Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1010 page)

There was good reason for my feeling startled, and showing it. On the day and at the hour when the child had come to herself, I had stood on the deck of the vessel, and had seen the apparition of her disappear from my view.

“Did she say anything,” I asked, “when she recovered her senses?”

“Yes. She too had been dreaming — dreaming that she was in company with you. She said: ‘He is coming to see us, mamma; and I have been showing him the way.’ I asked her where she had seen you. She spoke confusedly of more places than one. She talked of trees, and a cottage, and a lake; then of fields and hedges, and lonely lanes; then of a carriage and horses, and a long white road; then of crowded streets and houses, and a river and a ship. As to these last objects, there is nothing very wonderful in what she said. The houses, the river, and the ship which she saw in her dream, she saw in the reality when we took her from London to Rotterdam, on our way here. But as to the other places, especially the cottage and the lake (as she described them) I can only suppose that her dream was the reflection of mine.
I
had been dreaming of the cottage and the lake, as I once knew them in years long gone by; and — Heaven only knows why — I had associated you with the scene. Never mind going into that now! I don’t know what infatuation it is that makes me trifle in this way with old recollections, which affect me painfully in my present position. We were talking of the child’s health; let us go back to that.”

It was not easy to return to the topic of her child’s health. She had revived my curiosity on the subject of her association with Greenwater Broad. The child was still quietly at play in the bedchamber. My second opportunity was before me. I took it.

“I won’t distress you,” I began. “I will only ask leave, before we change the subject, to put one question to you about the cottage and the lake.”

As the fatality that pursued us willed it, it was
her
turn now to be innocently an obstacle in the way of our discovering each other.

“I can tell you nothing more to-night,” she interposed, rising impatiently. “It is time I put the child to bed — and, besides, I can’t talk of things that distress me. You must wait for the time — if it ever comes! — when I am calmer and happier than I am now.”

She turned to enter the bed-chamber. Acting headlong on the impulse of the moment, I took her by the hand and stopped her.

“You have only to choose,” I said, “and the calmer and happier time is yours from this moment.”

“Mine?” she repeated. “What do you mean?”

“Say the word,” I replied, “and you and your child have a home and a future before you.”

She looked at me half bewildered, half angry.

“Do you offer me your protection?” she asked.

“I offer you a husband’s protection,” I answered. “I ask you to be my wife.”

She advanced a step nearer to me, with her eyes riveted on my face.

“You are evidently ignorant of what has really happened,” she said. “And yet, God knows, the child spoke plainly enough!”

“The child only told me,” I rejoined, “what I had heard already, on my way here.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“And you still ask me to be your wife?”

“I can imagine no greater happiness than to make you my wife.”

“Knowing what you know now?”

“Knowing what I know now, I ask you confidently to give me your hand. Whatever claim that man may once have had, as the father of your child, he has now forfeited it by his infamous desertion of you. In every sense of the word, my darling, you are a free woman. We have had sorrow enough in our lives. Happiness is at last within our reach. Come to me, and say Yes.”

I tried to take her in my arms. She drew back as if I had frightened her.

“Never!” she said, firmly.

I whispered my next words, so that the child in the inner room might not hear us.

“You once said you loved me!”

“I do love you!”

“As dearly as ever?”

“
More
dearly than ever!”

“Kiss me!”

She yielded mechanically; she kissed me — with cold lips, with big tears in her eyes.

“You don’t love me!” I burst out, angrily. “You kiss me as if it were a duty. Your lips are cold — your heart is cold. You don’t love me!”

She looked at me sadly, with a patient smile.

“One of us must remember the difference between your position and mine,” she said. “You are a man of stainless honour, who holds an undisputed rank in the world. And what am I? I am the deserted mistress of a thief. One of us must remember that. You have generously forgotten it. I must bear it in mind. I dare say I am cold. Suffering has that effect on me; and, I own it, I am suffering now.”

I was too passionately in love with her to feel the sympathy on which she evidently counted in saying those words. A man can respect a woman’s scruples when they appeal to him mutely in her looks or in her tears; but the formal expression of them in words only irritates or annoys him.

“Whose fault is it that you suffer?” I retorted, coldly. “I ask you to make my life a happy one, and your life a happy one. You are a cruelly wronged woman, but you are not a degraded woman. You are worthy to be my wife, and I am ready to declare it publicly. Come back with me to England. My boat is waiting for you; we can set sail in two hours.”

She dropped into a chair; her hands fell helplessly into her lap.

“How cruel!” she murmured, “how cruel to tempt me!” She waited a little, and recovered her fatal firmness. “No!” she said. “If I die in doing it, I can still refuse to disgrace you. Leave me, Mr. Germaine. You can show me that one kindness more. For God’s sake, leave me!”

I made a last appeal to her tenderness.

