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Armadale

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #1895 · 1,659,816 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Armadale

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: September 1, 1999 [eBook #1895]
                Most recently updated: April 1, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1895

Credits: Produced by James Rusk, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARMADALE ***




ARMADALE

By Wilkie Collins


               TO
               JOHN FORSTER.

In acknowledgment of the services which he has rendered to the cause of
literature by his “Life of Goldsmith;” and in affectionate remembrance
of a friendship which is associated with some of the happiest years of
my life.


Readers in general--on whose friendly reception experience has given me
some reason to rely--will, I venture to hope, appreciate whatever merit
there may be in this story without any prefatory pleading for it on my
part. They will, I think, see that it has not been hastily meditated or
idly wrought out. They will judge it accordingly, and I ask no more.

Readers in particular will, I have some reason to suppose, be here
and there disturbed, perhaps even offended, by finding that “Armadale”
 oversteps, in more than one direction, the narrow limits within which
they are disposed to restrict the development of modern fiction--if they
can.

Nothing that I could say to these persons here would help me with them
as Time will help me if my work lasts. I am not afraid of my design
being permanently misunderstood, provided the execution has done it any
sort of justice. Estimated by the clap-trap morality of the present day,
this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which
is of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the
truth.

LONDON, April, 1866.




ARMADALE.

PROLOGUE.


I. THE TRAVELERS.

It was the opening of the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two, at
the Baths of Wildbad.

The evening shadows were beginning to gather over the quiet little
German town, and the diligence was expected every minute. Before the
door of the principal inn, waiting the arrival of the first visitors
of the year, were assembled the three notable personages of Wildbad,
accompanied by their wives--the mayor, representing the inhabitants;
the doctor, representing the waters; the landlord, representing his own
establishment. Beyond this select circle, grouped snugly about the trim
little square in front of the inn, appeared the towns-people in general,
mixed here and there with the country people, in their quaint German
costume, placidly expectant of the diligence--the men in short black
jackets, tight black breeches, and three-cornered beaver hats; the women
with their long light hair hanging in one thickly plaited tail behind
them, and the waists of their short woolen gowns inserted modestly
in the region of their shoulder-blades. Round the outer edge of the
assemblage thus formed, flying detachments of plump white-headed
children careered in perpetual motion; while, mysteriously apart from
the rest of the inhabitants, the musicians of the Baths stood collected
in one lost corner, waiting the appearance of the first visitors to play
the first tune of the season in the form of a serenade. The light of
a May evening was still bright on the tops of the great wooded hills
watching high over the town on the right hand and the left; and the
cool breeze that comes before sunset came keenly fragrant here with the
balsamic odor of the first of the Black Forest.

“Mr. Landlord,” said the mayor’s wife (giving the landlord his title),
“have you any foreign guests coming on this first day of the season?”

“Madame Mayoress,” replied the landlord (returning the compliment), “I
have two. They have written--the one by the hand of his servant, the
other by his own hand apparently--to order their rooms; and they
are from England, both, as I think by their names. If you ask me to
pronounce those names, my tongue hesitates; if you ask me to spell them,
here they are, letter by letter, first and second in their order as
they come. First, a high-born stranger (by title Mister) who introduces
himself in eight letters, A, r, m, a, d, a, l, e--and comes ill in his
own carriage. Second, a high-born stranger (by title Mister also), who
introduces himself in four letters--N, e, a, l--and comes ill in the
diligence. His excellency of the eight letters writes to me (by his
servant) in French; his excellency of the four letters writes to me in
German. The rooms of both are ready. I know no more.”

“Perhaps,” suggested the mayor’s wife, “Mr. Doctor has heard from one or
both of these illustrious strangers?”

“From one only, Madam Mayoress; but not, strictly speaking, from the
person himself. I have received a medical report of his excellency of
the eight letters, and his case seems a bad one. God help him!”

“The diligence!” cried a child from the outskirts of the crowd.

