Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (959 page)

I went back for the third time to my desk. The one person who might be trusted to find the answer to those questions was Mr. Playmore. I wrote him a full and careful account of all that had happened; I begged him to forgive and forget my ungracious reception of the advice which he had so kindly offered to me; and I promised beforehand to do nothing without first consulting his opinion in the new emergency which now confronted me.

The day was fine for the time of year; and by way of getting a little wholesome exercise after the surprises and occupations of the morning, I took my letter to Mr. Playmore to the post.

Returning to the villa, I was informed that another visitor was waiting to see me: a civilized visitor this time, who had given her name. My mother-in-law — Mrs. Macallan.

CHAPTER XXXVII. AT THE BEDSIDE.

BEFORE she had uttered a word, I saw in my mother-in-law’s face that she brought bad news.

“Eustace?” I said.

She answered me by a look.

“Let me hear it at once!” I cried. “I can bear anything but suspense.”

Mrs. Macallan lifted her hand, and showed me a telegraphic dispatch which she had hitherto kept concealed in the folds of her dress.

“I can trust your courage,” she said. “There is no need, my child, to prevaricate with you. Read that.”

I read the telegram. It was sent by the chief surgeon of a field-hospital; and it was dated from a village in the north of Spain.

“Mr. Eustace severely wounded in a skirmish by a stray shot. Not in danger, so far. Every care taken of him. Wait for another telegram.”

I turned away my face, and bore as best I might the pang that wrung me when I read those words. I thought I knew how dearly I loved him: I had never known it till that moment.

My mother-in-law put her arm round me, and held me to her tenderly. She knew me well enough not to speak to me at that moment.

I rallied my courage, and pointed to the last sentence in the telegram.

“Do you mean to wait?” I asked.

“Not a day!” she answered. “I am going to the Foreign Office about my passport — I have some interest there: they can give me letters; they can advise and assist me. I leave to-night by the mail train to Calais.”

“
You
leave?” I said. “Do you suppose I will let you go without me? Get my passport when you get yours. At seven this evening I will be at your house.”

She attempted to remonstrate; she spoke of the perils of the journey. At the first words I stopped her. “Don’t you know yet, mother, how obstinate I am? They may keep you waiting at the Foreign Office. Why do you waste the precious hours here?”

She yielded with a gentleness that was not in her everyday character. “Will my poor Eustace ever know what a wife he has got?” That was all she said. She kissed me, and went away in her carriage.

My remembrances of our journey are strangely vague and imperfect.

As I try to recall them, the memory of those more recent and more interesting events which occurred after my return to England gets between me and my adventures in Spain, and seems to force these last into a shadowy background, until they look like adventures that happened many years since. I confusedly recollect delays and alarms that tried our patience and our courage. I remember our finding friends (thanks to our letters of recommendation) in a Secretary to the Embassy and in a Queen’s Messenger, who assisted and protected us at a critical point in the journey. I recall to mind a long succession of men in our employment as travelers, all equally remarkable for their dirty cloaks and their clean linen, for their highly civilized courtesy to women and their utterly barbarous cruelty to horses. Last, and most important of all, I see again, more clearly than I can see anything else, the one wretched bedroom of a squalid village inn in which we found our poor darling, prostrate between life and death, insensible to everything that passed in the narrow little world that lay around his bedside.

There was nothing romantic or interesting in the accident which had put my husband’s life in peril.

He had ventured too near the scene of the conflict (a miserable affair) to rescue a poor lad who lay wounded on the field — mortally wounded, as the event proved. A rifle-bullet had struck him in the body. His brethren of the field-hospital had carried him back to their quarters at the risk of their lives. He was a great favorite with all of them; patient and gentle and brave; only wanting a little more judgment to be the most valuable recruit who had joined the brotherhood.

In telling me this, the surgeon kindly and delicately added a word of warning as well.

The fever caused by the wound had brought with it delirium, as usual. My poor husband’s mind, in so far as his wandering words might interpret it, was filled by the one image of his wife. The medical attendant had heard enough in the course of his ministrations at the bedside, to satisfy him that any sudden recognition of me by Eustace (if he recovered) might be attended by the most lamentable results. As things were at that sad time, I might take my turn at nursing him, without the slightest chance of his discovering me, perhaps for weeks and weeks to come. But on the day when he was declared out of danger — if that happy day ever arrived — I must resign my place at his bedside, and must wait to show myself until the surgeon gave me leave.

My mother-in-law and I relieved each other regularly, day and night, in the sick-room.

