Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (easy novels to read txt) 📕

She tore the letter open, and read these lines:

“I have left you forever, Blanche. God bless and reward you! God make you a happy woman in all your life to come! Cruel as you will think me, love, I have never been so truly your sister as I am now. I can only tell you this—I can never tell you more. Forgive me, and forget me, our lives are parted lives from this day.”

Going down to breakfast about his usual hour, Sir Patrick missed Blanche, whom he was accustomed to see waiting for him at the table at that time. The room was empty; the other members of the household having all finished their morning meal. Sir Patrick disliked breakfasting alone. He sent Duncan with a message, to be given to Blanche’s maid.

The maid appeared in due time Miss Lundie was unable to leave her room. She sent a letter to her uncle, with her love—and begged he would read it.

Sir Patrick opened the letter and saw what Anne had written to Blanche.

He waited a little, reflecting, with evident pain and anxiety, on what he had read—then opened his own letters, and hurriedly looked at the signatures. There was nothing for him from his friend, the sheriff, at Edinburgh, and no communication from the railway, in the shape of a telegram. He had decided, overnight, on waiting till the end of the week before he interfered in the matter of Blanche’s marriage. The events of the morning determined him on not waiting another day. Duncan returned to the breakfast-room to pour out his master’s coffee. Sir Patrick sent him away again with a second message

“Do you know where Lady Lundie is, Duncan?”

“Yes, Sir Patrick.”

“My compliments to her ladyship. If she is not otherwise engaged, I shall be glad to speak to her privately in an hour’s time.”

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH.

DROPPED.

SIR PATRICK made a bad breakfast. Blanche’s absence fretted him, and Anne Silvester’s letter puzzled him.

He read it, short as it was, a second time, and a third. If it meant any thing, it meant that the motive at the bottom of Anne’s flight was to accomplish the sacrifice of herself to the happiness of Blanche. She had parted for life from his niece for his niece’s sake! What did this mean? And how was it to be reconciled with Anne’s position—as described to him by Mrs. Inchbare during his visit to Craig Fernie?

All Sir Patrick’s ingenuity, and all Sir Patrick’s experience, failed to find so much as the shadow of an answer to that question.

While he was still pondering over the letter, Arnold and the surgeon entered the breakfast-room together.

“Have you heard about Blanche?” asked Arnold, excitedly. “She is in no danger, Sir Patrick—the worst of it is over now.”

The surgeon interposed before Sir Patrick could appeal to him.

“Mr. Brinkworth’s interest in the young lady a little exaggerates the state of the case,” he said. “I have seen her, at Lady Lundie’s request; and I can assure you that there is not the slightest reason for any present alarm. Miss Lundie has had a nervous attack, which has yielded to the simplest domestic remedies. The only anxiety you need feel is connected with the management of her in the future. She is suffering from some mental distress, which it is not for me, but for her friends, to alleviate and remove. If you can turn her thoughts from the painful subject—whatever it may be—on which they are dwelling now, you will do all that needs to be done.” He took up a newspaper from the table, and strolled out into the garden, leaving Sir Patrick and Arnold together.

“You heard that?” said Sir Patrick.

“Is he right, do you think?” asked Arnold.

“Right? Do you suppose a man gets his reputation by making mistakes? You’re one of the new generation, Master Arnold. You can all of you stare at a famous man; but you haven’t an atom of respect for his fame. If Shakspeare came to life again, and talked of playwriting, the first pretentious nobody who sat opposite at dinner would differ with him as composedly as he might differ with you and me. Veneration is dead among us; the present age has buried it, without a stone to mark the place. So much for that! Let’s get back to Blanche. I suppose you can guess what the painful subject is that’s dwelling on her mind? Miss Silvester has baffled me, and baffled the Edinburgh police. Blanche discovered that we had failed last night and Blanche received that letter this morning.”

He pushed Anne’s letter across the breakfast-table.

Arnold read it, and handed it back without a word. Viewed by the new light in which he saw Geoffrey’s character after the quarrel on the heath, the letter conveyed but one conclusion to his mind. Geoffrey had deserted her.

“Well?” said Sir Patrick. “Do you understand what it means?”

“I understand Blanche’s wretchedness when she read it.”

He said no more than that. It was plain that no information which he could afford—even if he had considered himself at liberty to give it—would be of the slightest use in assisting Sir Patrick to trace Miss Silvester, under present circumstances, There was—unhappily—no temptation to induce him to break the honorable silence which he had maintained thus far. And—more unfortunately still—assuming the temptation to present itself, Arnold’s capacity to resist it had never been so strong a capacity as it was now.