The musicians seized their instruments, and silence fell on the whole
community. From far away in the windings of the forest gorge, the ring
of horses’ bells came faintly clear through the evening stillness. Which
carriage was approaching--the private carriage with Mr. Armadale, or the
public carriage with Mr. Neal?

“Play, my friends!” cried the mayor to the musicians. “Public or
private, here are the first sick people of the season. Let them find us
cheerful.”

The band played a lively dance tune, and the children in the square
footed it merrily to the music. At the same moment, their elders near
the inn door drew aside, and disclosed the first shadow of gloom that
fell over the gayety and beauty of the scene. Through the opening made
on either hand, a little procession of stout country girls advanced,
each drawing after her an empty chair on wheels; each in waiting (and
knitting while she waited) for the paralyzed wretches who came helpless
by hundreds then--who come helpless by thousands now--to the waters of
Wildbad for relief.

While the band played, while the children danced, while the buzz of many
talkers deepened, while the strong young nurses of the coming cripples
knitted impenetrably, a woman’s insatiable curiosity about other women
asserted itself in the mayor’s wife. She drew the landlady aside, and
whispered a question to her on the spot.

“A word more, ma’am,” said the mayor’s wife, “about the two strangers
from England. Are their letters explicit? Have they got any ladies with
them?”

“The one by the diligence--no,” replied the landlady. “But the one by
the private carriage--yes. He comes with a child; he comes with a nurse;
and,” concluded the landlady, skillfully keeping the main point of
interest till the last, “he comes with a Wife.”

The mayoress brightened; the doctoress (assisting at the conference)
brightened; the landlady nodded significantly. In the minds of all three
the same thought started into life at the same moment--“We shall see the
Fashions!”

In a minute more, there was a sudden movement in the crowd; and a chorus
of voices proclaimed that the travelers were at hand.

By this time the coming vehicle was in sight, and all further doubt was
at an end. It was the diligence that now approached by the long street
leading into the square--the diligence (in a dazzling new coat of yellow
paint) that delivered the first visitors of the season at the inn door.
Of the ten travelers released from the middle compartment and the back
compartment of the carriage--all from various parts of Germany--three
were lifted out helpless, and were placed in the chairs on wheels to be
drawn to their lodgings in the town. The front compartment contained
two passengers only--Mr. Neal and his traveling servant. With an arm
on either side to assist him, the stranger (whose malady appeared to
be locally confined to a lameness in one of his feet) succeeded in
descending the steps of the carriage easily enough. While he steadied
himself on the pavement by the help of his stick--looking not
over-patiently toward the musicians who were serenading him with the
waltz in “Der Freischutz”--his personal appearance rather damped the
enthusiasm of the friendly little circle assembled to welcome him. He
was a lean, tall, serious, middle-aged man, with a cold gray eye and a
long upper lip, with overhanging eyebrows and high cheek-bones; a man
who looked what he was--every inch a Scotchman.

“Where is the proprietor of this hotel?” he asked, speaking in the
German language, with a fluent readiness of expression, and an icy
coldness of manner. “Fetch the doctor,” he continued, when the landlord
had presented himself, “I want to see him immediately.”

“I am here already, sir,” said the doctor, advancing from the circle of
friends, “and my services are entirely at your disposal.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Neal, looking at the doctor, as the rest of us
look at a dog when we have whistled and the dog has come. “I shall be
glad to consult you to-morrow morning, at ten o’clock, about my own
case. I only want to trouble you now with a message which I have
undertaken to deliver. We overtook a traveling carriage on the road here
with a gentleman in it--an Englishman, I believe--who appeared to be
seriously ill. A lady who was with him begged me to see you immediately
on my arrival, and to secure your professional assistance in removing
the patient from the carriage. Their courier has met with an accident,
and has been left behind on the road, and they are obliged to travel
very slowly. If you are here in an hour, you will be here in time to
receive them. That is the message. Who is this gentleman who appears to
be anxious to speak to me? The mayor? If you wish to see my passport,
sir, my servant will show it to you. No? You wish to welcome me to the
place, and to offer your services? I am infinitely flattered. If you
have any authority to shorten the performances of your town band, you
would be doing me a kindness to exert it. My nerves are irritable, and
I dislike music. Where is the landlord? No; I want to see my rooms. I
don’t want your arm; I can get upstairs with the help of my stick. Mr.
Mayor and Mr. Doctor, we need not detain one another any longer. I wish
you good-night.”

