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"Your housekeeper has gone," whispered the captain, "and you are to
be married on Monday. Don't agitate yourself, and don't express your
feelings--there isn't time for it. Get the first active servant you can
find in the house to pack your bag in ten minutes, take leave of the
admiral, and come back at once with me to the London train."

Noel Vanstone faintly attempted to ask a question. The captain declined
to hear it.

"As much talk as you like on the road," he said. "Time is too precious
for talking here. How do we know Lecount may not think better of it? How
do we know she may not turn back before she gets to Zurich?"

That startling consideration terrified Noel Vanstone into instant
submission.

"What shall I say to the admiral?" he asked, helplessly.

"Tell him you are going to be married, to be sure! What does it matter,
now Lecount's back is turned? If he wonders you didn't tell him before,
say it's a runaway match, and the bride is waiting for you. Stop! Any
letters addressed to you in your absence will be sent to this place, of
course? Give the admiral these envelopes, and tell him to forward your
letters under cover to me. I am an old customer at the hotel we are
going to; and if we find the place full, the landlord may be depended
on to take care of any letters with my name on them. A safe address in
London for your correspondence may be of the greatest importance. How do
we know Lecount may not write to you on her way to Zurich?"

"What a head you have got!" cried Noel Vanstone, eagerly taking the
envelopes. "You think of everything."

He left the carriage in high excitement, and ran back into the house. In
ten minutes more Captain Wragge had him in safe custody, and the horses
started on their return journey.

The travelers reached London in good time that evening, and found
accommodation at the hotel.

Knowing the restless, inquisitive nature of the man he had to deal with,
Captain Wragge had anticipated some little difficulty and embarrassment
in meeting the questions which Noel Vanstone might put to him on the way
to London. To his great relief, a startling domestic discovery absorbed
his traveling companion's whole attention at the outset of the journey.
By some extraordinary oversight, Miss Bygrave had been left, on the eve
of her marriage, unprovided with a maid. Noel Vanstone declared that he
would take the whole responsibility of correcting this deficiency in the
arrangements, on his own shoulders; he would not trouble Mr. Bygrave
to give him any assistance; he would confer, when they got to their
journey's end, with the landlady of the hotel, and would examine the
candidates for the vacant office himself. All the way to London, he
returned again and again to the same subject; all the evening, at the
hotel, he was in and out of the landlady's sitting-room, until he fairly
obliged her to lock the door. In every other proceeding which related to
his marriage, he had been kept in the background; he had been compelled
to follow in the footsteps of his ingenious friend. In the matter of the
lady's maid he claimed his fitting position at last--he followed nobody;
he took the lead!

The forenoon of the next day was devoted to obtaining the license--the
personal distinction of making the declaration on oath being eagerly
accepted by Noel Vanstone, who swore, in perfect good faith (on
information previously obtained from the captain) that the lady was
of age. The document procured, the bridegroom returned to examine the
characters and qualifications of the women-servants out of the place
whom the landlady had engaged to summon to the hotel, while Captain
Wragge turned his steps, "on business personal to himself," toward the
residence of a friend in a distant quarter of London.

The captain's friend was connected with the law, and the captain's
business was of a twofold nature. His first object was to inform himself
of the legal bearings of the approaching marriage on the future of the
husband and the wife. His second object was to provide beforehand
for destroying all traces of the destination to which he might betake
himself when he left Aldborough on the wedding-day. Having reached his
end successfully in both these cases, he returned to the hotel, and
found Noel Vanstone nursing his offended dignity in the landlady's
sitting-room. Three ladies' maids had appeared to pass their
examination, and had all, on coming to the question of wages, impudently
declined accepting the place. A fourth candidate was expected to present
herself on the next day; and, until she made her appearance, Noel
Vanstone positively declined removing from the metropolis. Captain
Wragge showed his annoyance openly at the unnecessary delay thus
occasioned in the return to Aldborough, but without producing any
effect. Noel Vanstone shook his obstinate little head, and solemnly
refused to trifle with his responsibilities.

