Man and Wife - Wilkie Collins (phonics books TXT) 📗

sober enough to do his work, and just tipsy enough to take a spiteful pleasure in persecuting his wife. He went out and got the things he wanted, and came back and called for me. A skilled workman like he was (he said) wanted a journeyman under him. There were things which it was beneath a skilled workman to do for himself. He was not going to call in a man or a boy, and then have to pay them. He was going to get it done for nothing, and he meant to make a journeyman of me. Half tipsy and half sober, he went on talking like that, and laying out his things, all quite right, as he wanted them. When they were ready he straightened himself up, and he gave me his orders what I was to do.

“I obeyed him to the best of my ability. Whatever he said, and whatever he did, I knew he was going as straight as man could go to his own death by my hands.

“The rats and mice were all over the house, and the place generally was out of repair. He ought to have begun on the kitchen-floor; but (having sentence pronounced against him) he began in the empty parlors on the ground-floor.

“These parlors were separated by what is called a ‘lath-and-plaster wall.’ The rats had damaged it. At one part they had gnawed through and spoiled the paper, at another part they had not got so far. The landlord’s orders were to spare the paper, because he had some by him to match it. My husband began at a place where the paper was whole. Under his directions I mixed up⁠—I won’t say what. With the help of it he got the paper loose from the wall, without injuring it in any way, in a long hanging strip. Under it was the plaster and the laths, gnawed away in places by the rats. Though strictly a paperhanger by trade, he could be plasterer too when he liked. I saw how he cut away the rotten laths and ripped off the plaster; and (under his directions again) I mixed up the new plaster he wanted, and handed him the new laths, and saw how he set them. I won’t say a word about how this was done either.

“I have a reason for keeping silence here, which is, to my mind, a very dreadful one. In everything that my husband made me do that day he was showing me (blindfold) the way to kill him, so that no living soul, in the police or out of it, could suspect me of the deed.

“We finished the job on the wall just before dark. I went to my cup of tea, and he went to his bottle of gin.

“I left him, drinking hard, to put our two bedrooms tidy for the night. The place that his bed happened to be set in (which I had never remarked particularly before) seemed, in a manner of speaking, to force itself on my notice now.

“The head of the bedstead was set against the wall which divided his room from mine. From looking at the bedstead I got to looking at the wall next. Then to wondering what it was made of. Then to rapping against it with my knuckles. The sound told me there was nothing but lath and plaster under the paper. It was the same as the wall we had been at work on downstairs. We had cleared our way so far through this last⁠—in certain places where the repairs were most needed⁠—that we had to be careful not to burst through the paper in the room on the other side. I found myself calling to mind the caution my husband had given me while we were at this part of the work, word for word as he had spoken it. ‘Take care you don’t find your hands in the next room.’ That was what he had said down in the parlor. Up in his bedroom I kept on repeating it in my own mind⁠—with my eyes all the while on the key, which he had moved to the inner side of the door to lock himself in⁠—till the knowledge of what it meant burst on me like a flash of light. I looked at the wall, at the bedhead, at my own two hands⁠—and I shivered as if it was winter time.

“Hours must have passed like minutes while I was upstairs that night. I lost all count of time. When my husband came up from his drinking, he found me in his room.”

X

“I leave the rest untold, and pass on purposely to the next morning.

“No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines. Still, there are things a woman can’t write of even to herself. I shall only say this. I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s hands⁠—at the very time when I first saw, set plainly before me, the way to take his life. He went out toward noon next day, to go his rounds among the public houses; my mind being then strung up to deliver myself from him, for good and all, when he came back at night.

“The things we had used on the previous day were left in the parlor. I was all by myself in the house, free to put in practice the lesson he had taught me. I proved myself an apt scholar. Before the lamps were lit in the street I had my own way prepared (in my bedroom and in his) for laying my own hands on him⁠—after he had locked himself up for the night.

“I don’t remember feeling either fear or doubt through all those hours. I sat down to my bit of supper with no better and no worse an appetite than usual. The only change in me that I can call to mind was that I felt a singular longing to have somebody