Both mayor and doctor looked after the Scotchman as he limped upstairs,
and shook their heads together in mute disapproval of him. The ladies,
as usual, went a step further, and expressed their opinions openly in
the plainest words. The case under consideration (so far as _they_ were
concerned) was the scandalous case of a man who had passed them over
entirely without notice. Mrs. Mayor could only attribute such an outrage
to the native ferocity of a savage. Mrs. Doctor took a stronger view
still, and considered it as proceeding from the inbred brutality of a
hog.

The hour of waiting for the traveling-carriage wore on, and the creeping
night stole up the hillsides softly. One by one the stars appeared, and
the first lights twinkled in the windows of the inn. As the darkness
came, the last idlers deserted the square; as the darkness came,
the mighty silence of the forest above flowed in on the valley, and
strangely and suddenly hushed the lonely little town.

The hour of waiting wore out, and the figure of the doctor, walking
backward and forward anxiously, was still the only living figure left in
the square. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, were counted out
by the doctor’s watch, before the first sound came through the night
silence to warn him of the approaching carriage. Slowly it emerged into
the square, at the walking pace of the horses, and drew up, as a hearse
might have drawn up, at the door of the inn.

“Is the doctor here?” asked a woman’s voice, speaking, out of the
darkness of the carriage, in the French language.

“I am here, madam,” replied the doctor, taking a light from the
landlord’s hand and opening the carriage door.

The first face that the light fell on was the face of the lady who had
just spoken--a young, darkly beautiful woman, with the tears standing
thick and bright in her eager black eyes. The second face revealed was
the face of a shriveled old negress, sitting opposite the lady on the
back seat. The third was the face of a little sleeping child in the
negress’s lap. With a quick gesture of impatience, the lady signed to
the nurse to leave the carriage first with the child. “Pray take them
out of the way,” she said to the landlady; “pray take them to their
room.” She got out herself when her request had been complied with.
Then the light fell clear for the first time on the further side of the
carriage, and the fourth traveler was disclosed to view.

He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his hair, long
and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide open, rolling
to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his face as void of all
expression of the character within him, and the thought within him, as
if he had been dead. There was no looking at him now, and guessing what
he might once have been. The leaden blank of his face met every question
as to his age, his rank, his temper, and his looks which that face might
once have answered, in impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him now
but the shock that had struck him with the death-in-life of paralysis.
The doctor’s eye questioned his lower limbs, and Death-in-Life answered,
_I am here_. The doctor’s eye, rising attentively by way of his hands
and arms, questioned upward and upward to the muscles round his mouth,
and Death-in-Life answered, _I am coming_.

In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was
nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that could be
offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage door.

As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel, his wandering
eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested on her for a moment,
and in that moment he spoke.

“The child?” he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
articulation.

“The child is safe upstairs,” she answered, faintly.

“My desk?”

“It is in my hands. Look! I won’t trust it to anybody; I am taking care
of it for you myself.”

He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said no
more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs, with his
wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously silent) on the other.
The landlord and the servants following saw the door of his room open
and close on him; heard the lady burst out crying hysterically as soon
as she was alone with the doctor and the sick man; saw the doctor come
out, half an hour later, with his ruddy face a shade paler than usual;
pressed him eagerly for information, and received but one answer to all
their inquiries--“Wait till I have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing
to-night.” They all knew the doctor’s ways, and they augured ill when he
left them hurriedly with that reply.

So the two first English visitors of the year came to the Baths of
Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two.




