back to Mr. Dexter. Ah ha! it had its sensible man, the lawyer, no doubt. You will listen to Mr. Playmore, won't you, though you wouldn't listen to me? I had, of course, respected Mr. Playmore's confidence in me when Benjamin and I met on my return to the hotel. Not a word relating to the lawyer's horrible suspicion of Missouri must Dexter has passed my lips. You must forgive me, my old friend. I said, answering Benjamin, I am afraid it has come to this. Try as I may. I can listen to nobody who advises me. On our way here, I honestly meant to be guided by Mr. Playmore. We should never have taken this long journey if I had not honestly meant it. I have tried. Tried hard to be a teachable, reasonable woman. But there is something in me that won't be taught. I am afraid I shall go back to Dexter. Even Benjamin lost all patience with me this time. What is bread in the bone, he said, quoting the old proverb, will never come out of the flesh. In years gone by you were the most obstinate child that ever made a mess in a nursery. Oh, dear me, we might as well have stayed in London. No, I replied. Now we have travelled to Edinburgh. We will see something interesting to me at any rate which we should never have seen if we had not left London. My husband's country house is within a few miles of us here. Tomorrow we will go to Glen Inge. Where the poor lady was poisoned, asked Benjamin, with a look of dismay, you meant that place. Yes, I want to see the room in which she died. I want to go all over the house. Benjamin crossed his hands resignedly on his lap. I tried to understand the new generation, said the old man, sadly. But I can't manage it. The new generation beats me. I sat down to write to Mr. Playmore about the visit to Glen Inge. The house in which the tragedy had occurred that had blighted my husband's life was, to my mind, the most interesting house in the habitable globe. The prospect of visiting Glen Inge had indeed, to tell the truth, strongly influenced my resolution to consult the Edinburgh Lawyer. I sent my note to Mr. Playmore by a messenger and received the kindest reply in return. If I would wait until the afternoon he would get the day's business done, and would take us to Glen Inge in his own carriage. Benjamin's obstinacy in his own quiet way, and on certain occasions only, was quite a match for mine. He had privately determined, as one of the old generation, to have nothing to do with Glen Inge. Not a word on the subject escaped him until Mr. Playmore's carriage was at the hotel door. At that appropriate moment, Benjamin remembered an old friend of his in Edinburgh. Will you please excuse me, Valeria? My friend's name is Saunders, and he will take it unkindly of me if I don't dine with him today. Apart from the associations that I connected with it, there was nothing to interest a traveller at Glen Inge. The country around was pretty and well cultivated, and nothing more. The park was to an English eye-wild and badly camped. The house had been built within the last seventy or eighty years. Outside it was as bare of all ornament as a factory, and as gloomily heavy an effect as a prison. Inside the deadly dreariness, the close oppressive solitude of a deserted dwelling, wearied the eye and weighed on the mind, from the roof to the basement. The house had been shut up since the time of the trial. A lonely old couple, man and wife, had the keys and the charge of it. The man chugged his head in silent, and saw a full disapproval of our intrusion, when Mr. Playmore ordered him to open the doors and shutters, and let the light in on the dark, deserted place. Fires were burning in the library and the picture gallery, to preserve the treasures which they contained from the damp. It was not easy at first to look at the cheerful place, without fancying that the inhabitants of the house must surely come in and warm themselves. Ascending to the upper floor I saw the rooms made familiar to me by the report of the trial. I entered the little study, with the old books on the shelves, and the key still missing from the locked door of communication with the bedroom. I looked into the room in which the unhappy mistress of Glen Inge had suffered and died. The bed was left in its place. The soap on which the nurse had snatched her intervals of repose was at its foot. The Indian cabinet in which the crumpled paper with the grains of arsenic had been found still held its little collection of curiosities. I moved on its pivot, the invalid table, on which she had taken her meals, and written her poems, poor soul. The place was dreary and dreadful, the heavy ear-field as if it were still burdened with its horrid load of misery and distrust. I was glad to get out, after a passing glance at the room which Ustaz had occupied on those days, into the guest's corridor. There was the bedroom, at the door of which Miss Eremus Dexter had waited and watched. There was the oaken floor, along which he had hopped, in his horrible way, following the footsteps of the servant disguised in her mistresses' clothes. Go where I might, the ghosts of the dead, and the absent were with me, step by step. Go where I might, the lonely horror of the house, had its still and awful voice for me. I keep the secret of the poison. I had the mystery of the death. The oppression of the place became unendurable. I longed for the pure sky and the free air. My companion noticed and understood me. Come, he said. We have had enough of the house. Let's look at the grounds. In the grey quiet of the evening we roamed about the lonely gardens and threaded our way through the rank-neglected rubberies. Wandering here and wandering there, we drifted into the kitchen-garden, with one little patch stills barely cultivated by the old man and his wife, and all the rest a wilderness of weeds. Beyond the far end of the garden, divided from it by a low paleon of wood, there stretched a patch of waste-ground, sheltered on three sides per trees. In one lost corner of the ground an object, common enough elsewhere, retracted my attention here. The object was a dust-heap, the great size of it, and the curious situation in which it was placed aroused a moment's languid curiosity in me. I stopped and looked at the dust and ashes at the broken crockery and the old iron. Here there was a torn hat, and there some fragments of rotten old boots, and scattered around a small attendant litter of torn paper and frowsy rags. What are you looking at?" asked Mr. Playmore. Had nothing more remarkable than the dust-heap, I answered. Entirely England, I suppose you would have all that carted away out of sight, said the Luya. We don't mind in Scotland, as long as that dust-heap is far enough away not to be smelt at the house. Besides, some are fed sifted, comes in useful as manure for the garden. Here the place is deserted, and the rubbish in consequence has not been disturbed. Everything at Glen Inge, Mrs. Eustace, the big dust-heap included, is waiting for the new mistress to set it to rights. One of these days you may be queen here, who knows? I shall never see this place again, I said. Never is a long day, returned my companion, and time has had surprises in store for all of us. We turned away and walked back in silence to the park gate at which the carriage was waiting. On the return to Edinburgh, Mr. Playmore directed the conversation to topics entirely unconnected with my visit to Glen Inge. He saw that my mind stood in need of relief, and he most good-naturedly and successfully exuded himself to amuse me. It was not until we were close to the city that he touched on the subject of my return to London. Have you decided yet on the day when you leave Edinburgh, he asked. We leave Edinburgh, I replied, by the train of tomorrow morning. Do you still see no reason to alter the opinions which you expressed yesterday? Does your speedy departure mean that? I am afraid it does, Mr. Playmore. When I am an older woman, I may be a wiser woman. In the meantime, I can only trust to you indulgence if I still blindly blunder on in my own way. He smiled pleasantly and patted my hand, then changed on a sudden, and looked at me gravely and attentively before we opened his lips again. This is my last opportunity of speaking to you before you go, he said. May I speak freely? As freely as you please, Mr. Playmore, whatever you may say to me will only add to my grateful sense of your kindness. I have very little to say, Mrs. Eustace, and that little begins with a word of caution. You told me yesterday that, when you paid your last visit to Missouri, most dexter, you went to him alone. Don't dig that again, take somebody with you. Do you think I am in any danger, then? Not in the ordinary sense of the word. I only think that a friend may be useful in keeping dexter's audacity. He is one of the most impudent men living within proper limits. Then again, in case anything worth remembering and acting on should, for from him in his talk, a friend may be valuable as witness. In your place, I should have a witness with me who could take notes, but then I am a lawyer, and my business is to make a fuss about trifles. Let me only say go with a companion when you next visit dexter, and be on your guard against yourself when your talk turns on Mrs. Bowley. On my guard against myself, what do you mean? Practice, my dear Mrs. Eustace, has given me an eye for the little weaknesses of human nature. You are quite naturally disposed to be jealous of Mrs. Bowley, and you are in consequence not in full possession of your excellent common sense when