Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (e book reader pc .txt) 📕
Description
Man and Wife is the ninth novel by Wilkie Collins, and was published in serial form in 1870. Like many of his other novels it has a complex plot and tackles social issues, in this case the then-lax state of the marriage laws, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. As always, Collins deals carefully but frankly with human personal behavior. To avoid offending Victorian morals too greatly, much is implied rather than stated outright. Nevertheless, even dealing with such matters at all led to his novels being derided as “sensation fiction” by his critics. By today’s standards, of course, they wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.
In Man and Wife, the main character Anne Silvester has fallen pregnant to a muscular and handsome, but boorish man, Geoffrey Delamayn, to whom she is not married. She is working as a governess at a house in Scotland. Anne arranges to meet Delamayn secretly at a garden party and angrily demands that he fulfill his promise to marry her, that very day. He very reluctantly agrees to a secret, private marriage, knowing that a public marriage would badly affect his inheritance prospects. How is the marriage to be arranged quickly but kept quiet? Anne has a plan based on her understanding of the looseness of the marriage laws in Scotland. Naturally, of course, things go badly wrong with this plan and many complexities arise.
Collins is deeply critical of the state of contemporary marriage laws, both in how loosely they were framed, and in how little power over their own lives they gave to women once they were married, even if married to a brutal man. He also uses this novel to denounce the worship of sporting heroes and the obsession with physical prowess rather than mental superiority as a primary indication of male virtue.
Though not as popular as his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Man and Wife received a good critical reception when it was released and was a commercial success.
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- Author: Wilkie Collins
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“Oh, Anne! Anne! What can have happened to you? Are you frightened? There’s not the least fear of anybody disturbing us. They are all at luncheon, and the servants are at dinner. We have the room entirely to ourselves. My darling! you look so faint and strange! Let me get you something.”
Anne drew Blanche’s head down and kissed her. It was done in a dull, slow way—without a word, without a tear, without a sigh.
“You’re tired—I’m sure you’re tired. Have you walked here? You shan’t go back on foot; I’ll take care of that!”
Anne roused herself at those words. She spoke for the first time. The tone was lower than was natural to her; sadder than was natural to her—but the charm of her voice, the native gentleness and beauty of it, seemed to have survived the wreck of all besides.
“I don’t go back, Blanche. I have left the inn.”
“Left the inn? With your husband?”
She answered the first question—not the second.
“I can’t go back,” she said. “The inn is no place for me. A curse seems to follow me, Blanche, wherever I go. I am the cause of quarreling and wretchedness, without meaning it, God knows. The old man who is headwaiter at the inn has been kind to me, my dear, in his way, and he and the landlady had hard words together about it. A quarrel, a shocking, violent quarrel. He has lost his place in consequence. The woman, his mistress, lays all the blame of it to my door. She is a hard woman; and she has been harder than ever since Bishopriggs went away. I have missed a letter at the inn—I must have thrown it aside, I suppose, and forgotten it. I only know that I remembered about it, and couldn’t find it last night. I told the landlady, and she fastened a quarrel on me almost before the words were out of my mouth. Asked me if I charged her with stealing my letter. Said things to me—I can’t repeat them. I am not very well, and not able to deal with people of that sort. I thought it best to leave Craig Fernie this morning. I hope and pray I shall never see Craig Fernie again.”
She told her little story with a total absence of emotion of any sort, and laid her head back wearily on the chair when it was done.
Blanche’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of her.
“I won’t tease you with questions, Anne,” she said, gently. “Come upstairs and rest in my room. You’re not fit to travel, love. I’ll take care that nobody comes near us.”
The stable-clock at Windygates struck the quarter to two. Anne raised herself in the chair with a start.
“What time was that?” she asked.
Blanche told her.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “I have come here to find something out if I can. You won’t ask me questions? Don’t, Blanche, don’t! for the sake of old times.”
Blanche turned aside, heartsick. “I will do nothing, dear, to annoy you,” she said, and took Anne’s hand, and hid the tears that were beginning to fall over her cheeks.
“I want to know something, Blanche. Will you tell me?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“Who are the gentlemen staying in the house?”
Blanche looked round at her again, in sudden astonishment and alarm. A vague fear seized her that Anne’s mind had given way under the heavy weight of trouble laid on it. Anne persisted in pressing her strange request.
“Run over their names, Blanche. I have a reason for wishing to know who the gentlemen are who are staying in the house.”
Blanche repeated the names of Lady Lundie’s guests, leaving to the last the guests who had arrived last.
“Two more came back this morning,” she went on. “Arnold Brinkworth and that hateful friend of his, Mr. Delamayn.”
Anne’s head sank back once more on the chair. She had found her way without exciting suspicion of the truth, to the one discovery which she had come to Windygates to make. He was in Scotland again, and he had only arrived from London that morning. There was barely time for him to have communicated with Craig Fernie before she left the inn—he, too, who hated letter-writing! The circumstances were all in his favor: there was no reason, there was really and truly no reason, so far, to believe that he had deserted her. The heart of the unhappy woman bounded in her bosom, under the first ray of hope that had warmed it for four days past. Under that sudden revulsion of feeling, her weakened frame shook from head to foot. Her face flushed deep for a moment—then turned deadly pale again. Blanche, anxiously watching her, saw the serious necessity for giving some restorative to her instantly.
“I am going to get you some wine—you will faint, Anne, if you don’t take something. I shall be back in a moment; and I can manage it without anybody being the wiser.”
She pushed Anne’s chair close to the nearest open window—a window at the upper end of the library—and ran out.
Blanche had barely left the room, by the door that led into the hall, when Geoffrey entered it by one of the lower windows opening from the lawn.
With his mind absorbed in the letter that he was about to write, he slowly advanced up the room toward the nearest table. Anne, hearing the sound of footsteps, started, and looked round. Her failing strength rallied in an instant, under the sudden relief of seeing him again. She rose and advanced eagerly, with a faint tinge of color in her cheeks. He looked up. The two stood face to face together—alone.
“Geoffrey!”
He looked at her without answering—without advancing a step, on his side. There was an evil light in his eyes; his silence was the brute silence that threatens dumbly. He had made up his mind never to see her again, and she had entrapped him into an interview. He had made up his mind to write, and there she stood
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