II. THE SOLID SIDE OF THE SCOTCH CHARACTER.

AT ten o’clock the next morning, Mr. Neal--waiting for the medical visit
which he had himself appointed for that hour--looked at his watch, and
discovered, to his amazement, that he was waiting in vain. It was close
on eleven when the door opened at last, and the doctor entered the room.

“I appointed ten o’clock for your visit,” said Mr. Neal. “In my country,
a medical man is a punctual man.”

“In my country,” returned the doctor, without the least ill-humor, “a
medical man is exactly like other men--he is at the mercy of accidents.
Pray grant me your pardon, sir, for being so long after my time; I have
been detained by a very distressing case--the case of Mr. Armadale,
whose traveling-carriage you passed on the road yesterday.”

Mr. Neal looked at his medical attendant with a sour surprise. There
was a latent anxiety in the doctor’s eye, a latent preoccupation in the
doctor’s manner, which he was at a loss to account for. For a moment
the two faces confronted each other silently, in marked national
contrast--the Scotchman’s, long and lean, hard and regular; the
German’s, plump and florid, soft and shapeless. One face looked as if it
had never been young; the other, as if it would never grow old.

“Might I venture to remind you,” said Mr. Neal, “that the case now under
consideration is MY case, and not Mr. Armadale’s?”

“Certainly,” replied the doctor, still vacillating between the case
he had come to see and the case he had just left. “You appear to be
suffering from lameness; let me look at your foot.”

Mr. Neal’s malady, however serious it might be in his own estimation,
was of no extraordinary importance in a medical point of view. He was
suffering from a rheumatic affection of the ankle-joint. The necessary
questions were asked and answered and the necessary baths were
prescribed. In ten minutes the consultation was at an end, and the
patient was waiting in significant silence for the medical adviser to
take his leave.

“I cannot conceal from myself,” said the doctor, rising, and hesitating
a little, “that I am intruding on you. But I am compelled to beg your
indulgence if I return to the subject of Mr. Armadale.”

“May I ask what compels you?”

“The duty which I owe as a Christian,” answered the doctor, “to a dying
man.”

Mr. Neal started. Those who touched his sense of religious duty touched
the quickest sense in his nature.

“You have established your claim on my attention,” he said, gravely. “My
time is yours.”

“I will not abuse your kindness,” replied the doctor, resuming his
chair. “I will be as short as I can. Mr. Armadale’s case is briefly
this: He has passed the greater part of his life in the West Indies--a
wild life, and a vicious life, by his own confession. Shortly after
his marriage--now some three years since--the first symptoms of an
approaching paralytic affection began to show themselves, and his
medical advisers ordered him away to try the climate of Europe. Since
leaving the West Indies he has lived principally in Italy, with no
benefit to his health. From Italy, before the last seizure attacked him,
he removed to Switzerland, and from Switzerland he has been sent to this
place. So much I know from his doctor’s report; the rest I can tell you
from my own personal experience. Mr. Armadale has been sent to Wildbad
too late: he is virtually a dead man. The paralysis is fast spreading
upward, and disease of the lower part of the spine has already taken
place. He can still move his hands a little, but he can hold nothing
in his fingers. He can still articulate, but he may wake speechless
to-morrow or next day. If I give him a week more to live, I give him
what I honestly believe to be the utmost length of his span. At his own
request I told him, as carefully and as tenderly as I could, what I
have just told you. The result was very distressing; the violence of the
patient’s agitation was a violence which I despair of describing to you.
I took the liberty of asking him whether his affairs were unsettled.
Nothing of the sort. His will is in the hands of his executor in London,
and he leaves his wife and child well provided for. My next question
succeeded better; it hit the mark: ‘Have you something on your mind
to do before you die which is not done yet?’ He gave a great gasp of
relief, which said, as no words could have said it, Yes. ‘Can I help
you?’ ‘Yes. I have something to write that I _must_ write; can you make
me hold a pen?’