dexter uses that lady as a means of blindfolding you. Am I speaking too freely? Certainly not. It's very degrading to me to be jealous of Mrs. Bowley. My vanity suffers dreadfully when I think of it, but my common sense yields to conviction. I dare say you're right. I am delighted to find that we agree on one point, you rejoined dryly. I don't despair yet of convincing you in that far more serious matter which is still in dispute between us, and, what is more, if you will throw no obstacles in the way, I look to dexter himself to help me. This aroused my curiosity. How misery must dexter could help him, and that, or in any other way, was a riddle beyond my reading. You propose to repeat to dexter all that Lady Clarinda told you about Mrs. Bowley, he went on, and you think it is likely that dexter will be overwhelmed as you were overwhelmed when he hears the story. I'm going to venture on a prophecy. I say that dexter will disappoint you. Far from showing any astonishment, he will bold you tell you that you have been duped by a deliberately false statement of facts, invented and set afloat in her own guilty interests by Mrs. Bowley. Now tell me, if you really try in that way to renew your own founded suspicion of an innocent woman, will that shake your confidence in your own opinion? It will entirely destroy my confidence in my own opinion, Mr. Playmore. Very good. I shall expect you to write to me in any case, and I believe we shall be of one mind before the week is out. Keep strictly secret all that I said to you yesterday about dexter. Don't even mention my name when you see him. Thinking of him as I think now, I would as soon touch the hand of a hangman as the hand of that monster. God bless you. Goodbye. So he said his farewell words at the door of the hotel. Kind, genial clever, but oh, how easily prejudiced, how shockingly obstinate and holding to his own opinion, and what an opinion! I shuddered as I thought of it. CHAPTER 35 Mr. Playmore's Prophecy We reached London between eight and nine in the evening. Strictly methodical in all his habits, Benjamin had telegraphed to his housekeeper from Edinburgh to have supper ready for us by ten o'clock, and to send the capman whom he always employed to meet us at the station. Arriving at the villa, we were obliged to wait for a moment to let a pony chase get by us before we could draw up at Benjamin's door. The chase passed very slowly, driven by a rough-looking man with a pipe in his mouth. But for the man I might have doubted whether the pony was quite a stranger to me, as things were I thought no more of the matter. Benjamin's respectable old housekeeper opened the garden gate and startled me by bursting into a devout ejaculation of gratitude at the sight of her master. The Lord be praised, sir, she cried, I thought he would never come back. Anything wrong, asked Benjamin, in his own impenetrably quiet way. The housekeeper trembled at the question and answered in this enigmatic words. My mind's upset, sir, and whether things are wrong or whether things are right is more than I can say. Hours ago a strange man came in and asked, she stopped as if she were completely bewildered, looked for a moment vacantly at her master, and suddenly addressed herself to me, and asked, she proceeded, when you was expected back, ma'am, I told him what my master had telegraphed, and the man says upon that, wait a bit, he says, I'm coming back. He came back in a minute or less, and he carried a thing in his arms, which curdled my blotted did, and set me shaking from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot. I know I ought to have stopped it, but I couldn't stand upon my legs much less put the man out of the house. In he went, without with your leave or by your leave, Mr. Benjamin said, in he went with a thing in his arms straight through to your library, and there it has been all these hours, and there it is. Now I've spoken to the police, but they wouldn't interfere, and what to do next is more than my poor head can tell. Don't you go in by yourself, ma'am, you'll be frightened out of your wits, you will! I persisted in entering the house for all that. Aided by the pony, I easily solved the mystery of the housekeeper's otherwise unintelligible narrative. Passing through the dining-room, where the supper-table was already laid for us, I looked through the half-open library door. Yes, there was Miserie Mostexter, a raid in his pink jacket, fast asleep in Benjamin's favourite armchair. No coverlet hid his horrible deformity. Nothing was sacrificed to conventional ideas of propriety in his extraordinary dress. I could hardly wonder that the poor old housekeeper trembled from head to foot when she spoke of him. Valeria said Benjamin, pointing to the portend in the chair. Which is it, an Indian idol or a man? I have already described Miserie Mostexter as possessing the sensitive ear of a dog. He now allowed that he also slept the light sleep of a dog. Quietly, as Benjamin had spoken, the strange voice aroused him on the instance. He rubbed his eyes and smiled as innocently as a waking child. How do you do, Mrs. Valeria? he said. I have had a nice little sleep. You don't know how happy I am to see you again. Who is this? He rubbed his eyes once more and looked at Benjamin. Not knowing what else to do in this extraordinary emergency, I presented my visitor to the master of the house. Excuse my getting up, Sir, said Miserie Mostexter. I can't get up. I have no licks. You look as if you thought I was occupying your chair. If I am committing an intrusion, be so good as to put your umbrella under me and give me a jig. I shall fall on my hands, and I shall be offended with you. I will submit to a tumble and a scolding, but please don't break my heart by sending me away. That beautiful woman there can be very cruel sometimes, Sir, when the fit takes her. She went away when I stood in the sores neat of a little talk with her. She went away and left me to my loneliness and my suspense. I am a poor deformed britch, with a warm heart and perhaps an insatiable curiosity as well. Insatiable curiosity, have you ever felt it is a curse? I bore it until my brains began to boil in my head, and then I sent for my garden and made him drive me here. I like being here. The air of your library soothes me, the sight of Mrs. Valeria's balm to my wounded heart. She has something to tell me, something that I am dying to hear. If she is not too tired after her journey, and if you will let her tell me, I promise to have myself taken away when she is done. Dear Mr. Benjamin, you look like the refuge of the afflicted. I am afflicted. Shake hands like a good Christian and take me in. He held out his hand. His soft blue eyes melted into an expression of piteous entreaty, completely stupefied by the amazing herring of which he had been made the object. Benjamin took the offered hand with the ear of a man in a dream. I hope I see you well, sir, he said mechanically, and then looked around at me to know what he was to do next. I understand, Mr. Dexter. I whispered. Leave him to me. Benjamin stole a last bewildered look at the object in the chair, bowed to it, with the instinct of politeness which never failed him, and still with the ear of a man in a dream withdrew into the next room. Left together we looked at each other for the first moment in silence. Whether I unconsciously drew on that inexhaustible store of indulgence which a woman always keeps in reserve for a man who owns that he has need of her, or whether resenting as I did Mr. Playmore's horrible suspicion of him, my heart was especially accessible to feelings of compassion in his unhappy case, I cannot tell. I only know that I pitied Miss Erema's Dexter at that moment as I had never pitied him yet, and that I spared him the reproof which I should certainly have administered to any other man who had taken the liberty of establishing himself uninvited in Benjamin's house. He was the first to speak. Lady Clarinda has destroyed your confidence in me. He began wildly. Lady Clarinda has done nothing of the sort, I replied. She has not attempted to influence my opinion. I was really obliged to leave London as I told you. He sighed and closed his eyes contendantly as if I had relieved him of a heavy weight of anxiety. Be merciful to me, he said, and tell me something more. I have been so miserable in your absence. He suddenly opened his eyes again and looked at me with an appearance of the greatest interest. Are you very much fatigued by travelling? He proceeded. I am hungry for news of what happened at the Majest dinner party. Is it cruel of me to tell you so, when you have not rested after your journey? Only one question to night, and I will leave the rest till to-morrow. What did Lady Clarinda say about Mrs. Bowley? All that you wanted to hear? All and more, I answered. What? What? What? He cried wild with impatience in a moment. Mr. Playmore's last prophetic words were vividly present to my mind. He had declared in the most positive manner that Dexter would persist in misleading me, and would show no signs of astonishment when I repeated what Lady Clarinda had told me of Mrs. Bowley. I resolved to put the lawyer's prophecy so far as the question of astonishment was concerned to the sharpest attainable test. I said not a word to Miss Ariyma's Dexter in the way of preface or preparation. I burst on him with my news as abruptly as possible. The person you saw in the corridor was not Mrs. Bowley. I said, It was the maid dressed in her mistress's cloak and hat. Mrs. Bowley