‘Aha!’ said the captain. ‘Now you have hit the right nail on the head at last. You can’t possibly be more surprised at his remembering you than I am. A word of advice, my dear. When you are well enough to get up and see Mr Kirke, try how that sharp question of yours sounds in his ears – and insist on his answering it himself.’ Slipping out of the dilemma in that characteristically adroit manner, Captain Wragge got briskly on his legs again, and took up his hat.
‘Wait!’ she pleaded. ‘I want to ask you –’
‘Not another word,’ said the captain. ‘I have given you quite enough to think of for one day. My time is up, and my gig is waiting for me. I am off, to scour the country as usual. I am off, to cultivate the field of public indigestion with the triple ploughshare of aloes, scammony and gambage.’ He stopped and turned round at the door. ‘By-the-by, a message from my unfortunate wife. If you will allow her to come and see you again, Mrs Wragge solemnly promises not to lose her shoe next time. I don’t believe her. What do you say? May she come?’
‘Yes; whenever she likes,’ said Magdalen. ‘If I ever get well again, may poor Mrs Wragge come and stay with me?’
‘Certainly, my dear. If you have no objection, I will provide her, beforehand, with a few thousand impressions in red, blue and yellow, of her own portrait (“You might have blown this patient away with a feather, before she took the Pill. Look at her now!”) She is sure to drop herself about perpetually wherever she goes, and the most gratifying results, in an advertising point of view, must inevitably follow. Don’t think me mercenary – I merely understand the age I live in.’ He stopped on his way out, for the second time, and turned round once more at the door. ‘You have been a remarkably good girl,’ he said, ‘and you deserve to be rewarded for it. I’ll give you a last piece of information before I go. Have you heard anybody inquiring after you, for the last day or two, outside your door? Ah, I see you have. A word in your ear, my dear. That’s Mr Kirke.’ He tripped away from the bedside, as briskly as ever. Magdalen heard him advertising himself to the nurse, before he closed the door. ‘If you are ever asked about it,’ he said, in a confidential whisper, ‘the name is Wragge, and the Pill is to be had in neat boxes, price thirteenpence half-penny, government stamp included. Take a few copies of the portrait of a female patient, whom you might have blown away with a feather before she took the Pill, and whom you are simply requested to contemplate now. Many thanks. Good morning.’
The door closed, and Magdalen was alone again. She felt no sense of solitude; Captain Wragge had left her with something new to think of. Hour after hour, her mind dwelt wonderingly on Mr Kirke, until the evening came, and she heard his voice again, through the half-opened door.
‘I am very grateful,’ she said to him, before the nurse could answer his inquiries – ‘very, very grateful for all your goodness to me.’
‘Try to get well,’ he replied kindly. ‘You will more than reward me, if you try to get well.’
The next morning, Mr Merrick found her impatient to leave her bed, and be moved to the sofa in the front room. The doctor said he supposed she wanted a change. ‘Yes,’ she replied; ‘I want to see Mr Kirke.’ The doctor consented to move her on the next day, but he positively forbade the additional excitement of seeing anybody, until the day after. She attempted a remonstrance – Mr Merrick was impenetrable. She tried, when he was gone, to win the nurse by persuasion – the nurse was impenetrable too.
On the next day, they wrapped her in shawls, and carried her in to the sofa, and made her a litle bed on it. On the table near at hand, were some flowers and a number of an illustrated newspaper. She immediately asked who had put them there. The nurse (failing to notice a warning look from the doctor) said Mr Kirke had thought that she might like the flowers, and that the pictures in the paper might amuse her. After that reply, her anxiety to see Mr Kirke became too ungovernable to be trifled with. The doctor left the room at once to fetch him.
She looked eagerly at the opening door. Her first glance at him, as he came in, raised a doubt in her mind, whether she now saw that tall figure, and that open sunburnt face, for the first time. But she was too weak and too agitated to follow her recollections as far back as Aldborough. She resigned the attempt, and only looked at him. He stopped at the foot of the sofa, and said a few cheering words. She beckoned to him to come nearer, and offered him her wasted hand. He tenderly took it in his, and sat down by her. They were both silent. His face told her of the sorrow and the sympathy which his silence would fain have concealed. She still held his hand – consciously now – as persistently as she had held it on the day when he found her. Her eyes closed, after a vain effort to speak to him, and the tears rolled slowly over her wan white cheeks.
The doctor signed to Kirke, to wait and give her time. She recovered a little and looked at him: ‘How kind you have been to me!’ she murmured. ‘And how little I have deserved it!’
‘Hush! hush!’ he said. ‘You don’t know what a happiness it was to me to help you.’
The sound of his voice seemed to strengthen her, and to give her courage. She lay looking at him with an eager interest, with a gratitude which artlessly ignored all the conventional restraints that interpose between a woman and a man. ‘Where did you see me,’ she said suddenly, ‘before you found me here?’
Kirke hesitated. Mr Merrick came to his assistance.