“He might as well have asked me if I could perform a miracle. I could
only say No. ‘If I dictate the words,’ he went on, ‘can you write what I
tell you to write?’ Once more I could only say No I understand a
little English, but I can neither speak it nor write it. Mr. Armadale
understands French when it is spoken (as I speak it to him) slowly, but
he cannot express himself in that language; and of German he is totally
ignorant. In this difficulty, I said, what any one else in my situation
would have said: ‘Why ask _me_? there is Mrs. Armadale at your service
in the next room.’ Before I could get up from my chair to fetch her,
he stopped me--not by words, but by a look of horror which fixed me, by
main force of astonishment, in my place. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘your wife
is the fittest person to write for you as you desire?’ ‘The last person
under heaven!’ he answered. ‘What!’ I said, ‘you ask me, a foreigner
and a stranger, to write words at your dictation which you keep a secret
from your wife!’ Conceive my astonishment when he answered me, without
a moment’s hesitation, ‘Yes!’ I sat lost; I sat silent. ‘If _you_
can’t write English,’ he said, ‘find somebody who can.’ I tried to
remonstrate. He burst into a dreadful moaning cry--a dumb entreaty, like
the entreaty of a dog. ‘Hush! hush!’ I said, ‘I will find somebody.’
‘To-day!’ he broke out, ‘before my speech fails me, like my hand.’
‘To-day, in an hour’s time.’ He shut his eyes; he quieted himself
instantly. ‘While I am waiting for you,’ he said, ‘let me see my little
boy.’ He had shown no tenderness when he spoke of his wife, but I saw
the tears on his cheeks when he asked for his child. My profession, sir,
has not made me so hard a man as you might think; and my doctor’s heart
was as heavy, when I went out to fetch the child, as if I had not been a
doctor at all. I am afraid you think this rather weak on my part?”

The doctor looked appealingly at Mr. Neal. He might as well have looked
at a rock in the Black Forest. Mr. Neal entirely declined to be drawn by
any doctor in Christendom out of the regions of plain fact.

“Go on,” he said. “I presume you have not told me all that you have to
tell me, yet?”

“Surely you understand my object in coming here, now?” returned the
other.

“Your object is plain enough, at last. You invite me to connect myself
blindfold with a matter which is in the last degree suspicious, so far.
I decline giving you any answer until I know more than I know now. Did
you think it necessary to inform this man’s wife of what had passed
between you, and to ask her for an explanation?”

“Of course I thought it necessary!” said the doctor, indignant at the
reflection on his humanity which the question seemed to imply. “If ever
I saw a woman fond of her husband, and sorry for her husband, it is this
unhappy Mrs. Armadale. As soon as we were left alone together, I sat
down by her side, and I took her hand in mine. Why not? I am an ugly old
man, and I may allow myself such liberties as these!”

“Excuse me,” said the impenetrable Scotchman. “I beg to suggest that you
are losing the thread of the narrative.”

“Nothing more likely,” returned the doctor, recovering his good humor.
“It is in the habit of my nation to be perpetually losing the thread;
and it is evidently in the habit of yours, sir, to be perpetually
finding it. What an example here of the order of the universe, and the
everlasting fitness of things!”

“Will you oblige me, once for all, by confining yourself to the facts,”
 persisted Mr. Neal, frowning impatiently. “May I inquire, for my own
information, whether Mrs. Armadale could tell you what it is her husband
wishes me to write, and why it is that he refuses to let her write for
him?”