herself was not in the house at all. Mrs. Bowley herself was dancing at a masked ball in Edinburgh. There is what the maid told Lady Clarinda, and there is what Lady Clarinda told me. In the absorbing interest of the moment, I poured out those words one after another as fast as they would pass my lips. Miss Ariyma's Dexter completely falsified the lawyer's prediction. He shattered under the shock. His eyes opened wide with amazement. Say it again, he cried. I can't take it all in at once. You stun me! I was more than contented with this result. I triumphed in my victory. For once I had really some reason to feel satisfied with myself. I had taken the Christian and merciful side in my discussion with Mr. Playmore, and I had won my reward. I could sit in the same room with Miss Ariyma's Dexter and feel the blessed conviction that I was not breathing the same air with a poisoner. Was it not worth the visit to Edinburgh to have made sure of that? In repeating at his own desire what I had already said to him I took care to add the details which made Lady Clarinda's narrative coherent and credible. He listened through all with breathless attention, here and there repeating the words after me and to impress them the more surely and the more deeply on his mind. What is to be said, what is to be done? he asked, with a look of blank despair. I can't believe it. From first to last, as strange as it is, it sounds true. How would Mr. Playmore have felt if he had heard those words? I did him the justice to believe that he would have felt heartily ashamed of himself. There is nothing to be said, I rejoined, except that Mrs. Bowley is innocent and that you and I have done her grievous wrong. Don't you agree with me? I entirely agree with you, he answered, without an instant hesitation. Mrs. Bowley is an innocent woman. The defense at the trial was the right defense after all. He folded his arms complacently. He looked perfectly satisfied to leave the matter there. I was not of his mind. To my own amazement I now found myself the least reasonable person of the two. Miseramus texted to use the popular phrase had given me more than I had bargained for. He had not only done all that I had anticipated in the way of falsifying Mr. Playmore's prediction, he had actually advanced beyond my limits. I could go the length of recognising Mrs. Bowley's innocence, but at that point I stopped. If the defense at the trial were the right defense, fair well to all hope of exerting my husband's innocence, I held to that hope as I held to my love and my life. Speak for yourself, I said. My opinion of the defense remains unchanged. He started, and it has browsed as if I had disappointed and displeased him. Does that mean that you were determined to go on? It does. He was downright angry with me. He cast his customary politeness to the winds. Absurd impossible! he cried contemptuously. You have yourself declared that we've wronged an innocent woman when we suspected Mrs. Bowley. Is there anyone else whom we can suspect? It's ridiculous to ask the question. There is no alternative left but to accept the facts as they are in to stern affair than the matter of the poisoning at Gleninch. It's childish to dispute playing conclusions. You must give up. You may be angry with me if you will, Mr. Dexter. Neither your anger nor your argument will make me give up. He controlled himself by an effort. He was quiet and polite again when he next spoke to me. Very well. Pardon me for a moment if I absorb myself in my own thoughts. I want to do something which I have not done yet. What may that be, Mr. Dexter? I am going to put myself into Mrs. Bowley's skin and to think with Mrs. Bowley's mind. Give me a minute. Thank you. What did he mean? What new transformation of him was passing before my eyes? Was there ever such a puzzle of a man as this? Who that saw him now, intently pursuing his new train of thought, would have recognised him as the childish creature who had awoke so innocently and had astonished Benjamin by the infantile nonsense which he talked. It is said and said truly that there are many sides to every human character. Dexter's many sides were developing themselves at such a rapid rate of progress that they were already beyond my counting. He lifted his head and fixed a look of keen inquiry on me. I have come out of Mrs. Bowley's skin, he announced, and I have arrived at this result. We are two impetuous people, and we have been a little hasty and rushing at a conclusion. He stopped. I said nothing. Was the shadow of a doubt of him beginning to rise in my mind? I waited and listened. I am as fully satisfied as ever of the truth of what Lady Clarinda told you, he proceeded, but I see on consideration what I failed to see at the time. The story admits of two interpretations, one on the surface and another under the surface. I look under the surface in your interests, and I say it is just possible that Mrs. Bowley may have been cunning enough to forestall suspicion and to set up an alibi. I am ashamed to own that I did not understand what he meant by the last word, alibi. He saw that I was not following him and spoke out more plainly. Was there made something more than her mistress's passive accomplice? He said. Was she the hand that her mistress used? Was she on her way to give the first dose of poison when she passed me in this corridor? Did Mrs. Bowley spend the night in Edinburgh so as to have her defense ready if suspicion fell upon her? My shadowy doubt of him became substantial doubt when I heard that—had I absolved him a little too readily? Was he really trying to renew my suspicions of Mrs. Bowley as Mr. Playmore had foretold? This time I was obliged to answer him, and doing so I unconsciously employed one of the phrases which the lawyer had used to meet during my first interview with him. That sounds rather far-fetched, Mr. Dexter, I said. To my relief he made no attempt to defend the new view that he had advanced. It is far-fetched, he admitted. When I say it was just possible, though I didn't claim much for my idea, I set more for it perhaps than it deserved. This, miss my view, is ridiculous. What are you to do next? If Mrs. Bowley is not the poisoner, either by herself or by her maid, who is? She is innocent, and you stars is innocent. Where is the other person whom you can suspect? If I poisoned her, he cried, with his eyes flashing and his voice rising to its highest notes. Do you, does anybody suspect me? I loved her, I adored her, I have never been the same man since her death. Hush, I will trust you with a secret. Don't tell your husband. It might be the destruction of her friendship. I would have married her, before she met with Hustars, if she would have taken me. When the doctors told me she had died poison, to ask Dr. Jerome what I suffered he can tell you. All through that horrible night I was awake, watching my opportunity until I found my way to her. I got into the room and took my last leave of the cold remains of the angel whom I loved. I cried over her, I kissed her. For the first and last time, I stole one little lock of her hair. I have worn it ever since, I have kissed it night and day. Oh, God! The room comes back to me, the dead face comes back to me. Look, look! He tore from its place of concealment and disposed him a little locket, fastened by a ribbon round his neck. He threw it to me where I sat and burst into a passion of tears. A man in my place might have known what to do, being only a woman I yielded to the compassionate impulse of the moment. I got up and crossed the room to him. I gave him back his locket and put my hand, without knowing what I was about on the poor wretched shoulder. I am incapable of suspecting you, Mr. Dexter. I said gently, no such idea ever entered my head. I pity you from the bottom of my heart. He caught my hand in his, and devoured it with kisses. His lips burned me like fire. He twisted himself suddenly in the chair and worn his arm round my waist. In the terror and indignation of the moment, mainly struggling with him, I cried out for help. The door opened and Benjamin appeared on the threshold. Dexter let go his hold of me. I ran to Benjamin and prevented him from advancing into the room. In all my long experience of my fatherly old friend, I had never seen him really angry yet. I saw him more than angry now. He was pale. The patient gentle old man was pale with rage. I held him at the door with all my strength. You can't lay your hand on a cripple, I said. Sent for the man outside to take him away. I drew Benjamin out of the room and closed and locked the library door. The housekeeper was in the dining room. I sent her out to call the driver for the pony chase into the house. The man came in, the rough man whom I had noticed when we were approaching the garden gate. Benjamin opened the library door in stern silence. It was perhaps unworthy of me, but I could not resist the temptation to look in. Missouri must Dexter had sunk down in the chair. The rough man lifted his master with a gentleness that surprised me. I had my face, I heard Dexter say to him, in broken tones. He opened his coarse pilot jacket and hit his master's head under it, and so went silently out, with a deformed creature held to his bosom, like a woman, sheltering her child. END OF CHAPTER XXXV I passed a sleepless night. The outrage that had been offered to me was bad enough in itself, but consequences were associated with it which might affect me more seriously still. Insofar as the attainment of the one object of my life might yet