“With all my heart. Mr. Noel Vanstone is coming here this afternoon to dine and spend the evening. He will be tiresome in the last degree; but, like all tiresome people, he is not to be got rid of on any terms. Before he comes, I have a last word or two of caution for your private ear. By this time to-morrow we shall have parted—without any certain knowledge, on either side, of our ever meeting again. I am anxious to serve your interests faithfully to the last; I am anxious you should feel that I have done all I could for your future security when we say good-by.”
Magdalen looked at him in surprise. He spoke in altered tones. He was agitated; he was strangely in earnest. Something in his look and manner took her memory back to the first night at Aldborough, when she had opened her mind to him in the darkening solitude—when they two had sat together alone on the slope of the martello tower. “I have no reason to think otherwise than kindly of you,” she said.
Captain Wragge suddenly left his chair, and took a turn backward and forward in the room. Magdalen’s last words seemed to have produced some extraordinary disturbance in him.
“Damn it!” he broke out; “I can’t let you say that. You have reason to think ill of me. I have cheated you. You never got your fair share of profit from the Entertainment, from first to last. There! now the murder’s out!”
Magdalen smiled, and signed to him to come back to his chair.
“I know you cheated me,” she said, quietly. “You were in the exercise of your profession, Captain Wragge. I expected it when I joined you. I made no complaint at the time, and I make none now. If the money you took is any recompense for all the trouble I have given you, you are heartily welcome to it.”
“Will you shake hands on that?” asked the captain, with an awkwardness and hesitation strongly at variance with his customary ease of manner.
Magdalen gave him her hand. He wrung it hard. “You are a strange girl,” he said, trying to speak lightly. “You have laid a hold on me that I don’t quite understand. I’m half uncomfortable at taking the money from you now; and yet you don’t want it, do you?” He hesitated. “I almost wish,” he said, “I had never met you on the Walls of York.”
“It is too late to wish that, Captain Wragge. Say no more. You only distress me—say no more. We have other subjects to talk about. What were those words of caution which you had for my private ear?”
The captain took another turn in the room, and struggled back again into his every-day character. He produced from his pocketbook Mrs. Lecount’s letter to her master, and handed it to Magdalen.