To the two powerful motives which had hitherto tied his tongue—respect for Anne’s reputation, and reluctance to reveal to Blanche the deception which he had been compelled to practice on her at the inn—to these two motives there was now added a third. The meanness of betraying the confidence which Geoffrey had reposed in him would be doubled meanness if he proved false to his trust after Geoffrey had personally insulted him. The paltry revenge which that false friend had unhesitatingly suspected him of taking was a revenge of which Arnold’s nature was simply incapable. Never had his lips been more effectually sealed than at this moment—when his whole future depended on Sir Patrick’s discovering the part that he had played in past events at Craig Fernie.

“Yes! yes!” resumed Sir Patrick, impatiently. “Blanche’s distress is intelligible enough. But here is my niece apparently answerable for this unhappy woman’s disappearance. Can you explain what my niece has got to do with it?”

“I! Blanche herself is completely mystified. How should I know?”

Answering in those terms, he spoke with perfect sincerity. Anne’s vague distrust of the position in which they had innocently placed themselves at the inn had produced no corresponding effect on Arnold at the time. He had not regarded it; he had not even understood it. As a necessary result, not the faintest suspicion of the motive under which Anne was acting existed in his mind now.

Sir Patrick put the letter into his pocket-book, and abandoned all further attempt at interpreting the meaning of it in despair.

“Enough, and more than enough, of groping in the dark,” he said. “One point is clear to me after what has happened up stairs this morning. We must accept the position in which Miss Silvester has placed us. I shall give up all further effort to trace her from this moment.”

“Surely that will be a dreadful disappointment to Blanche, Sir Patrick?”

“I don’t deny it. We must face that result.”

“If you are sure there is nothing else to be done, I suppose we must.”

“I am not sure of any thing of the so rt, Master Arnold! There are two chances still left of throwing light on this matter, which are both of them independent of any thing that Miss Silvester can do to keep it in the dark.”

“Then why not try them, Sir? It seems hard to drop Miss Silvester when she is in trouble.”

“We can’t help her against her own will,” rejoined Sir Patrick. “And we can’t run the risk, after that nervous attack this morning, of subjecting Blanche to any further suspense. I have thought of my niece’s interests throughout this business; and if I now change my mind, and decline to agitate her by more experiments, ending (quite possibly) in more failures, it is because I am thinking of her interests still. I have no other motive. However numerous my weaknesses may be, ambition to distinguish myself as a detective policeman is not one of them. The case, from the police point of view, is by no means a lost case. I drop it, nevertheless, for Blanche’s sake. Instead of encouraging her thoughts to dwell on this melancholy business, we must apply the remedy suggested by our medical friend.”

“How is that to be done?” asked Arnold.

The sly twist of humor began to show itself in Sir Patrick’s face.

“Has she nothing to think of in the future, which is a pleasanter subject of reflection than the loss of her friend?” he asked. “You are interested, my young gentleman, in the remedy that is to cure Blanche. You are one of the drugs in the moral prescription. Can you guess what it is?”

Arnold started to his feet, and brightened into a new being.

“Perhaps you object to be hurried?” said Sir Patrick.

“Object! If Blanche will only consent, I’ll take her to church as soon as she comes down stairs!”

“Thank you!” said Sir Patrick, dryly. “Mr. Arnold Brinkworth, may you always be as ready to take Time by the forelock as you are now! Sit down again; and don’t talk nonsense. It is just possible—if Blanche consents (as you say), and if we can hurry the lawyers—that you may be married in three weeks’ or a month’s time.”

“What have the lawyers got to do with it?”

“My good fellow, this is not a marriage in a novel! This is the most unromantic affair of the sort that ever happened. Here are a young gentleman and a young lady, both rich people; both well matched in birth and character; one of age, and the other marrying with the full consent and approval of her guardian. What is the consequence of this purely prosaic state of things? Lawyers and settlements, of course!”

“Come into the library, Sir Patrick; and I’ll soon settle the settlements! A bit of paper, and a dip of ink. ‘I hereby give every blessed farthing I have got in the world to my dear Blanche.’ Sign that; stick a wafer on at the side; clap your finger on the wafer; ‘I deliver this as my act and deed;’ and there it is—done!”

“Is it, really? You are a born legislator. You create and codify your own system all in a breath. Moses-Justinian-Mahomet, give me your arm! There is one atom of sense in what you have just said. ‘Come into the library’—is a suggestion worth attending to. Do you happen, among your other superfluities, to have such a thing as a lawyer about you?”

“I have got two. One in London, and one in Edinburgh.”

“We will take the nearest of the two, because we are in a hurry. Who is the Edinburgh lawyer? Pringle of Pitt Street? Couldn’t be a better man. Come and write to him. You have given