depend on my personal association with Missouri must Dexter, an unsurmountable obstacle appeared to be now placed in my way. Even in my husband's interest ought I to permit a man who had grossly insulted me to approach me again. Although I was no prude, I recalled from the thought of it. I arose late and sat down at my desk, trying to summon energy enough to write to Mr. Playmore, and trying in vain. Toward noon, while Benjamin happened to be out for a little while, the housekeeper announced the arrival of another strange visitor at the gate of the villa. It's a woman this time, ma'am, or something like one, said the worthy person confidentially. A great, stout, awkward, stupid creature with a man's hat on and a man's stick in her hand, she says she has got a note for you, and she won't give it to anybody but you. I'd better not let her in, had I? Recognizing the original of her picture, I astonished the housekeeper by consenting to receive the messenger immediately. Ariel entered the room in stolid silence as usual, but I noticed a change in her which puzzled me. Her dull eyes were red and a blood trot. Traces of tears as I fancied were visible on her fat, shapeless cheeks. She crossed the room on her way to my chair with a less determined tread than was customary with her. Could Ariel, I asked myself, be woman enough to cry? Was it within the limits of possibility that Ariel could approach me in sorrow and in fear? I hear you've brought something for me, I said, when you sit down. She handed me a letter, without answering and without taking a chair. I opened the envelope. The letter inside was written by Miserimus Dexter. It contained these lines. Try to pity me, if you have any pity left for a miserable man. I have bitterly expiated the madness of a moment. If you could see me, even you would own that my punishment has been heavy enough. For God's sake, don't abandon me. I was beside myself when I let the feelings that you have awakened in me get the better of my control. It shall never show itself again. It shall be a secret that dies with me. Can I expect you to believe this? No. I won't ask you to believe me. I won't ask you to trust me in the future. If you ever consent to see me again, let it be in the presence of any third person whom you may appoint to protect you. I deserve that. I will submit to it. I will wait till time has composed your angry feeling against me. All I ask now is leave to her. Say to Ariel, I forgive him, and one day I will let him see me again. She will remember it for love of me. If he sent her back without a message, he'll send me to the madhouse. Ask her if he don't believe me. Miserimus Dexter. I finished the strange letter and looked at Ariel. She stood with her eyes on the floor and held out to me the thick walking stick which she carried in her hand. Take the stick, with the first word she said to me. Why am I to take it? I asked. She struggled a little, with her sluggish working mind, and slowly put her thoughts into words. You're angry with the master, she said. Take it out on me. Here's the stick. Beat me. Beat you, I exclaimed. My back's broad, said the poor creature. I won't make a row. I bear it. Drat, you take the stick. Don't fax him. Whack it out on my back. Beat me. She roughly forced the stick into my hand. She turned her poor shapeless shoulders to me, waiting for the blow. It was at once dreadful and touching to see her, that he has rose in my eyes. I tried gently and patiently to reason with her. Quite useless. The idea of taking the master's punishment on herself was the one idea in her mind. Don't fax him, she repeated. Beat me. What do you mean by vexing him? I asked. She tried to explain and failed to find the words. She showed me by imitation, as a savage might have shown me what she meant. Striding to the fireplace, she crouched on the rug and looked into the fire with a horrible wakened stare. Then she clasped her hands over her full head, and rocked slowly to and fro, still steering into the fire. There's how he sits, she said, with a sudden burst of speech. Hours and hours, there's how he sits. Notices nobody cries about you. The picture she presented recalled to my memory the report of Dexter's health, and the doctor's plain warning of peril waiting for him in the future. Even if I could have resisted Ariel, I must have yielded to the vague dread of consequences which now shook me in secret. Don't do that, I cried. She was still rocking herself in imitation of the master, and still steering into the fire with her hands on her head. Get her prey. I'm not angry with him now. I forgive him. She rose on her hands and knees, and waited, looking up intently into my face. In that attitude, more like a dog than a human being, she repeated her customary petition when she wanted to fix words that interested her in her mind. Say it again. I did as she bade me. She was not satisfied. Say it as it is in the letter, she went on. Say it as the master said it to me. I looked back at the letter and repeated the form of message contained in the letter part of it word for word. I forgive him, and one day I will let him see me again. She sprang to her feet at a bound. For the first time, since she had entered the room, her dull face began to break slowly into light and life. That's it! she cried. Here if I can say it too, here if I got it by heart. Teaching her exactly as I should have taught a child, I slowly fastened the message word by word on her mind. Now rest yourself, I said, and let me give you something to eat and drink after your long walk. I might as well have spoken to one of the chairs. She snatched up her stick from the ground and burst out with a hoarse shout of joy. I've got it by heart. She cried. This will cool the master's head. Hooray! She dashed out into the passage, like a wild animal escaping from its cage. I was just in time to see her tear open the garden gate and set forth on her walk back at a pace which made it hopeless to attempt to follow and stop her. I returned to the sitting-room pondering on a question which had perplexed wiser heads than mine. Could a man who was hopelessly and entirely wicked have indeed such devoted attachment to him as Dexter had inspired and the faithful woman who had just left me, in the rough gardener who had carried him out so gently on the previous night? Who can decide? The greatest scoundrel living always has a friend, in a woman or a dog. I sat down again at my desk and made another attempt to write to Mr. Playmore. Recalling for the purpose of my letter all that Missouri must dexter had said to me, my memory dwelled with special interest on the strange outbreak of feeling which had led him to betray the secret of his infatuation for Eustace's first wife. I saw again the ghastly scene and the rest chamber, the deformed creature crying over the corpse and the stillness of the first dark hours of the new day. The horrible picture took a strange hold on my mind. I arose and walked up and down and tried to turn my thought some other way. It was not to be done. The scene was too familiar to me to be easily dismissed. I had myself visited the room and looked at the bed. I had myself walked in the corridor which Dexter had crossed on his way to take his last leave of her. The corridor? I stopped. My thought suddenly took a new direction, uninfluenced by any effort of my will. What other association besides the association with Dexter did I connect with the corridor? Was it something I had seen during my visit to Gleninch? No. Was it something I had read? I snitched up the report of the trial to see. It opened at a page which contained the nurse's evidence. I read the evidence through again, without recovering the lost remembrance until I came to these lines, close at the end. Before bedtime I went upstairs to prepare the remains of the deceased lady for the coffin, the room in which Illé was locked, the door leading into Mr MacAllen's room being secured, as well as the door leading into the corridor. The keys had been taken away by Mr Gale. Two of the men's servants were posted outside the bedroom to keep watch. They were to be relieved at four in the morning. That was all they could tell me. There was my lost association with the corridor. There was what I ought to have remembered when Missouri must Dexter was telling me of his visit to the dead. How had he got into the bedroom? The door was being locked, and the keys being taken away by Mr Gale. There was but one of the locked doors of which Mr Gale had not got the key, the door of communication between the study and the bedroom. The key was missing from this. Had it been stolen? And was Dexter the thief? He might have passed by the men on the watch while they were asleep, or he might have crossed the corridor in an unguarded interval while the men were being relieved. But how could he have got into the bad chamber except by way of the locked study door? He must have the key, and he must have secreted it weeks before Mrs Eustace MacAllen's death. When the nurse first arrived at Glen Inge on the seventh of the month, her evidence declared the key of the door of communication to be then missing. To what conclusion did these considerations and discoveries point? Had Missouri must Dexter in a moment of ungovernable agitation unconsciously placed the clue in my hands? Was the pivot on which turned the whole mystery of the poisoning at Glen Inge the missing key? I went back for the third time to my desk. The one person who might be trusted to find the answer to those questions was Mr