In the hours of his delirium — hours that recurred with a pitiless regularity — my name was always on my poor darling’s fevered lips. The ruling idea in him was the fine dreadful idea which I had vainly combated at our last interview. In the face of the verdict pronounced at the Trial, it was impossible even for his wife to be really and truly persuaded that he was an innocent man. All the wild pictures which his distempered imagination drew were equally inspired by that one obstinate conviction. He fancied himself to be still living with me under those dreaded conditions. Do what he might, I was always recalling to him the terrible ordeal through which he had passed. He acted his part, and he acted mine. He gave me a cup of tea; and I said to him, “We quarreled yesterday, Eustace. Is it poisoned?” He kissed me, in token of our reconciliation; and I laughed, and said, “It’s morning now, my dear. Shall I die by nine o’clock to-night?” I was ill in bed, and he gave me my medicine. I looked at him with a doubting eye. I said to him, “You are in love with another woman. Is there anything in the medicine that the doctor doesn’t know of?” Such was the horrible drama which now perpetually acted itself in his mind. Hundreds and hundreds of times I heard him repeat it, almost always in the same words. On other occasions his thoughts wandered away to my desperate project of proving him to be an innocent man. Sometimes he laughed at it. Sometimes he mourned over it. Sometimes he devised cunning schemes for placing unsuspected obstacles in my way. He was especially hard on me when he was inventing his preventive stratagems — he cheerfully instructed the visionary people who assisted him not to hesitate at offending or distressing me. “Never mind if you make her angry; never mind if you make her cry. It’s all for her good; it’s all to save the poor fool from dangers she doesn’t dream of. You mustn’t pity her when she says she does it for my sake. See! she is going to be insulted; she is going to be deceived; she is going to disgrace herself without knowing it. Stop her! stop her!” It was weak of me, I know; I ought to have kept the plain fact that he was out of his senses always present to my mind: still it is true that my hours passed at my husband’s pillow were many of them hours of mortification and misery of which he, poor dear, was the innocent and only cause.

The weeks passed; and he still hovered between life and death.

I kept no record of the time, and I cannot now recall the exact date on which the first favorable change took place. I only remember that it was toward sunrise on a fine winter morning when we were relieved at last of our heavy burden of suspense. The surgeon happened to be by the bedside when his patient awoke. The first thing he did, after looking at Eustace, was to caution me by a sign to be silent and to keep out of sight. My mother-in-law and I both knew what this meant. With full hearts we thanked God together for giving us back the husband and the son.

The same evening, being alone, we ventured to speak of the future — for the first time since we had left home.

“The surgeon tells me,” said Mrs. Macallan, “that Eustace is too weak to be capable of bearing anything in the nature of a surprise for some days to come. We have time to consider whether he is or is not to be told that he owes his life as much to your care as to mine. Can you find it in your heart to leave him, Valeria, now that God’s mercy has restored him to you and to me?”

“If I only consulted my own heart,” I answered, “I should never leave him again.”

Mrs. Macallan looked at me in grave surprise.

“What else have you to consult?” she asked.

“If we both live,” I replied, “I have to think of the happiness of his life and the happiness of mine in the years that are to come. I can bear a great deal, mother, but I cannot endure the misery of his leaving me for the second time.”

“You wrong him, Valeria — I firmly believe you wrong him — in thinking it possible that he can leave you again.”

“Dear Mrs. Macallan, have you forgotten already what we have both heard him say of me while we have been sitting by his bedside?”

“We have heard the ravings of a man in delirium. It is surely hard to hold Eustace responsible for what he said when he was out of his senses.”

“It is harder still,” I said, “to resist his mother when she is pleading for him. Dearest and best of friends! I don’t hold Eustace responsible for what he said in the fever — but I
do
take warning by it. The wildest words that fell from him were, one and all, the faithful echo of what he said to me in the best days of his health and his strength. What hope have I that he will recover with an altered mind toward me? Absence has not changed it; suffering has not changed it. In the delirium of fever, and in the full possession of his reason, he has the same dreadful doubt of me. I see but one way of winning him back: I must destroy at its root his motive for leaving me. It is hopeless to persuade him that I believe in his innocence: I must show him that belief is no longer necessary; I must prove to him that his position toward me has become the position of an innocent man!”

“Valeria! Valeria! you are wasting time and words. You have tried the experiment; and you know as well as I do that the thing is not to be done.”

I had no answer to that. I could say no more than I had said already.

“Suppose you go back to Dexter, out of sheer compassion for a mad and miserable wretch who has already insulted you,” proceeded my mother-in-law. “You can only go back accompanied by me, or by some other trustworthy person. You can only stay long enough to humour the creature’s wayward fancy, and to keep his crazy brain quiet for a time. That done, all is done — you leave him. Even supposing Dexter to be still capable of helping you, how can you make use of him but by admitting him to terms of confidence and familiarity — by treating him, in short, on the footing of an intimate friend? Answer me honestly: can you bring yourself to do that, after what happened at Mr. Benjamin’s house?”

I had told her of my last interview with Miserrimus Dexter, in the natural confidence that she inspired in me as relative and fellow-traveler; and this was the use to which she turned her information! I suppose I had no right to blame her; I suppose the motive sanctioned everything. At any rate, I had no choice but to give offense or to give an answer. I gave it. I acknowledged that I could never again permit Miserrimus Dexter to treat me on terms of familiarity as a trusted and intimate friend.

Mrs. Macallan pitilessly pressed the advantage that she had won.

“Very well,” she said, “that resource being no longer open to you, what hope is left? Which way are you to turn next?”

There was no meeting those questions, in my present situation, by any adequate reply. I felt strangely unlike myself — I submitted in silence. Mrs. Macallan struck the last blow that completed her victory.

“My poor Eustace is weak and wayward,” she said; “but he is not an ungrateful man. My child, you have returned him good for evil — you have proved how faithfully and how devotedly you love him, by suffering all hardships and risking all dangers for his sake. Trust me, and trust him! He cannot resist you. Let him see the dear face that he has been dreaming of looking at him again with all the old love in it, and he is yours once more, my daughter — yours for life.” She rose and touched my forehead with her lips; her voice sank to tones of tenderness which I had never heard from her yet. “Say yes, Valeria,” she whispered; “and be dearer to me and dearer to him than ever!”