The Law and the Lady. Wilkie Collins

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СКАЧАТЬ taking refuge in employment of any sort from my own thoughts. I felt the hateful suspicion that had degraded me coming back again in spite of my efforts to repel it. The books! the books! my only hope was to absorb myself, body and soul, in the books.

      I had one foot on the ladder, when I heard the door of the room open—the door which communicated with the hall.

      I looked around, expecting to see the Major. I saw instead the Major’s future prima donna standing just inside the door, with her round eyes steadily fixed on me.

      “I can stand a good deal,” the girl began, coolly, “but I can’t stand this any longer?”

      “What is it that you can’t stand any longer?” I asked.

      “If you have been here a minute, you have been here two good hours,” she went on. “All by yourself in the Major’s study. I am of a jealous disposition—I am. And I want to know what it means.” She advanced a few steps nearer to me, with a heightening color and a threatening look. “Is he going to bring you out on the stage?” she asked, sharply.

      “Certainly not.”

      “He ain’t in love with you, is he?”

      Under other circumstances I might have told her to leave the room. In my position at that critical moment the mere presence of a human creature was a positive relief to me. Even this girl, with her coarse questions and her uncultivated manners, was a welcome intruder on my solitude: she offered me a refuge from myself.

      “Your question is not very civilly put,” I said. “However, I excuse you. You are probably not aware that I am a married woman.”

      “What has that got to do with it?” she retorted. “Married or single, it’s all one to the Major. That brazen-faced hussy who calls herself Lady Clarinda is married, and she sends him nosegays three times a week! Not that I care, mind you, about the old fool. But I’ve lost my situation at the railway, and I’ve got my own interests to look after, and I don’t know what may happen if I let other women come between him and me. That’s where the shoe pinches, don’t you see? I’m not easy in my mind when I see him leaving you mistress here to do just what you like. No offense! I speak out—I do. I want to know what you are about all by yourself in this room? How did you pick up with the Major? I never heard him speak of you before to-day.”

      Under all the surface selfishness and coarseness of this strange girl there was a certain frankness and freedom which pleaded in her favor—to my mind, at any rate. I answered frankly and freely on my side.

      “Major Fitz-David is an old friend of my husband’s,” I said, “and he is kind to me for my husband’s sake. He has given me permission to look in this room—”

      I stopped, at a loss how to describe my employment in terms which should tell her nothing, and which should at the same time successfully set her distrust of me at rest.

      “To look about in this room—for what?” she asked. Her eye fell on the library ladder, beside which I was still standing. “For a book?” she resumed.

      “Yes,” I said, taking the hint. “For a book.”

      “Haven’t you found it yet?”

      “No.”

      She looked hard at me, undisguisedly considering with herself whether I were or were not speaking the truth.

      “You seem to be a good sort,” she said, making up her mind at last. “There’s nothing stuck-up about you. I’ll help you if I can. I have rummaged among the books here over and over again, and I know more about them than you do. What book do you want?”

      As she put that awkward question she noticed for the first time Lady Clarinda’s nosegay lying on the side-table where the Major had left it. Instantly forgetting me and my book, this curious girl pounced like a fury on the flowers, and actually trampled them under her feet!

      “There!” she cried. “If I had Lady Clarinda here I’d serve her in the same way.”

      “What will the Major say?” I asked.

      “What do I care? Do you suppose I’m afraid of him? Only last week I broke one of his fine gimcracks up there, and all through Lady Clarinda and her flowers!”

      She pointed to the top of the book-case—to the empty space on it close by the window. My heart gave a sudden bound as my eyes took the direction indicated by her finger. She had broken the vase! Was the way to discovery about to reveal itself to me through this girl? Not a word would pass my lips; I could only look at her.

      “Yes!” she said. “The thing stood there. He knows how I hate her flowers, and he put her nosegay in the vase out of my way. There was a woman’s face painted on the china, and he told me it was the living image of her face. It was no more like her than I am. I was in such a rage that I up with the book I was reading at the time and shied it at the painted face. Over the vase went, bless your heart, crash to the floor. Stop a bit! I wonder whether that’s the book you have been looking after? Are you like me? Do you like reading Trials?”

      Trials? Had I heard her aright? Yes: she had said Trials.

      I answered by an affirmative motion of my head. I was still speechless. The girl sauntered in her cool way to the fire-place, and, taking up the tongs, returned with them to the book-case.

      “Here’s where the book fell,” she said—“in the space between the book-case and the wall. I’ll have it out in no time.”

      I waited without moving a muscle, without uttering a word.

      She approached me with the tongs in one hand and with a plainly bound volume in the other.

      “Is that the book?” she said. “Open it, and see.”

      I took the book from her.

      “It is tremendously interesting,” she went on. “I’ve read it twice over—I have. Mind you, I believe he did it, after all.”

      Did it? Did what? What was she talking about? I tried to put the question to her. I struggled—quite vainly—to say only these words: “What are you talking about?”

      She seemed to lose all patience with me. She snatched the book out of my hand, and opened it before me on the table by which we were standing side by side.

      “I declare, you’re as helpless as a baby!” she said, contemptuously. “There! Is that the book?”

      I read the first lines on the title-page—

      A COMPLETE REPORT OF THE TRIAL OF EUSTACE MACALLAN.

      I stopped and looked up at her. She started back from me with a scream of terror. I looked down again at the title-page, and read the next lines—

      FOR THE ALLEGED POISONING OF HIS WIFE.

      There, God’s mercy remembered me. There the black blank of a swoon swallowed me up.

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