Playmore. I wrote him a full and careful account of all that had happened. I begged him to forgive and forget my ungracious reception of the advice which he had so kindly offered to me, and I promised beforehand to do nothing without first consulting his opinion in the new emergency which now confronted me. The day was fine for the time of year, and by way of getting a little wholesome exercise after the surprises and occupations of the morning I took my letter to Mr Playmore to the post. Returning to the villa, I was informed that another visitor was waiting to see me, a civilised visitor this time who had given her name—my mother-in-law, Mrs MacAllen. End of Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Of the Law and the Lady Mrs LibriVox Recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vibhke Müller The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins Chapter 37 At the Bad Side Before she had uttered a word I saw in my mother-in-law's face that she brought bad news. He starts, I said. She answered me by a look. Let me hear it at once, I cried. I can bear anything but suspense. Mrs MacAllen lifted her hand and showed me a telegraphic dispatch which she had hid her toe-kept concealed in the folds of her dress. I can trust your courage, she said. There is no need, my child, to prevaricate with you. Read that. I read the telegram. It was sent by the chief surgeon of a field hospital, and it was dated from a village in the north of Spain. Mr Yostar severely wounded in a skirmish by a stray shot. Not in danger so far. Every care taken of him. Wait for another telegram. I turned away my face and bore as best I might the pine that frung me when I read those words. I thought I knew how dearly I loved him. I had never known it till that moment. My mother-in-law put her arm round me and held me to her tenderly. She knew me well enough not to speak to me at that moment. I rallied my courage and pointed to the last sentence in the telegram. Do you mean to wait? I asked. Not a day, she answered. I am going to the foreign office about my passport. I have some interest there. They can give me letters. They can advise and assist me. I leave to-night by the mail train to Calais. You leave, I said. Do you suppose I will let you go without me? Get my passport when you get yours. At seven this evening I shall be at your house. She attempted to ram and stray. She spoke of the perils of the journey. At the first words I stopped her. Don't you know yet, mother, how obstinate I am? They may keep you waiting at the foreign office. Why do you waste the precious hours here? She yielded with a gentleness that was not in her everyday character. Will my poor you-stars ever know what a wife he's got? That was all she said. She kissed me and went away in her carriage. My remembrances of our journey are strangely vague and imperfect. As I try to recall them, the memory of those more recent and more interesting events, which occurred after my return to England, gets between me and my adventures in Spain, and seems to force these last into a shadowy background, until they look like adventures that happened many years since. I confusedly recollect delays and alarms that tried our patience and our courage. I remember our finding friends, thanks to our letters of recommendation, in a secretary to the Embassy and in a Queen's Messenger, who assisted and protected us at a critical point in the journey. I recall to mind a long succession of men in our employment as travellers, all equally remarkable for their dirty cloaks and their clean linen, for their highly civilised courtesy to women and their utterly barbarous cruelty to horses. Last and most important of all, I see again, more clearly than I can see anything else, the one wretched bedroom of a squallered village in, in which we found our poor darling, prostrate between life and death, insensible to everything that passed in the narrow little world that lay around his bedside. There was nothing romantic or interesting in the accident which had put my husband's life in peril. He had ventured to near the scene of the conflict, a miserable affair, to rescue a poor lad who lay wounded on the field, mortally wounded as the event proved. A rifle bullet had struck him in the body. His brethren of the field hospital had carried him back to their quarters at the risk of their lives. He was a great favourite with all of them, patient and gentle and brave, only wanting a little more judgement to be the most valuable recruit who had joined the brotherhood. In telling me this, the surgeon kindly and delicately added a word of warning, as well. The fever caused by the wound had brought with it delirium, as usual. My poor husband's mind, in so far as his wandering words might interpret it, was filled by the one image of his wife. The medical attendant had heard enough in the course of his ministrations at the bedside to satisfy him that any sudden recognition of me by Eustace, if he recovered, might be attended by the most lamentable results. As things were at that sad time, I might take my turn at nursing him without the slightest chance of his discovering me, perhaps for weeks and weeks to come. But on the day when he was declared out of danger, if that happy day ever arrived, I must resign my place at his bedside, and must wait to show myself until the surgeon gave me leave. My mother-in-law and I relieved each other regularly, day and night, in the sick room. In the hours of his delirium, hours that recurred with a pitiless regularity, my name was always on my poor darling's fevered lips. The ruling idea in him was the fine dreadful idea which I had vainly combated at our last interview. In the face of the verdict, pronounced at the trial, it was impossible, even for his wife, to be really and truly persuaded that he was an innocent man. All the wild pictures which his distempered imagination drew were equally inspired by that one obstinate conviction. He fancied himself to be still living with me under those dreadful conditions. Do what he might. I was always recalling to him the terrible ordeal through which he had passed. He acted his part, and he acted mine. He gave me a cup of tea, and I said to him, We quarreled yesterday, you stars. Is it poisoned? He kissed me in token of our reconciliation, and I laughed, and said, It's morning now, my dear. Shall I die by nine o'clock tonight? I was ill in bed, and he gave me my medicine. I looked at him with a doubting eye. I said to him, You are in love with another woman. Is there anything in the medicine that the doctor doesn't know of? Such was the horrible drama which now perpetually acted itself in his mind. Hundreds and hundreds of times I heard him repeated, almost always in the same words. On other occasions his thoughts wandered away to my desperate project of proving him to be an innocent man. Sometimes he laughed at it. Sometimes he mourned over it. Sometimes he devised cunning schemes for placing unsuspected obstacles in my way. He was especially hard on me when he was inventing his preventive stratagems. He cheerfully instructed the visionary people who assisted him not to hesitate at offending or distressing me. Never mind if you make her angry. Never mind if you make her cry. It's all for her good. It's all to save the poor fool from dangers she doesn't dream of. You mustn't pity her when she says she does it for my sake. See, she is going to be insulted. She is going to be deceived. She is going to disgrace herself without knowing it. Stop her. Stop her. It was weak of me, I know. I ought to have kept the plain fact that he was out of his senses, always present to my mind. Still it's true that my hours passed at my husband's pillow, where many of them hours of mortification and misery of which he poor dear was the innocent and only cause. The weeks passed, and he still hovered between life and death. I kept no record of the time, and I cannot now recall the exact date on which the first favourable change took place. I only remember that it was towards sunrise on a fine winter morning, when we were relieved at last of our heavy burden of suspense. The surgeon happened to be by the bedside when his patient awoke. The first thing he did, after looking at you stars, was to caution me by your sign to be silent and to keep out of sight. My mother-in-law and I both knew what this meant, with full hearts we thanked God together for giving us back the husband and the son. The same evening, being alone, we ventured to speak of the future, for the first time since we had left home. The surgeon tells me, said Mrs. McAllen, that your stance is too weak to be capable of bearing anything in the nature of a surprise for some days to come. We have time to consider whether he is or is not to be told that he owes his life as much to your care as to mine. Can you find it in your heart to leave him, Valeria, now that God's mercy has restored him to you and to me? If I only consulted my own heart, I answered, I should never leave him again." Mrs. McAllen looked at me in grave surprise. What else have you to consult? She asked. If we both live, I replied, I have to think of the happiness of his life and the happiness of mine in the years that are to come. I can bear a great deal, mother, but I cannot endure the misery of his leaving me for the second time. You wrong him, Valeria. I firmly believe you wrong him in thinking it possible that he can leave you again. Dear Mrs. McAllen, have you forgotten already what we have both heard him say of me while we have been