The first event which occurred on Saturday morning was the arrival of
Mrs. Lecount's letter to her master, inclosed in one of the envelopes
which the captain had addressed to himself. He received it (by previous
arrangement with the waiter) in his bedroom--read it with the closest
attention--and put it away carefully in his pocketbook. The letter
was ominous of serious events to come when the housekeeper returned to
England; and it was due to Magdalen--who was the person threatened--to
place the warning of danger in her own possession.

Later in the day the fourth candidate appeared for the maid's
situation--a young woman of small expectations and subdued manners, who
looked (as the landlady remarked) like a person overtaken by misfortune.
She passed the ordeal of examination successfully, and accepted the
wages offered with out a murmur. The engagement having been ratified on
both sides, fresh delays ensued, of which Noel Vanstone was once more
the cause. He had not yet made up his mind whether he would, or would
not, give more than a guinea for the wedding-ring; and he wasted the
rest of the day to such disastrous purpose in one jeweler's shop after
another, that he and the captain, and the new lady's maid (who traveled
with them), were barely in time to catch the last train from London that
evening. It was late at night when they left the railway at the nearest
station to Aldborough. Captain Wragge had been strangely silent all
through the journey. His mind was ill at ease. He had left Magdalen,
under very critical circumstances, with no fit person to control her,
and he was wholly ignorant of the progress of events in his absence at
North Shingles.



CHAPTER XIII.

WHAT had happened at Aldborough in Captain Wragge's absence? Events had
occurred which the captain's utmost dexterity might have found it hard
to remedy.

As soon as the chaise had left North Shingles, Mrs. Wragge received
the message which her husband had charged the servant to deliver. She
hastened into the parlor, bewildered by her stormy interview with the
captain, and penitently conscious that she had done wrong, without
knowing what the wrong was. If Magdalen's mind had been unoccupied by
the one idea of the marriage which now filled it--if she had possessed
composure enough to listen to Mrs. Wragge's rambling narrative of what
had happened during her interview with the housekeeper--Mrs. Lecount's
visit to the wardrobe must, sooner or later, have formed part of the
disclosure; and Magdalen, although she might never have guessed the
truth, must at least have been warned that there was some element of
danger lurking treacherously in the Alpaca dress. As it was, no such
consequence as this followed Mrs. Wragge's appearance in the parlor; for
no such consequence was now possible.

Events which had happened earlier in the morning, events which had
happened for days and weeks past, had vanished as completely from
Magdalen's mind as if they had never taken place. The horror of the
coming Monday--the merciless certainty implied in the appointment of the
day and hour--petrified all feeling in her, and annihilated all thought.
Mrs. Wragge made three separate attempts to enter on the subject of the
housekeeper's visit. The first time she might as well have addressed
herself to the wind, or to the sea. The second attempt seemed likely
to be more successful. Magdalen sighed, listened for a moment
indifferently, and then dismissed the subject. "It doesn't matter," she
said. "The end has come all the same. I'm not angry with you. Say no
more." Later in the day, from not knowing what else to talk about, Mrs.
Wragge tried again. This time Magdalen turned on her impatiently. "For
God's sake, don't worry me about trifles! I can't bear it." Mrs. Wragge
closed her lips on the spot, and returned to the subject no more.
Magdalen, who had been kind to her at all other times, had angrily
forbidden it. The captain--utterly ignorant of Mrs. Lecount's interest
in the secrets of the wardrobe--had never so much as approached it. All
the information that he had extracted from his wife's mental confusion,
he had extracted by putting direct questions, derived purely from
the resources of his own knowledge. He had insisted on plain answers,
without excuses of any kind; he had carried his point as usual; and
his departure the same morning had left him no chance of re-opening the
question, even if his irritation against his wife had permitted him
to do so. There the Alpaca dress hung, neglected in the dark--the
unnoticed, unsuspected center of dangers that were still to come.

Toward the afternoon Mrs. Wragge took courage to start a suggestion of
her own--she pleaded for a little turn in the fresh air.

