Blind Love

by Wilkie Collins

  "Dear Miss Henley, let me help you to pack up."

  Iris positively refused.

  "No," she said, "I don't agree with Mr. Mountjoy. My father leaves it to me to name the day when we meet. I hold you, my dear, to our engagement—I don't leave an affectionate friend as I might leave a stranger."

  Even if Mr. Mountjoy communicated his discoveries to Miss Henley, on the way home, there would be no danger now of her believing him. Mrs. Vimpany put her powerful arm round the generous Iris, and, with infinite grace, thanked her by a kiss.

  "Your kindness will make my lonely lot in life harder than ever to bear," she murmured, "when you are gone."

  "But we may hope to meet in London," Iris reminded her; "unless Mr. Vimpany alters his mind about leaving this place."

  "My husband will not do that, dear. He is determined to try his luck, as he says, in London. In the meantime you will give me your address, won't you? Perhaps you will even promise to write to me?"

  Iris instantly gave her promise, and wrote down her address in London.

  Mountjoy made no attempt to interfere: it was needless.

  If the maid had not fallen ill on the journey, and if Mrs. Vimpany had followed Miss Henley to London, there would have been little to fear in the discovery of her address—and there was little to fear now. The danger to Iris was not in what might happen while she was living under her father's roof, but in what might happen if she was detained (by plans for excursions) in Mr. Vimpany's house, until Lord Harry might join her there.

  Rather than permit this to happen, Hugh (in sheer desperation) meditated charging Mrs. Vimpany, to her face, with being the Irish lord's spy, and proving the accusation by challenging her to produce the registered letter and the diamond pin.

  While he was still struggling with his own reluctance to inflict this degrading exposure on a woman, the talk between the two ladies came to an end. Mrs. Vimpany returned again to the window. On this occasion, she looked out into the street—with her handkerchief (was it used as a signal?) exhibited in her hand. Iris, on her side, advanced to Mountjoy. Easily moved to anger, her nature was incapable of sullen perseverance in a state of enmity. To see Hugh still patiently waiting—still risking the chances of insult—devoted to her, and forgiving her—was at once a reproach that punished Iris, and a mute appeal that no true woman's heart could resist.

  With tears in her eyes she said to him: "There must be no coolness between you and me. I lost my temper, and spoke shamefully to you. My dear, I am indeed sorry for it. You are never hard on me—you won't be hard on me now?"

  She offered her hand to him. He had just raised it to his lips—when the drawing-room door was roughly opened. They both looked round.

  The man of all others whom Hugh least desired to see was the man who now entered the room. The victim of "light claret"—privately directed to lurk in the street, until he saw a handkerchief fluttering at the window—had returned to the house; primed with his clever wife's instructions; ready and eager to be even with Mountjoy for the dinner at the inn.

  CHAPTER IX

  MR. VIMPANY ON INTOXICATION

  THERE was no unsteadiness in the doctor's walk, and no flush on his face. He certainly did strut when he entered the room; and he held up his head with dignity, when he discovered Mountjoy. But he seemed to preserve his self-control. Was the man sober again already?

  His wife approached him with her set smile; the appearance of her lord and master filled Mrs. Vimpany with perfectly-assumed emotions of agreeable surprise.

  "This is an unexpected pleasure," she said. "You seldom favour us with your company, my dear, so early in the evening! Are there fewer patients in want of your advice than usual?"

  "You are mistaken, Arabella. I am here in the performance of a painful duty."

  The doctor's language, and the doctor's manner, presented him to Iris in a character that was new to her. What effect had he produced on Mrs. Vimpany? That excellent friend to travellers in distress lowered her eyes to the floor, and modestly preserved silence. Mr. Vimpany proceeded to the performance of his duty; his painful responsibility seemed to strike him at first from a medical point of view.

  "If there is a poison which undermines the sources of life," he remarked, "it is alcohol. If there is a vice that degrades humanity, it is intoxication. Mr. Mountjoy, are you aware that I am looking at you?"