‘I forbid you to say a word about the past, to Mr Kirke,’ interposed the doctor; ‘and I forbid Mr Kirke to say a word about it to you. You are beginning a new life to-day – and the only recollections I sanction, are recollections five minutes old.’
She looked at the doctor, and smiled. ‘I must ask him one question,’ she said – and turned back again to Kirke. ‘Is it true that you had only seen me once, before you came to this house?’
‘Quite true!’ He made the reply with a sudden change of colour which she instantly detected. Her brightening eyes looked at him more earnestly than ever, as she put her next question.
‘How came you to remember me, after only seeing me once?’
His hand unconsciously closed on hers, and pressed it for the first time. He attempted to answer, and hesitated at the first word. ‘I have a good memory,’ he said at last – and suddenly looked away from her with a confusion so strangely unlike his customary self-possession of manner, that the doctor and the nurse both noticed it.
Every nerve in her body felt that momentary pressure of his hand, with the exquisite susceptibility, which accompanies the first faltering advance on the way to health. She looked at his changing colour, she listened to his hesitating words, with every sensitive perception of her sex and age, quickened to seize intuitively on the truth. In the moment when he looked away from her, she gently took her hand from him, and turned her head aside on the pillow. ‘Can it be?’ she thought, with a flutter of delicious fear at her heart, with a glow of delicious confusion burning on her cheeks. ‘Can it be?’
The doctor made another sign to Kirke. He understood it, and rose immediately. The momentary discomposure in his face and manner had both disappeared. He was satisfied in his own mind that he had successfully kept his secret, and in the relief of feeling that conviction, he had become himself again.
‘Good-bye; till to-morrow,’ he said, as he left the room.
‘Good-bye,’ she answered, softly, without looking at him.
Mr Merrick took the chair which Kirke had resigned, and laid his hand on her pulse. ‘Just what I feared,’ remarked the doctor: ‘too quick by half.’
She petulantly snatched away her wrist. ‘Don’t!’ she said, shrinking from him. ‘Pray don’t touch me!’
Mr Merrick good-humouredly gave up his place to the nurse. ‘I’ll return in half an hour,’ he whispered; ‘and carry her back to bed. Don’t let her talk. Show her the pictures in the newspaper, and keep her quiet in that way.’
When the doctor returned, the nurse reported that the newspaper had not been wanted. The patient’s conduct had been exemplary.
She had not been at all restless, and she had never spoken a word.
The days passed; and the time grew longer and longer which the doctor allowed her to spend in the front room. She was soon able to dispense with the bed on the sofa – she could be dressed, and could sit up, supported by pillows, in an arm-chair. Her hours of emancipation from the bedroom represented the great daily event of her life. They were the hours she passed in Kirke’s society.
She had a double interest in him now – her interest in the man whose protecting care had saved her reason and her life; her interest in the man whose heart’s dearest and deepest secret she had surprised. Little by little, they grew as easy and familiar with each other as old friends; little by little, she presumed on all her privileges, and wound her way unsuspected into the most intimate knowledge of his nature.
Her questions were endless. Everything that he could tell her of himself and his life, she drew from him delicately and insensibly: he, the least self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in her dexterous hands. She found out his pride in his ship, and practised on it without remorse. She drew him into talking of the fine qualities of the vessel, of the great things the vessel had done in emergencies, as he had never in his life talked yet to any living creature on shore. She found him out in private seafaring anxieties and unutterable seafaring exultations, which he had kept a secret from his own mate. She watched his kindling face with a delicious sense of triumph in adding fuel to the fire; she trapped him into forgetting all considerations of time and place, and striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little lodging-house table, in the fervour of his talk, as if his hand had descended on the solid bulwark of his ship. His confusion at the discovery of his own forgetfulness, secretly delighted her; she could have cried with pleasure, when he penitently wondered what he could possibly have been thinking of.
At other times, she drew him from dwelling on the pleasures of his life, and led him into talking of its perils – the perils of that jealous mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of his existence, which had kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore. Twice he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable, he and all with him had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of a hair’s breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by adroitly tempting him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him into telling her of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories – made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them – fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism – the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed – raised him to a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her, that she became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again, which she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she most rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to women in their intercourse with men. ‘This hand,’ she thought, with an exquisite delight in secretly following the idea while he was close to her – ‘this hand that has rescued the drowning from death – is shifting my pillows so tenderly that I hardly know when they are moved. This hand that has seized men mad with mutiny, and driven them back to their duty by main force – is mixing my lemonade and peeling my fruit, more delicately and more neatly than I could do it for myself. Oh, if I could be a man, how I should like to be such a man as this!’
She never allowed her thoughts, while she was in his presence, to lead her beyond that point. It was only when the night had separated them, that she ventured to let her mind dwell on the self-sacrificing devotion which had so mercifully rescued her. Kirke little knew how she thought of him, in the secrecy of her own chamber, during the quiet hours that elapsed before she sank to sleep. No suspicion crossed his mind of the influence which he was exerting over her – of the new spirit which he was breathing into that new life, so sensitively open to impression in the first freshness of its recovered sense! ‘She has nobody else to amuse her, poor thing,’ he used to think sadly, sitting alone in his small second-floor room. ‘If a rough fellow like me can beguile the weary hours, till her friends come here, she is heartily welcome to all that I can tell her.’