Magdalen passively put on her hat; passively accompanied her companion
along the public walk, until they reached its northward extremity. Here
the beach was left solitary, and here they sat down, side by side, on
the shingle. It was a bright, exhilarating day; pleasure-boats were
sailing on the calm blue water; Aldborough was idling happily afloat
and ashore. Mrs. Wragge recovered her spirits in the gayety of the
prospect--she amused herself like a child, by tossing pebbles into the
sea. From time to time she stole a questioning glance at Magdalen, and
saw no encouragement in her manner, no change to cordiality in her face.
She sat silent on the slope of the shingle, with her elbow on her knee,
and her head resting on her hand, looking out over the sea--looking
with rapt attention, and yet with eyes that seemed to notice nothing.
Mrs. Wragge wearied of the pebbles, and lost her interest in looking at
the pleasure-boats. Her great head began to nod heavily, and she dozed
in the warm, drowsy air. When she woke, the pleasure-boats were far off;
their sails were white specks in the distance. The idlers on the beach
were thinned in number; the sun was low in the heaven; the blue sea was
darker, and rippled by a breeze. Changes on sky and earth and ocean
told of the waning day; change was everywhere--except close at her side.
There Magdalen sat, in the same position, with weary eyes that still
looked over the sea, and still saw nothing.

"Oh, do speak to me!" said Mrs. Wragge.

Magdalen started, and looked about her vacantly.

"It's late," she said, shivering under the first sensation that reached
her of the rising breeze. "Come home; you want your tea." They walked
home in silence.

"Don't be angry with me for asking," said Mrs. Wragge, as they sat
together at the tea-table. "Are you troubled, my dear, in your mind?"

"Yes," replied Magdalen. "Don't notice me. My trouble will soon be
over."

She waited patiently until Mrs. Wragge had made an end of the meal, and
then went upstairs to her own room.

"Monday!" she said, as she sat down at her toilet-table. "Something may
happen before Monday comes!"

Her fingers wandered mechanically among the brushes and combs, the tiny
bottles and cases placed on the table. She set them in order, now in one
way, and now in another--then on a sudden pushed them away from her in a
heap. For a minute or two her hands remained idle. That interval passed,
they grew restless again, and pulled the two little drawers backward and
forward in their grooves. Among the objects laid in one of them was a
Prayer-book which had belonged to her at Combe-Raven, and which she had
saved with her other relics of the past, when she and her sister had
taken their farewell of home. She opened the Prayer-book, after a long
hesitation, at the Marriage Service, shut it again before she had read a
line, and put it back hurriedly in one of the drawers. After turning the
key in the locks, she rose and walked to the window. "The horrible
sea!" she said, turning from it with a shudder of disgust--"the lonely,
dreary, horrible sea!"

She went back to the drawer, and took the Prayer-book out for the second
time, half opened it again at the Marriage Service, and impatiently
threw it back into the drawer. This time, after turning the lock, she
took the key away, walked with it in her hand to the open window, and
threw it violently from her into the garden. It fell on a bed thickly
planted with flowers. It was invisible; it was lost. The sense of its
loss seemed to relieve her.

"Something may happen on Friday; something may happen on Saturday;
something may happen on Sunday. Three days still!"

She closed the green shutters outside the window and drew the curtains
to darken the room still more. Her head felt heavy; her eyes were
burning hot. She threw herself on her bed, with a sullen impulse to
sleep away the time. The quiet of the house helped her; the darkness of
the room helped her; the stupor of mind into which she had fallen had
its effect on her senses; she dropped into a broken sleep. Her restless
hands moved incessantly, her head tossed from side to side of the
pillow, but still she slept. Ere long words fell by ones and twos
from her lips; words whispered in her sleep, growing more and more
continuous, more and more articulate, the longer the sleep lasted--words
which seemed to calm her restlessness and to hush her into deeper
repose. She smiled; she was in the happy land of dreams; Frank's name
escaped her. "Do you love me, Frank?" she whispered. "Oh, my darling,
say it again! say it again!"

The time passed, the room grew darker; and still she slumbered and
dreamed. Toward sunset--without any noise inside the house or out to
account for it--she started up on the bed, awake again in an instant.
The drowsy obscurity of the room struck her with terror. She ran to the
window, pushed open the shutters, and leaned far out into the evening
air and the evening light. Her eyes devoured the trivial sights on the
beach; her ears drank in the welcome murmur of the sea. Anything to
deliver her from the waking impression which her dreams had left! No
more darkness, no more repose. Sleep that came mercifully to others came
treacherously to her. Sleep had only closed her eyes on the future, to
open them on the past.