sitting by his bedside? We have heard the ravings of a man in delirium. It is surely hard to hold you stars responsible for what he said when he was out of his senses. It is harder still, I said, to resist his mother when she is pleading for him. Dearest and best of friends, I don't hold you stars responsible for what he said in his fever, but I do take warning by it. The wildest words that fell from him were one and all the faithful echo of what he said to me in the best days of his health and his strength. What hope have I that he will recover with an altered mind toward me? Absence has not changed it, suffering has not changed it. In the delirium of fever and in the full possession of his reason he has the same dreadful doubt of me. I see but one way of winning him back. I must destroy at its roots his motive for leaving me. It is hopeless to persuade him that I believe in his innocence. I must show him that belief is no longer necessary. I must prove to him that his position toward me has become the position of an innocent man. Valeria, Valeria, you are wasting time and words. You have tried the experiment and you know as well as I do that the thing is not to be done. I had no answer to that. I could say no more than I had said already. Suppose you go back to Dexter out of sheer compassion for a mad and miserable wretch who has already insulted you. Proceeded my mother-in-law. You can only go back a comfort night by me or by some other trustworthy person. You can only stay long enough to humour the creature's wayward fancy and to keep his crazy brain quiet for a time. That done, all is done. You leave him. Even supposing Dexter to be still capable of helping you, how can you make use of him but by admitting him to terms of confidence and familiarity, by treating him in short on the footing of an intimate friend? Answer me honestly. Can you bring yourself to do that after what happened at Mr Benjamin's house? I had told her of my last interview with Miseramus Dexter in the natural confidence that she inspired in me as a relative and fellow traveller, and this was the use to which she turned her information. I suppose I had no right to blame her. I suppose the motive sank into everything. At any rate I had no choice but to give offence or to give an answer. I gave it. I acknowledged that I could never again permit Miseramus Dexter to treat me on terms of familiarity as a trusted and intimate friend. Mrs McAllen pitilessly pressed the advantage that she had won. Very well! she said. That resource being no longer open to you, what hope is left? Which way are you to turn next? There was no meeting those questions in my present situation by any adequate reply. I felt strangely unlike myself. I submitted in silence. Mrs McAllen struck the last blow that completed her victory. My poor Eustace is weak and wayward, she said, but he is not an ungrateful man. My child, you have returned him good for evil. You have proved how faithfully and how devotedly you love him by suffering all hardships and risking all dangers for his sake. Trust me and trust him. He cannot resist you. Let him see the dear face that he has been dreaming of looking at him again with all the old love in it, and he is yours once more, my daughter, yours for life. She rose and touched my forehead with her lips. Her voice sank to tones of tenderness which I had never heard from her yet. Say yes, Valeria, she whispered, and be dearer to me and dearer to him than ever. My heart sided with her. My energies were worn out. No letter had arrived from Mr. Playmore to guide and to encourage me. I had resisted so long and so vainly. I had tried and suffered so much. I had met with such cruel disasters and such reiterated disappointments, and he was in the room beneath me, feebly finding his way back to consciousness and to life. How could I resist? It was all over. In saying yes, if Eustace confirmed his mother's confidence in him, I was saying adieu to the one cherished ambition, the one dear and noble hope of my life. I knew it, and I said yes. And so good-bye to the grand struggle, and so welcome to the new resignation which owned that I had failed. My mother-in-law and I slept together under the only shelter that the inn could offer to us, a sort of loft at the top of the house. The night that followed our conversation was bitterly cold. We felt the chilly temperature in spite of the protection of our dressing gowns and our travelling wrappers. My mother-in-law slept, but no rest came to me. I was too anxious and too wretched. Thinking over my changed position and doubting how my husband would receive me to be able to sleep. Some hours, as I suppose, must have passed, and I was still absorbed in my own melancholy thoughts, when I suddenly became conscious of a new and strange sensation which has donished and alarmed me. I started up in the bed, breathless and bewildered. The movement awakened Mrs. MacAllen. Are you in? she asked. What is the matter with you? I tried to tell her as well as I could. She seemed to understand me before I had done. She took me tenderly in her arms and pressed me to her bosom. My poor innocent child! she said. Is it possible you don't know? Must I really tell you? She whispered her next words. Shall I ever forget the tumult of feelings which the whispered aroused in me, the strange medley of joy and fear and wonder and relief and pride and humility which filled my whole being and made a new woman of me from that moment? Now, for the first time, I knew it. If God spared me for a few months more, the most enduring and the most sacred of all human joys might be mine, the joy of being a mother. I don't know how the rest of the night passed. I only find my memory again when the morning came, and when I went out by myself to breathe the crisp, wintry air on the open wall behind the inn. I have said that I felt like a new woman. The morning found me with a new resolution and a new courage. When I thought of the future, I had not only my husband to consider now. His good name was no longer his own or mine. It might soon become the most precious inheritance that he could leave to his child. What had I done while I was in ignorance of this? I had resigned the hope of cleansing his name from the stain that rested on it, a stain still no matter how little it might look in the eye of the law. Our child might live to hear malicious tongues say, Your father was tried for the vilest of all murders, and was never absolutely acquitted of the charge. Could I face the glorious perils of childbirth without possibility present to my mind? No. Not until I had made one more effort to lay the conscience of Miserie must dexted bear to my view. Not until I had once again renewed the struggle and brought the truth that vindicated the husband and the father to the light of day. I went back to the house, with my new courage to sustain me. I opened my heart to my friend and mother and told her frankly of the change that had come over me since we had last spoken of few stars. She was more than disappointed. She was almost offended with me. The one thing needful had happened, she said. The happiness that might soon come to us would form a new tie between my husband and me. Every other consideration about this she treated as purely fanciful. If I left you stars now, I did a heartless thing and a foolish thing. I should regret to the end of my days, having thrown away the one golden opportunity of my married life. It cost me a hard struggle. It oppressed me with many a painful doubt, but I held firm this time. The honour of the father, the inheritance of the child, I kept these thoughts as constantly as possible before my mind. Sometimes they failed me and left me nothing better than a poor fool who had some fitful burst of crying and was always ashamed of herself afterward. But my native obstinacy, as Mrs. McAllen said, carried me through. Now and then I had a beep at you stars, while he was asleep, and that helped me too. Though they made my heart ache and shook me sadly at the times, those dirty visits to my husband fortified me afterwards. I cannot explain how this happened. It seems so contradictory. I can only repeat it as one of my experiences at that troubled time. I made one concession to Mrs. McAllen. I consented to wait for two days before I took any steps for returning to England, on the chance that my mind might change in the interval. It was well for me that I yielded so far. On the second day the director of the field hospital sent to the post office at our nearest town for letters addressed to him or to his care. The messenger brought back a letter for me. I thought I recognised the handwriting, and I was right. Mr. Playmore's answer had reached me at last. If I had been in any danger of changing my mind, the good law year would have saved me in the nick of time. The extract that follows contains the pith of his letter, and shows how he encouraged me when I stood and saw need of a few cheering and friendly words. Let me tell you now, he wrote, what I have done toward verifying the conclusion to which your letter points. I have traced one of the servants who was appointed to keep watch in the corridor on the night when the first Mrs. Eustace died at Gleninch. The man perfectly remembers that Miserymus Dexter suddenly appeared before him, and his fellow servant long after the house was quiet for the night. Dexter said to him, I suppose there is no harm in going into the study to read. I can't sleep after what has happened. I must relieve my mind somehow. The men had no