'I mean no offense!' cried Noel Vanstone, piteously. 'Why do you interrupt me, Mr. Bygrave? Why don't you let me explain? I mean no offense.'
'No offense is taken, sir,' said the captain. 'You have a perfect right to the exercise of your own discretion. I am not offended—I only claim for myself the same privilege which I accord to you.' He rose with great dignity and rang the bell. 'Tell Miss Bygrave,' he said to the servant, 'that our walk this morning is put off until another opportunity, and that I won't trouble her to come downstairs.'
This strong proceeding had the desired effect. Noel Vanstone vehemently pleaded for a moment's private conversation before the message was delivered. Captain Wragge's severity partially relaxed. He sent the servant downstairs again, and, resuming his chair, waited confidently for results. In calculating the facilities for practicing on his visitor's weakness, he had one great superiority over Mrs. Lecount. His judgment was not warped by latent female jealousies, and he avoided the error into which the housekeeper had fallen, self-deluded—the error of underrating the impression on Noel Vanstone that Magdalen had produced. One of the forces in this world which no middle-aged woman is capable of estimating at its full value, when it acts against her, is the force of beauty in a woman younger than herself.
'You are so hasty, Mr. Bygrave—you won't give me time—you won't wait and hear what I have to say!' cried Noel Vanstone, piteously, when the servant had closed the parlor door.
'My family failing, sir—the blood of the Bygraves. Accept my excuses. We are alone, as you wished; pray proceed.'
Placed between the alternatives of losing Magdalen's society or betraying Mrs. Lecount, unenlightened by any suspicion of the housekeeper's ultimate object, cowed by the immovable scrutiny of Captain Wragge's inquiring eye, Noel Vanstone was not long in making his choice. He confusedly described his singular interview of the previous evening with Mrs. Lecount, and, taking the folded paper from his pocket, placed it in the captain's hand.
A suspicion of the truth dawned on Captain Wragge's mind the moment he saw the mysterious note. He withdrew to the window before he opened it. The first lines that attracted his attention were these: 'Oblige me, Mr. Noel, by comparing the young lady who is now in your company with the personal description which follows these lines, and which has been communicated to me by a friend. You shall know the name of the person described— which I have left a blank—as soon as the evidence of your own eyes has forced you to believe what you would refuse to credit on the unsupported testimony of Virginie Lecount.'
That was enough for the captain. Before he had read a word of the description itself, he knew what Mrs. Lecount had done, and felt, with a profound sense of humiliation, that his female enemy had taken him by surprise.
There was no time to think; the whole enterprise was threatened with irrevocable overthrow. The one resource in Captain Wragge's present situation was to act instantly on the first impulse of his own audacity. Line by line he read on, and still the ready inventiveness which had never deserted him yet failed to answer the call made on it now. He came to the closing sentence—to the last words which mentioned the two little moles on Magdalen's neck. At that crowning point of the description, an idea crossed his mind; his party-colored eyes twinkled; his curly lips twisted up at the corners; Wragge was himself again. He wheeled round suddenly from the window, and looked Noel Vanstone straight in the face with a grimly-quiet suggestiveness of something serious to come.
'Pray, sir, do you happen to know anything of Mrs. Lecount's family?' he inquired.
'A respectable family,' said Noel Vanstone—'that's all I know. Why do you ask?'
'I am not usually a betting man,' pursued Captain Wragge. 'But on this occasion I will lay you any wager you like there is madness in your housekeeper's family.'
'Madness!' repeated Noel Vanstone, amazedly
'Madness!' reiterated the captain, sternly tapping the note with his forefinger. 'I see the cunning of insanity, the suspicion of insanity, the feline treachery of insanity in every line of this deplorable document. There is a far more alarming reason, sir, than I had supposed for Mrs. Lecount's behavior to my niece. It is clear to me that Miss Bygrave resembles some other lady who has seriously offended your housekeeper—who has been formerly connected, perhaps, with an outbreak of insanity in your housekeeper—and who is now evidently confused with my niece in your housekeeper's wandering mind. That is my conviction, Mr. Vanstone. I may be right, or I may be wrong. All I say is this—neither you, nor any man, can assign a sane motive for the production of that incomprehensible document, and for the use which you are requested to make of it.'
'I don't think Lecount's mad,' said Noel Vanstone, with a very blank look, and a very discomposed manner. 'It couldn't have escaped me, with my habits of observation; it couldn't possibly have escaped me if Lecount had been mad.'
'Very good, my dear sir. In my opinion, she is the subject of an insane delusion. In your opinion, she is in possession of her senses, and has some mysterious motive which neither you nor I can fathom. Either way, there can be no harm in putting Mrs. Lecount's description to the test, not only as a matter of curiosity, but for our own private satisfaction on both sides. It is of course impossible to tell my niece that she is to be made the subject of such a preposterous experiment as that note of yours suggests. But you can use your own eyes, Mr. Vanstone; you can keep your own counsel; and—mad or not—you can at least tell your housekeeper, on the testimony of your own senses, that she is wrong. Let me look at the description again. The greater part of it is not worth two straws for any purpose of identification; hundreds of young ladies have tall figures, fair complexions, light brown hair, and light gray eyes. You will say, on the other hand, hundreds of young ladies have not got two little moles close together on the left side of the neck. Quite true. The moles supply us with what we scientific men call a Crucial Test. When my niece comes downstairs, sir, you have my full permission to take the liberty of looking at her neck.'
Noel Vanstone expressed his high approval of the Crucial Test by smirking and simpering for the first time that morning.
'Of looking at her neck,' repeated the captain, returning the note to his visitor, and then making for the door. 'I will go upstairs myself, Mr. Vanstone,' he continued, 'and inspect Miss Bygrave's walking-dress. If she has innocently placed any obstacles in your way, if her hair is a little too low, or her frill is a little too high, I will exert my authority, on the first harmless pretext I can think of, to have those obstacles removed. All I ask is, that you will choose your opportunity discreetly, and that you will not allow my niece to suppose that her neck is the object of a gentleman's inspection.'
The moment he was out of the parlor Captain Wragge ascended the stairs at the top of his speed and knocked at Magdalen's door. She opened it to him in her walking-dress, obedient to the signal agreed on between them which summoned her downstairs.
'What have you done with your paints and powders?' asked the captain, without wasting a word in preliminary explanations. 'They were not in the box of costumes which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?'
'I have got them here,' replied Magdalen. 'What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?'