She went down again into the parlor, eager to talk--no matter how idly,
no matter on what trifles. The room was empty. Perhaps Mrs. Wragge had
gone to her work--perhaps she was too tired to talk. Magdalen took her
hat from the table and went out. The sea that she had shrunk from, a few
hours since, looked friendly now. How lovely it was in its cool evening
blue! What a god-like joy in the happy multitude of waves leaping up to
the light of heaven!

She stayed out until the night fell and the stars appeared. The night
steadied her.

By slow degrees her mind recovered its balance and she looked her
position unflinchingly in the face. The vain hope that accident might
defeat the very end for which, of her own free-will, she had ceaselessly
plotted and toiled, vanished and left her; self-dissipated in its own
weakness. She knew the true alternative, and faced it. On one side was
the revolting ordeal of the marriage; on the other, the abandonment
of her purpose. Was it too late to choose between the sacrifice of the
purpose and the sacrifice of herself? Yes! too late. The backward path
had closed behind her. Time that no wish could change, Time that no
prayers could recall, had made her purpose a part of herself: once she
had governed it; now it governed her. The more she shrank, the harder
she struggled, the more mercilessly it drove her on. No other feeling
in her was strong enough to master it--not even the horror that was
maddening her--the horror of her marriage.

Toward nine o'clock she went back to the house.

"Walking again!" said Mrs. Wragge, meeting her at the door. "Come in and
sit down, my dear. How tired you must be!"

Magdalen smiled, and patted Mrs. Wragge kindly on the shoulder.

"You forget how strong I am," she said. "Nothing hurts me."

She lit her candle and went upstairs again into her room. As she
returned to the old place by her toilet-table, the vain hope in the
three days of delay, the vain hope of deliverance by accident, came back
to her--this time in a form more tangible than the form which it had
hitherto worn.

"Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Something may happen to him; something may
happen to me. Something serious; something fatal. One of us may die."

A sudden change came over her face. She shivered, though there was no
cold in the air. She started, though there was no noise to alarm her.

"One of us may die. I may be the one."

She fell into deep thought, roused herself after a while, and, opening
the door, called to Mrs. Wragge to come and speak to her.

"You were right in thinking I should fatigue myself," she said. "My walk
has been a little too much for me. I feel tired, and I am going to bed.
Good-night." She kissed Mrs. Wragge and softly closed the door again.

After a few turns backward and forward in the room, she abruptly opened
her writing-case and began a letter to her sister. The letter grew and
grew under her hands; she filled sheet after sheet of note-paper. Her
heart was full of her subject: it was her own story addressed to Norah.
She shed no tears; she was composed to a quiet sadness. Her pen ran
smoothly on. After writing for more than two hours, she left off while
the letter was still unfinished. There was no signature attached to
it--there was a blank space reserved, to be filled up at some other
time. After putting away the case, with the sheets of writing secured
inside it, she walked to the window for air, and stood there looking
out.

The moon was waning over the sea. The breeze of the earlier hours had
died out. On earth and ocean, the spirit of the Night brooded in a deep
and awful calm.

Her head drooped low on her bosom, and all the view waned before her
eyes with the waning moon. She saw no sea, no sky. Death, the Tempter,
was busy at her heart. Death, the Tempter, pointed homeward, to the
grave of her dead parents in Combe-Raven churchyard.

"Nineteen last birthday," she thought. "Only nineteen!" She moved away
from the window, hesitated, and then looked out again at the view. "The
beautiful night!" she said, gratefully. "Oh, the beautiful night!"

She left the window and lay down on her bed. Sleep, that had come
treacherously before, came mercifully now; came deep and dreamless, the
image of her last waking thought--the image of Death.

Early the next morning Mrs. Wragge went into Magdalen's room, and found
that she had risen betimes. She was sitting before the glass, drawing
the comb slowly through and through her hair--thoughtful and quiet.

"How do you feel this morning, my dear?" asked Mrs. Wragge. "Quite well
again?"

"Yes."

After replying in the affirmative, she stopped, considered for a moment,
and suddenly contradicted herself.

"No," she said, "not quite well. I am suffering a little from
toothache."