orders to keep anyone out of the study. They know that the door of communication with the bedchamber was locked, and that the keys of the two other doors of communication were in the possession of Mr. Gale. They accordingly permitted Dexter to go into the study. He closed the door, the door that opened on the corridor, and remained absent for some time in the study as the men supposed in the bedchamber as we know from what he led out at his interview with you. Now he could enter that room as you rightly imagine, in but one way, by being in possession of the missing key. How long he remained there, I cannot discover. The point is of little consequence. The servant remembers that he came out of the study again as pale as death, and that he passed on without a word on his way back to his own room. These are facts. The conclusion to which they lead is serious in the last degree. It justifies everything that I confided to you in my office at Edinburgh. You remember what passed between us, I say no more. As to yourself next, you have innocently aroused in Miserimus Dexter a feeling toward you which I need not attempt to characterise. There is a certain something. I saw it myself, in your figure and in some of your movements, which does recall the late Mrs. Eustace to those who knew her well, and which has evidently had its effect on Dexter's morbid mind. Without dwelling further on this subject, let me only remind you that he has shown himself as a consequence of your influence over him to be incapable, in his moments of agitation, of thinking before he speaks while he is in your presence. It is not merely possible, it is highly probable, that he may betray himself far more seriously than he has betrayed himself yet if you give him the opportunity. I owe it to you, knowing what your interests are, to express myself plainly on this point. I have no sort of doubt that you have advanced one step nearer to the end which you have in view in the brief interval since you left Edinburgh. I see in your letter, and in my discoveries, irresistible evidence that Dexter must have been in secret communication with the deceased lady. Innocent communication, I am certain, so far as she was concerned, not only at the time of her death but perhaps for weeks before it. I cannot disguise from myself or from you my own strong persuasion, that if you succeed in discovering the nature of this communication, in all human likelihood you prove your husband's innocence by the discovery of the truth. As an honest man, I am bound not to conceal this. And, as an honest man also, I am equally bound to add that, not even with your rewarding view, can I find it in my conscience to advise you to risk what you must risk if you see Miserimus Dexter again. In this difficult and delicate matter, I cannot and will not take the responsibility. The final decision must rest with yourself. One favour only, I entreat you to grant. Let me hear what you resolve to do as soon as you know it yourself. The difficulties which my worthy correspondent felt were no difficulties to me. I did not possess Mr. Plainmore's judicial mind. My resolution was settled before I had read his letter through. The Mail to France crossed the frontier the next day. There was a place for me, under the protection of the conductor, if I chose to take it, without consulting a living creature, rash as usual, had long as usual. I took it. 38 On the Journey Back If I had been travelling homeward in my own carriage, the remaining chapters of this narrative would never have been written. Before we had been an hour on the road, I should have called to the driver, and should have told him to turn back. Who can be always resolute? In asking that question I speak of the women, not of the men, I had been resolute in turning a deaf ear to Mr. Plainmore's doubts and cautions, resolute in holding out against my mother-in-law, resolute in taking my place by the French mail, until ten minutes after we had driven away from the inn my courage held out, and then it failed me. Then I said to myself, You've wretched, you've deserted your husband. For hours afterward, if I could have stopped the mail, I would have done it. I hated the conductor, the kindest of men. I hated the Spanish ponies that drew us, the chearest animals that ever jingled a string of bells. I hated the bright day that would make things pleasant, and the bracing air that forced me to feel the luxury of breathing, whether I liked it or not. Never was a journey more miserable than my safe and easy journey to the frontier. But one little comfort helped me to bear my heartache, resignedly, a stolen morsel of Eustace's hair. We had started at an hour of the morning when he was still sound asleep. I could creep into his room and kiss him, and cry over him softly, and cut off a stray lock of his hair without danger of discovery. How I summoned resolution enough to leave him is, to this hour, not clear to my mind. I think my mother-in-law must have helped me, without meaning to do it. She came into the room with an erect head and a cold eye. She said, with an unmerciful emphasis on the word, If you mean to go, Valeria, the carriage is here. Any woman with a spark of spirit in her would have meant it under those circumstances. I meant it, and did it. And then I was sorry for it. Poor humanity! Times got all the credit of being the great consola of afflicted mortals. In my opinion, time has been overrated in this matter, distanced at the same beneficent work far more speedily, and, when assisted by change, far more effectually as well. On the railroad to Paris I became capable of taking a sensible view of my position. I could now remind myself that my husband's reception of me, after the first surprise and the first happiness had passed away, might not have justified his mother's confidence in him. Admitting that I ran of risk in going back to Miserimus Dexter, should I not have been equally rash in another way, if I had returned uninvited to a husband to it declare that our conjugal happiness was impossible, and that our married life was at an end? Besides, who could say that the events of the future might not yet justify me, not only to myself, but to him? I might yet hear him say, she was inquisitive when she had no business to inquire, she was obstinate when she ought to have listened to reason, she left my bed-site when other women would have remained, but in the end she atoned for it all, she turned out to be right. I rested a day in Paris and wrote three letters, one to Benjamin telling him to expect me the next evening, one to Mr. Playmore, warning him in good time that I meant to take a last effort to penetrate the mystery at Gleninch, one to you stars of a few lines only, owning that I had helped to nurse him through the dangerous part of his illness, confessing the one reason which had prevailed with me to leave him, and in treating him to suspend his opinion of me until time had proved that I loved him more dearly than ever. This last letter I enclosed to my mother-in-law, leaving it to her discretion to choose the right time for giving it to her son. I positively forbade Mrs. MacEllen, however, to tell you stars of the new tie between us. Although he had separated himself from me, I was determined that he should not hear it from other lips than mine. Never mind why. There are certain little matters which I must keep to myself, and this is one of them. My letters being written, my duty was done. I was free to play my last card in the game, the darkly doubtful game which was neither quite for me nor quite against me as the chances now stood. End of Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Of the Law and the Lady This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vipgamulla. The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins. Chapter 39 On the Way to Dexter I declare to Heaven, Valyria, I believe that monster's madness is infectious and you've caught it. This was Benjamin's opinion of me, on my safe arrival at the villa, after I had announced my intention of returning Miserimus Dexter's visit in his company. Being determined to carry my point, I could afford to try the influence of my old persuasion. I beg it, my good friend, to have a little patience with me. And do remember what I've already told you, I added. It is of serious importance to me to see Dexter again. I only heaped fuel on the fire. See him again, Benjamin repeated indignantly. See him, after he grossly insulted you under my roof in this very room? I can't be awake, I must be asleep and dreaming. It was wrong of me, I know, but Benjamin's virtuous indignation was so very virtuous that it let the spirit of mischief loosen me. I really could not resist the temptation to outrage his sense of propriety by taking an audaciously liberal view of the whole matter. Gently, my good friend, gently, I said, We must make allowances for a man who suffers under Dexter's infirmities and lives Dexter's life. And really, we must not let our modesty lead us beyond reasonable limits. I began to think that I took rather a prudish view of the thing myself at the time. A woman who respects herself and whose whole heart is with her husband is not so very seriously injured when a vretched, crippled creature is rude enough to put his arm around her waist. Virtuous indignation, if I may venture to say so, is sometimes very cheap indignation. Besides, I have forgiven him, and you must forgive him too. There's no fear of his forgetting himself again while you are with me. His house is quite a