“Do you know what my life is if I live without you?” I asked. “My mother is dead. There is not a living creature left in the world whom I love but you. And you ask me to leave you! Where am I to go to? what am I to do? You talk of cruelty! Is there no cruelty in sacrificing the happiness of my life to a miserable scruple of delicacy, to an unreasoning fear of the opinion of the world? I love you and you love me. There is no other consideration worth a straw. Come back with me to England! come back and be my wife!”

She dropped on her knees, and taking my hand put it silently to her lips. I tried to raise her. It was useless: she steadily resisted me.

“Does this mean No?” I asked.

“It means,” she said in faint, broken tones, “that I prize your honour beyond my happiness. If I marry you, your career is destroyed by your wife; and the day will come when you will tell me so. I can suffer — I can die; but I can
not
face such a prospect as that. Forgive me and forget me. I can say no more!”

She let go of my hand, and sank on the floor. The utter despair of that action told me, far more eloquently than the words which she had just spoken, that her resolution was immovable. She had deliberately separated herself from me; her own act had parted us forever.

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TWO DESTINIES.

I MADE no movement to leave the room; I let no sign of sorrow escape me. At last, my heart was hardened against the woman who had so obstinately rejected me. I stood looking down at her with a merciless anger, the bare remembrance of which fills me at this day with a horror of myself. There is but one excuse for me. The shock of that last overthrow of the one hope that held me to life was more than my reason could endure. On that dreadful night (whatever I may have been at other times), I myself believe it, I was a maddened man.

I was the first to break the silence.

“Get up,” I said coldly.

She lifted her face from the floor, and looked at me as if she doubted whether she had heard aright.

“Put on your hat and cloak,” I resumed. “I must ask you to go back with me as far as the boat.”

She rose slowly. Her eyes rested on my face with a dull, bewildered look.

“Why am I to go with you to the boat?” she asked.

The child heard her. The child ran up to us with her little hat in one hand, and the key of the cabin in the other.

“I’m ready,” she said. “I will open the cabin door.”

Her mother signed to her to go back to the bed-chamber. She went back as far as the door which led into the courtyard, and waited there, listening. I turned to Mrs. Van Brandt with immovable composure, and answered the question which she had addressed to me.

“You are left,” I said, “without the means of getting away from this place. In two hours more the tide will be in my favor, and I shall sail at once on the return voyage. We part, this time, never to meet again. Before I go I am resolved to leave you properly provided for. My money is in my traveling-bag in the cabin. For that reason, I am obliged to ask you to go with me as far as the boat.”

“I thank you gratefully for your kindness,” she said. “I don’t stand in such serious need of help as you suppose.”

“It is useless to attempt to deceive me,” I proceeded. “I have spoken with the head partner of the house of Van Brandt at Amsterdam, and I know exactly what your position is. Your pride must bend low enough to take from my hands the means of subsistence for yourself and your child. If I had died in England — ”

I stopped. The unexpressed idea in my mind was to tell her that she would inherit a legacy under my will, and that she might quite as becomingly take money from me in my life-time as take it from my executors after my death. In forming this thought into words, the associations which it called naturally into being revived in me the memory of my contemplated suicide in the Greenwater lake. Mingling with the remembrance thus aroused, there rose in me unbidden, a temptation so overpoweringly vile, and yet so irresistible in the state of my mind at the moment, that it shook me to the soul. “You have nothing to live for, now that she has refused to be yours,” the fiend in me whispered. “Take your leap into the next world, and make the woman whom you love take it with you!” While I was still looking at her, while my last words to her faltered on my lips, the horrible facilities for the perpetration of the double crime revealed themselves enticingly to my view. My boat was moored in the one part of the decaying harbor in which deep water still lay at the foot of the quay. I had only to induce her to follow me when I stepped on the deck, to seize her in my arms, and to jump overboard with her before she could utter a cry for help. My drowsy sailors, as I knew by experience, were hard to wake, and slow to move even when they were roused at last. We should both be drowned before the youngest and the quickest of them could get up from his bed and make his way to the deck. Yes! We should both be struck together out of the ranks of the living at one and the same moment. And why not? She who had again and again refused to be my wife — did she deserve that I should leave her free to go back, perhaps, for the second time to Van Brandt? On the evening when I had saved her from the waters of the Scotch river, I had made myself master of her fate. She had tried to destroy herself by drowning; she should drown now, in the arms of the man who had once thrown himself between her and death!

Self-abandoned to such atrocious reasoning as this, I stood face to face with her, and returned deliberately to my unfinished sentence.

“If I had died in England, you would have been provided for by my will. What you would have taken from me then, you may take from me now. Come to the boat.”

A change passed over her face as I spoke; a vague doubt of me began to show itself in her eyes. She drew back a little, without making any reply.

“Come to the boat,” I reiterated.

“It is too late.” With that answer, she looked across the room at the child, still waiting by the door. “Come, Elfie,” she said, calling the little creature by one of her favorite nicknames. “Come to bed.”