As she altered her first answer in those words she gave a twist to her
hair with the comb, so that it fell forward and hid her face.

At breakfast she was very silent, and she took nothing but a cup of tea.

"Let me go to the chemist's and get something," said Mrs. Wragge.

"No, thank you."

"Do let me!"

"No!"

She refused for the second time, sharply and angrily. As usual, Mrs.
Wragge submitted, and let her have her own way. When breakfast was
over, she rose, without a word of explanation, and went out. Mrs. Wragge
watched her from the window and saw that she took the direction of the
chemist's shop.

On reaching the chemist's door she stopped--paused before entering
the shop, and looked in at the window--hesitated, and walked away a
little--hesitated again, and took the first turning which led back to
the beach.

Without looking about her, without caring what place she chose, she
seated herself on the shingle. The only persons who were near to her, in
the position she now occupied, were a nursemaid and two little boys. The
youngest of the two had a tiny toy-ship in his hand. After looking at
Magdalen for a little while with the quaintest gravity and attention,
the boy suddenly approached her, and opened the way to an acquaintance
by putting his toy composedly on her lap.

"Look at my ship," said the child, crossing his hands on Magdalen's
knee.

She was not usually patient with children. In happier days she would
not have met the boy's advance toward her as she met it now. The hard
despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her fast-closed lips parted and
trembled. She put the ship back into the child's hands and lifted him on
her lap.

"Will you give me a kiss?" she said, faintly. The boy looked at his ship
as if he would rather have kissed the ship.

She repeated the question--repeated it almost humbly. The child put his
hand up to her neck and kissed her.

"If I was your sister, would you love me?" All the misery of her
friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart, poured from
her in those words.

"Would you love me?" she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom of the
child's frock.

"Yes," said the boy. "Look at my ship."

She looked at the ship through her gathering tears.

"What do you call it?" she asked, trying ha rd to find her way even to
the interest of a child.

"I call it Uncle Kirke's ship," said the boy. "Uncle Kirke has gone
away."

The name recalled nothing to her memory. No remembrances but old
remembrances lived in her now. "Gone?" she repeated absently, thinking
what she should say to her little friend next.

"Yes," said the boy. "Gone to China."

Even from the lips of a child that word struck her to the heart. She put
Kirke's little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the beach.

As she turned back to the house, the struggle of the past night renewed
itself in her mind. But the sense of relief which the child had brought
to her, the reviving tenderness which she had felt while he sat on her
knee, influenced her still. She was conscious of a dawning hope, opening
freshly on her thoughts, as the boy's innocent eyes had opened on her
face when he came to her on the beach. Was it too late to turn back?
Once more she asked herself that question, and now, for the first time,
she asked it in doubt.

She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed self
which warned her to act, and not to think. Without waiting to remove her
shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her writing-case and addressed
these lines to Captain Wragge as fast as her pen could trace them:

"You will find the money I promised you inclosed in this. My resolution
has failed me. The horror of marrying him is more than I can face. I
have left Aldborough. Pity my weakness, and forget me. Let us never meet
again."

With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her little
white silk bag from her bosom and took out the banknotes to inclose
them in the letter. Her hand searched impetuously; her hand had lost its
discrimination of touch. She grasped the whole contents of the bag in
one handful of papers, and drew them out violently, tearing some and
disarranging the folds of others. As she threw them down before her on
the table, the first object that met her eye was her own handwriting,
faded already with time. She looked closer, and saw the words she
had copied from her dead father's letter--saw the lawyer's brief and
terrible commentary on them confronting her at the bottom of the page:

_Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children, and the law leaves them
helpless at their uncle's mercy._

Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily quiet. All
the Past rose before her in mute, overwhelming reproach. She took up the
lines which her own hand had written hardly a minute since, and looked
at the ink, still wet on the letters, with a vacant incredulity.

The color that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more. The
hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her tearless
eyes. She folded the banknotes carefully, and put them back in her bag.
She pressed the copy of her father's letter to her lips, and returned
it to its place with the banknotes. When the bag was in her bosom
again, she waited a little, with her face hidden in her hands, then
deliberately tore up the lines addressed to Captain Wragge. Before the
ink was dry, the letter lay in fragments on the floor.