  "Impossible not to be aware of that," Hugh answered. "May I ask why you are looking at me?" It was not easy to listen gravely to Mr. Vimpany's denunciation of intemperance, after what had taken place at the dinner of that day. Hugh smiled. The moral majesty of the doctor entered its protest.

  "This is really shameful," he said. "The least you can do is to take it seriously."

  "What is it?" Mountjoy asked. "And why am I to take it seriously?"

  Mr. Vimpany's reply was, to say the least of it, indirect. If such an expression may be permitted, it smelt of the stage. Viewed in connection with Mrs. Vimpany's persistent assumption of silent humility, it suggested to Mountjoy a secret understanding, of some kind, between husband and wife.

  "What has become of your conscience, sir?" Mr. Vimpany demanded. "Is that silent monitor dead within you? After giving me a bad dinner, do you demand an explanation? Ha! you shall have it."

  Having delivered himself to this effect, he added action to words. Walking grandly to the door, he threw it open, and saluted Mountjoy with an ironical bow. Iris observed that act of insolence; her colour rose, her eyes glittered. "Do you see what he has just done?" she said to Mrs. Vimpany.

  The doctor's wife answered softly: "I don't understand it." After a glance at her husband, she took Iris by the hand: "Dear Miss Henley, shall we retire to my room?"

  Iris drew her hand away. "Not unless Mr. Mountjoy wishes it," she said.

  "Certainly not!" Hugh declared. "Pray remain here; your presence will help me to keep my temper." He stepped up to Mr. Vimpany. "Have you any particular reason for opening that door?" he asked.

  The doctor was a rascal; but, to do him justice, he was no coward. "Yes," he said, "I have a reason."

  "What is it, if you please?"

  "Christian forbearance," Mr. Vimpany answered.

  "Forbearance towards me?" Mountjoy continued.

  The doctor's dignity suddenly deserted him.

  "Aha, my boy, you have got it at last!" he cried. "It's pleasant to understand each other, isn't it? You see, I'm a plain-spoken fellow; I don't wish to give offence. If there's one thing more than another I pride myself on, it's my indulgence for human frailty. But, in my position here, I'm obliged to be careful. Upon my soul, I can't continue my acquaintance with a man who—oh, come! come! don't look as if you didn't understand me. The circumstances are against you, sir. You have treated me infamously."

  "Under what circumstances have I treated you infamously?" Hugh asked.

  "Under pretence of giving me a dinner," Mr. Vimpany shouted—"the worst dinner I ever sat down to!"

  His wife signed to him to be silent. He took no notice of her. She insisted on being understood. "Say no more!" she warned him, in a tone of command.

  The brute side of his nature, roused by Mountjoy's contemptuous composure, was forcing its way outwards; he set his wife at defiance.

  "Then don't let him look at me as if he thought I was in a state of intoxication!" cried the furious doctor. "There's the man, Miss, who tried to make me tipsy," he went on, actually addressing himself to Iris. "Thanks to my habits of sobriety, he has been caught in his own trap. He's intoxicated. Ha, friend Mountjoy, have you got the right explanation at last? There's the door, sir!"

  Mrs. Vimpany felt that this outrage was beyond endurance. If something was not done to atone for it, Miss Henley would be capable—her face, at that moment, answered for her—of leaving the house with Mr. Mountjoy. Mrs. Vimpany seized her husband indignantly by the arm.

  "You brute, you have spoilt everything!" she said to him. "Apologise directly to Mr. Mountjoy. You won't?"

&
nbsp; "I won't!"

  Experience had taught his wife how to break him to her will. "Do you remember my diamond pin?" she whispered.

  He looked startled. Perhaps he thought she had lost the pin.

  "Where is it?" he asked eagerly.

  "Gone to London to be valued. Beg Mr. Mountjoy's pardon, or I will put the money in the bank—and not one shilling of it do you get."

  In the meanwhile, Iris had justified Mrs. Vimpany's apprehensions. Her indignation noticed nothing but the insult offered to Hugh. She was too seriously agitated to be able to speak to him. Still admirably calm, his one anxiety was to compose her.

  "Don't be afraid," he said; "it is impossible that I can degrade myself by quarrelling with Mr. Vimpany. I only wait here to know what you propose to do. You have Mrs. Vimpany to think of."