He was out of spirits and restless now, whenever he was by himself. Little by little, he fell into a habit of taking long lonely walks at night, when Magdalen thought he was sleeping upstairs. Once, he went away abruptly in the daytime – on business, as he said. Something had passed between Magdalen and himself the evening before, which had led her into telling him her age. ‘Twenty, last birthday,’ he thought. ‘Take twenty from forty-one. An easy sum in subtraction – as easy a sum as my little nephew could wish for.’ He walked to the Docks, and looked bitterly at the shipping. ‘I mustn’t forget how a ship is made,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long before I am back at the old work again.’ On leaving the Docks, he paid a visit to a brother-sailor – a married man. In the course of conversation, he asked how much older his friend might be than his friend’s wife. There was six years’ difference between them. ‘I suppose that’s difference enough?’ said Kirke. ‘Yes,’ said his friend. ‘Quite enough. Are you looking out for a wife at last? Try a seasoned woman of thirty-five – that’s your mark, Kirke, as near as I can calculate.’
The time passed smoothly and quickly – the present time, in which she was recovering so happily – the present time, which he was beginning to distrust already.
Early one morning, Mr Merrick surprised Kirke, by a visit in his little room on the second floor.
‘I came to the conclusion yesterday,’ said the doctor, entering abruptly on his business, ‘that our patient was strong enough to justify us, at last, in running all risks, and communicating with her friends; and I have accordingly followed the clue which that queer fellow, Captain Wragge, put into our hands. You remember-he advised us to apply to Mr Pendril, the lawyer? I saw Mr Pendril two days ago, and was referred by him – not over-willingly as I thought – to a lady named Miss Garth. I heard enough from her, to satisfy me that we have exercised a wise caution in acting as we have done. It is a very, very sad story – and I am bound to say that I, for one, make great allowances for the poor girl downstairs. Her only relation in the world is her elder sister. I have suggested that the sister shall write to her in the first instance – and then, if the letter does her no harm, follow it personally in a day or two. I have not given the address, by way of preventing any visits from being paid here, without my permission. All I have done is to undertake to forward the letter; and I shall probably find it at my house when I get back. Can you stop at home until I send my man with it? There is not the least hope of my being able to bring it myself. All you need do, is to watch for an opportunity when she is not in the front room, and to put the letter where she can see it when she comes in. The handwriting on the address will break the news, before she opens the letter. Say nothing to her about it – take care that the landlady is within call – and leave her to herself. I know I can trust you to follow my directions; and that is why I ask you to do us this service. You look out of spirits this morning. Natural enough. You’re used to plenty of fresh air, captain, and you’re beginning to pine in this close place.’
‘May I ask a question, doctor? Is she pining in this close place, too? When her sister comes, will her sister take her away?’
‘Decidedly – if my advice is followed. She will be well enough to be moved, in a week or less. Good day. You are certainly out of spirits, and your hand feels feverish. Pining for the blue water, captain – pining for the blue water!’ With that expression of opinion, the doctor cheerfully went out.
In an hour, the letter arrived. Kirke took it from the landlady reluctantly, and almo
st roughly, without looking at it. Having ascertained that Magdalen was still engaged at her toilet, and having explained to the landlady the necessity of remaining within call, he went downstairs immediately, and put the letter on the table in the front room.
Magdalen heard the sound of the familiar step on the floor. ‘I shall soon be ready,’ she called to him through the door.
He made no reply – he took his hat, and went out. After a momentary hesitation, he turned his face eastward, and called on the shipowners who employed him, at their office in Cornhill.
Chapter Three
Magdalen’s first glance round the empty room, showed her the letter on the table. The address, as the doctor had predicted, broke the news the moment she looked at it.
Not a word escaped her. She sat down by the table, pale and silent, with the letter in her lap. Twice she attempted to open it, and twice she put it back again. The bygone time was not alone in her mind, as she looked at her sister’s handwriting – the fear of Kirke was there with it. ‘My past life!’ she thought. ‘What will he think of me, when he knows my past life?’
She made another effort, and broke the seal. A second letter dropped out of the enclosure, addressed to her in a handwriting with which she was not familiar. She put the second letter aside, and read the lines which Norah had written.
‘Ventnor, Isle of Wight, August 24th
‘MyDearest Magdalen,
‘When you read this letter, try to think we have only been parted since yesterday; and dismiss from your mind (as I have dismissed from mine) the past and all that belongs to it.
‘I am strictly forbidden to agitate you, or to weary you by writing a long letter. Is it wrong to tell you that I am the happiest woman living? I hope not, for I can’t keep the secret to myself.
‘My darling, prepare yourself for the greatest surprise I have ever caused you. I am married. It is only a week to-day, since I parted with my old name – it is only a week, since I have been the happy wife of George Bartram, of St Crux.
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