curiosity. It's sure to interest you. The pictures alone are worth the journey. I will write to him to-day, and we will go and see him together to-morrow. We owe it to ourselves if we don't owe it to Mr. Dexter to pay this visit. If you will look about you, Benjamin, you will see that benevolence towards everybody is the great virtue of the time we live in. Poor Mr. Dexter must have the benefit of the prevailing fashion. Come, come, march with the age, open your mind to the new ideas. Instead of accepting this polite invitation, where the old Benjamin flew at the age we lived in, like a bull at a red cloth. Oh, the new ideas, the new ideas! By all manner of means, Valeria, let's have the new ideas. The old moralities all wrong, the old ways are all worn out. Let's march with the age we live in. Nothing comes amiss to the age we live in. The wife in England and the husband in Spain, married or not married, living together or not living together, it's all one to the new ideas. I will go with you, Valeria. I'll be worthy of the generation I live in. When we have done with Dexter, don't let's do things by halves. Let's go and get cremmed with the ready-made science at a lecture. Let's hear the last new professor, the man who has been behind the scenes at creation, and knows to tea how the world was made and how long it took to make it. There's the other fellow too. Might we don't forget the modern Solomon, who has left his proverbs behind him, the brand new philosopher who considers the consolation of religion and the light of harmless playthings, and who is kind enough to say that he might have been all the happier if he could only have been childish enough to play with them himself. Oh, the new ideas, the new ideas! What consoling, elevating, beautiful discoveries have been made by the new ideas! We were all monkeys before we were men and molecules before we were monkeys. And what does it matter? And what does anything matter to anybody? I'm with you, Valeria. I'm ready. The sooner the better. Come to Dexter, come to Dexter. I am so glad you agree with me, I said. But let's do nothing in a hurry. Three o'clock tomorrow will be time enough for Mr. Dexter. I will write at once and tell him to expect us. Where are you going? I'm going to clear my mind of camp, said Benjamin Sternley. I'm going into the library. What are you going to read? I am going to read Puss in Boots and Jack in the Beanstalk, and anything else I can find that doesn't march with the age we live in. With that parting shot at the new ideas, my old friend left me for a time. Having dispatched my note, I found myself beginning to revert, with a certain feeling of anxiety to the subject of Missouri-Must-Dexter's health. How had he passed through the interval of my absence from England? Could anybody within my reach tell me news of him? To inquire of Benjamin would only be to provoke a new outbreak. While I was still considering, the housekeeper entered the room on some domestic errand. I asked at the venture if she had heard anything more, while I had been away of the extraordinary person who had so seriously alarmed her on a former occasion. The housekeeper shook her head and looked as if she thought it in bad taste to mention the subject at all. About a week after you'd gone away, ma'am, she said, with extreme severity of manner and with excessive carefulness in her choice of words, the person you mentioned had the impudence to send a letter to you. The messenger was informed by my master's orders that you had gone abroad, and he and his letter were both sent about their business together. Not long afterward, ma'am, I happened while drinking tea with Mrs. MacAllen's housekeeper, to hear of the person again. He himself caught in his chase at Mrs. MacAllen's to inquire about you there. How he can contrive to sit without legs to balance him is beyond my understanding, but that's neither here nor there. Legs or no legs, the housekeeper saw him, and she says, as I say, she will never forget him to her dying day. She told him as soon as she recovered herself of Mr. Eustace's illness, and of you and Mrs. MacAllen being in foreign parts nursing him. He went away, so the housekeeper told me, with tears in his eyes, and oaths and curses on his lips, a sight shocking to see. That's all I know about the person, ma'am, and I hope to be excused if I win her to say that the subject is for good reasons extremely disagreeable to me. She made a formal curtsy and quitted the room. Left by myself, I felt more anxious and more uncertain than ever when I thought of the experiment that was to be tried on the next day. Making due allowances for exaggeration, the description of Miserimus Dexter on his departure from Mrs. MacAllen's house suggested that he had not endured my long absence very patiently, and that he was still, as far as ever, from keeping his shattered nervous system its fair chance of repose. The next morning brought me Mr. Playmore's reply to the letter which I had addressed to him from Paris. He wrote very briefly, neither approving nor blaming my decision, but strongly reiterating his opinion that I should do well to choose a competent witness as my companion on my coming interview with Dexter. The most interesting part of the letter was at the end. You must be prepared, Mr. Playmore wrote, to see a change for the worsen Dexter. A friend of mine was with him on a matter of business a few days since, and was struck by the alteration in him. Your presence assured to have its effect one way or another. I can give you no instructions for managing him. You must be guided by the circumstances. Your own tact will tell you whether it is wise or not to encourage him to speak of the late Mrs. Eustace. The chances of his betraying himself or revolve, as I think, round that one topic. Keep him to it, if you can. This was added in a post-script. Ask Mr. Benjamin, if you were near enough, to the library door to hear Dexter tell you of his entering the Bat-Chamber on the night of Mrs. Eustace MacAllen's death. I put the question to Benjamin when we met at the luncheon table before setting forth for the distance hubbub in which Miserie must Dexter lived. My old friend disapproved of the contemplated expedition as strongly as ever. He was unusually grave and unusually spearing of his words when he answered me. I am no listener, he said, but some people have voices which insist on being heard. Mr. Dexter is one of them. Does that mean that you heard him? I asked. The door couldn't muffle him, and the wall couldn't muffle him. Benjamin rejoined. I heard him, and I thought it infamous. There. I may want you to do more than hear him this time, I venture to say. I may want you to make notes of our conversation while Mr. Dexter is speaking to me. You used to write down what my father said, when he was dictating his letters to you. Have you got one of your little notebooks to spare? Benjamin looked up from his plate with an aspect of stern surprise. It is one thing, he said, to write under the dictation of a great merchant, conducting a vast correspondence by which thousands of pounds change hands in due course of post. And it's another thing to take down the gibberish of a moondring mad monster who ought to be kept in a cage. Your good father, Valeria, would never have asked me to do that. Forgive me, Benjamin, I must really ask you to do it. You may be of the greatest possible use to me. Come, give way this one, steer for my sake. Benjamin looked down again at his plate with a rueful resignation which told me that I had carried my point. I have been tied to her apron string all my life. I hurt him grumble to himself, and it's too late in the day to get loose from her now. He looked up again at me. I thought I had retired from business, he said, but it seems I must turn clerk again. Well, what's the new stroke of work that's expected from me this time? The cap was announced to be waiting for us at the gate as he asked the question. I rose and took his arm and gave him a grateful kiss on his rosy old cheek. Only two things, I said, sit down behind Mr. Dexter's chair so that he can't see you, but take care to place yourself at the same time so that you can see me. The less I see of Mr. Dexter the better I shall be pleased, growled Benjamin. What am I to do after I have taken my place behind him? You are to wait until I make you a sign, and when you see it you are to begin writing down in your notebook what Mr. Dexter is saying, and you are to go on until I make another sign which means leave off. Well, said Benjamin, what's the sign for begin, and what's the sign for leave off? I was not quite prepared with an answer to this. I asked him to help me with a hint. No, Benjamin would take no active part in the matter. He was resigned to be employed in the capacity of passive instrument, and their all concession ended so far as he was concerned. Left to my own resources I found it no easy matter to invent a telegraphic system which should sufficiently inform Benjamin without awakening Dexter's quick suspicion. I looked into the glass to see if I could find the necessary suggestion in anything that I wore. My earrings supplied me with the idea of which I was in search. I shall take care to sit in an arm chair, I said. When you see me, rest my elbow on the chair, and lift my hand to my earring, as if I were playing with it, write down what he says, and go on until—well, suppose we say until you hear me move my chair. But that sound stopped. You understand me? I understand you. We started for Dexter's house.