  "I have nobody to think of but You," Iris replied. "But for me, you would never have been in this house. After the insult that has been offered to you—oh, Hugh, I feel it too!—let us return to London together. I have only to tell Rhoda we are going away, and to make my preparations for travelling. Send for me from the inn, and I will be ready in time for the next train."

  Mrs. Vimpany approached Mountjoy, leading her husband.

  "Sorry I have offended you," the doctor said. "Beg your pardon. It's only a joke. No offence, I hope?"

  His servility was less endurable than his insolence. Telling him that he need say no more, Mountjoy bowed to Mrs. Vimpany, and left the room. She returned his bow mechanically, in silence. Mr. Vimpany followed Hugh out—thinking of the diamond pin, and eager to open the house door, as another act of submission which might satisfy his wife.

  Even a clever woman will occasionally make mistakes; especially when her temper happens to have been roused. Mrs. Vimpany found herself in a false position, due entirely to her own imprudence.

  She had been guilty of three serious errors. In the first place she had taken it for granted that Mr. Vimpany's restorative mixture would completely revive the sober state of his brains. In the second place, she had trusted him with her vengeance on the man who had found his way to her secrets through her husband's intemperance. In the third place, she had rashly assumed that the doctor, in carrying out her instructions for insulting Mountjoy, would keep within the limits which she had prescribed to him, when she hit on the audacious idea of attributing his disgraceful conduct to the temptation offered by his host's example. As a consequence of these acts of imprudence, she had exposed herself to a misfortune that she honestly dreaded—the loss of the place which she had carefully maintained in Miss Henley's estimation. In the contradictory confusion of feelings, so often found in women, this deceitful and dangerous creature had been conquered—little by little, as she had herself described it—by that charm of sweetness and simplicity in Iris, of which her own depraved nature presented no trace. She now spoke with hesitation, almost with timidity, in addressing the woman whom she had so cleverly deceived, at the time when they first met.

  "Must I give up all, Miss Henley, that I most value?" she asked.

  "I hardly understand you, Mrs. Vimpany."

  "I will try to make it plainer. Do you really mean to leave me this evening?"

  "I do."

  "May I own that I am grieved to hear it? Your departure will deprive me of some happy hours, in your company."

  "Your husband's conduct leaves me no alternative," Iris replied.

  "Pray do not humiliate me by speaking of my husband! I only want to know if there is a harder trial of my fortitude still to come. Must I lose the privilege of being your friend?"

  "I hope I am not capable of such injustice as that," Iris declared. "It would be hard indeed to lay the blame of Mr. Vimpany's shameful behaviour on you. I don't forget that you made him offer an apology. Some women, married to such a man as that, might have been afraid of him. No, no; you have been a good friend to me—and I mean to remember it."

  Mrs. Vimpany's gratitude was too sincerely felt to be expressed with her customary readiness. She only said what the stupidest woman in existence could have said: "Thank you."

  In the silence that followed, the rapid movement of carriage wheels became audible in the street. The sound stopped at the door of the doctor's house.

  CHAPTER X

  THE MOCKERY OF DECEIT

  HAD Mountjoy arrived to take Iris away, before her preparations for travelling were complete? Both the ladies hurried to the window, but they were too late. The rapid visitor, already hidden from them under the portico, was knocking smartly at the door. In another minute, a man's voice in the hall asked for "Miss Henley." The tones—clear, mellow, and pleasantly varied here and there by the Irish accent—were not to be mistaken by any one who had already hear them. The man in the hall was Lord Harry.

  In that serious emergency, Mrs. Vimpany recovered her presence of mind.

  She made for the door, with the object of speaking to Lord Harry before he could present himself in the drawing-room. But Iris had heard him ask for her in the hall; and that one circumstance instantly stripped of its concealments the character of the woman in whose integrity she had believed. Her first impression of Mrs. Vimpany—so sincerely repented, so eagerly atoned for—had been the right impression after all! Younger, lighter, and quicker than the doctor's wife, Iris reached the door first, and laid her hand on the lock.

  "Wait a minute," she said.

  Mrs. Vimpany hesitated. For the first time in her life at a loss what to say, she could only sign to Iris to stand back. Iris refused to move. She put her terrible question in the plainest words:

  "How does Lord Harry know that I am in this house?"

  The wretched woman (listening intently for the sound of a step on the stairs) refused to submit to a shameful exposure, even now. To her perverted moral sense, any falsehood was acceptable, as a means of hiding herself from discovery by Iris. In the very face of detection, the skilled deceiver kept up the mockery of deceit.

  "My dear," she said, "what has come to you? Why won't you let me go to my room?"

  Iris eyed her with a look of scornful surprise. "What next?" she said. "Are you impudent enough to pretend that I have not found you out, yet?"

  Sheer desperation still sustained Mrs. Vimpany's courage. She played her assumed character against the contemptuous incredulity of Iris, as she had sometimes played her theatrical characters against the hissing and hooting of a brutal audience.

  "Miss Henley," she said, "you forget yourself!"

  "Do you think I didn't see in your face," Iris rejoined, "that you heard him, too? Answer my question."

  "What question?"

  "You have just heard it."

  "No!"

  "You false woman!"

  "Don't forget, Miss Henley, that you are speaking to a lady."

  "I am speaking to Lord Harry's spy!"

  Their voices rose loud; the excitement on either side had reached its climax; neither the one nor the other was composed enough to notice the sound of the carriage-wheels, leaving the house again. In the meanwhile, nobody came to the drawing-room door. Mrs. Vimpany was too well acquainted with the hot-headed Irish lord not to conclude that he would have made himself heard, and would have found his way to Iris, but for some obstacle, below stairs, for which he was not prepared. The doctor's wife did justice to the doctor at last. Another person had, in all probability, heard Lord Harry's voice—and that person might have been her husband.

  Was it possible that he remembered the service which she had asked of him; and, even if he had succeeded in calling it to mind, was his discretion to be trusted? As those questions occurred to her, the desire to obtain some positive information was more than she was able to resist. Mrs. Vimpany attempted to leave the drawing-room for the second time.

  But the same motive had already urged Miss Henley to action. Again, the younger woman outstripped the older. Iris descended the stairs, resolved to discover the cause of the sudden suspension of events in the lower part of the house.

 
CHAPTER XI

  MRS. VIMPANY'S FAREWELL

  THE doctor's wife followed Miss Henley out of the room, as far as the landing—and waited there.

  She had her reasons for placing this restraint on herself. The position of the landing concealed her from the view of a person in the hall. If she only listened for the sound of voices she might safely discover whether Lord Harry was, or was not, still in the house. In the first event, it would be easy to interrupt his interview with Iris, before the talk could lead to disclosures which Mrs. Vimpany had every reason to dread. In the second event, there would be no need to show herself.

  Meanwhile, Iris opened the dining-room door and looked in.

  Nobody was there. The one other room on the ground floor, situated at the back of the building, was the doctor's consulting-room. She knocked at the door. Mr. Vimpany's voice answered: "Come in." There he was alone, drinking brandy and water, and smoking his big black cigar.

  "Where is Lord Harry?" she said.

  "In Ireland, I suppose," Mr. Vimpany answered quietly.

  Iris wasted no time in making useless inquiries. She closed the door again, and left him. He, too, was undoubtedly in the conspiracy to keep her deceived. How had it been done? Where was the wild lord, at that moment?

  Whilst she was pursuing these reflections in the hall, Rhoda came up from the servants' tea-table in the kitchen. Her mistress gave her the necessary instructions for packing, and promised to help her before long. Mrs. Vimpany's audacious resolution to dispute the evidence of her own senses, still dwelt on Miss Henley's mind. Too angry to think of the embarrassment which an interview with Lord Harry would produce, after they had said their farewell words in Ireland, she was determined to prevent the doctor's wife from speaking to him first, and claiming him as an accomplice in her impudent denial of the truth. If he had been, by any chance, deluded into leaving the house, he would sooner or later discover the trick that had been played on him, and would certainly return. Iris took a chair in the hall.