“There is my thread found--and thank you for finding it!” said the
doctor. “You shall hear what Mrs. Armadale had to tell me, in
Mrs. Armadale’s own words. ‘The cause that now shuts me out of his
confidence,’ she said, ‘is, I firmly believe, the same cause that has
always shut me out of his heart. I am the wife he has wedded, but I am
not the woman he loves. I knew when he married me that another man had
won from him the woman he loved. I thought I could make him forget her.
I hoped when I married him; I hoped again when I bore him a son. Need
I tell you the end of my hopes--you have seen it for yourself.’ (Wait,
sir, I entreat you! I have not lost the thread again; I am following it
inch by inch.) ‘Is this all you know?’ I asked. ‘All I knew,’ she said,
‘till a short time since. It was when we were in Switzerland, and when
his illness was nearly at its worst, that news came to him by accident
of that other woman who has been the shadow and the poison of my
life--news that she (like me) had borne her husband a son. On the
instant of his making that discovery--a trifling discovery, if ever
there was one yet--a mortal fear seized on him: not for me, not for
himself; a fear for his own child. The same day (without a word to me)
he sent for the doctor. I was mean, wicked, what you please--I listened
at the door. I heard him say: _I have something to tell my son, when
my son grows old enough to understand me. Shall I live to tell it_? The
doctor would say nothing certain. The same night (still without a word
to me) he locked himself into his room. What would any woman, treated
as I was, have done in my place? She would have done as I did--she would
have listened again. I heard him say to himself: _I shall not live to
tell it: I must write it before I die_. I heard his pen scrape, scrape,
scrape over the paper; I heard him groaning and sobbing as he wrote;
I implored him for God’s sake to let me in. The cruel pen went scrape,
scrape, scrape; the cruel pen was all the answer he gave me. I waited
at the door--hours--I don’t know how long. On a sudden, the pen stopped;
and I heard no more. I whispered through the keyhole softly; I said I
was cold and weary with waiting; I said, Oh, my love, let me in! Not
even the cruel pen answered me now: silence answered me. With all the
strength of my miserable hands I beat at the door. The servants came up
and broke it in. We were too late; the harm was done. Over that fatal
letter, the stroke had struck him--over that fatal letter, we found him
paralyzed as you see him now. Those words which he wants you to write
are the words he would have written himself if the stroke had spared him
till the morning. From that time to this there has been a blank place
left in the letter; and it is that blank place which he has just asked
you to fill up.’--In those words Mrs. Armadale spoke to me; in those
words you have the sum and substance of all the information I can give.
Say, if you please, sir, have I kept the thread at last? Have I
shown you the necessity which brings me here from your countryman’s
death-bed?”

“Thus far,” said Mr. Neal, “you merely show me that you are exciting
yourself. This is too serious a matter to be treated as you are treating
it now. You have involved me in the business, and I insist on seeing my
way plainly. Don’t raise your hands; your hands are not a part of the
question. If I am to be concerned in the completion of this mysterious
letter, it is only an act of justifiable prudence on my part to inquire
what the letter is about. Mrs. Armadale appears to have favored you with
an infinite number of domestic particulars--in return, I presume, for
your polite attention in taking her by the hand. May I ask what she
could tell you about her husband’s letter, so far as her husband has
written it?”

“Mrs. Armadale could tell me nothing,” replied the doctor, with a sudden
formality in his manner, which showed that his forbearance was at last
failing him. “Before she was composed enough to think of the letter, her
husband had asked for it, and had caused it to be locked up in his desk.
She knows that he has since, time after time, tried to finish it, and
that, time after time, the pen has dropped from his fingers. She knows,
when all other hope of his restoration was at an end, that his medical
advisers encouraged him to hope in the famous waters of this place. And
last, she knows how that hope has ended; for she knows what I told her
husband this morning.”

The frown which had been gathering latterly on Mr. Neal’s face deepened
and darkened. He looked at the doctor as if the doctor had personally
offended him.

“The more I think of the position you are asking me to take,” he said,
“the less I like it. Can you undertake to say positively that Mr.
Armadale is in his right mind?”

“Yes; as positively as words can say it.”

“Does his wife sanction your coming here to request my interference?”

“His wife sends me to you--the only Englishman in Wildbad--to write for
your dying countryman what he cannot write for himself; and what no one
else in this place but you can write for him.”

That answer drove Mr. Neal back to the last inch of ground left him to
stand on. Even on that inch the Scotchman resisted still.

“Wait a little!” he said. “You put it strongly; let us be quite sure you
put it correctly as well. Let us be quite sure there is nobody to take
this responsibility but myself. There is a mayor in Wildbad, to
begin with--a man who possesses an official character to justify his
interference.”

“A man of a thousand,” said the doctor. “With one fault--he knows no
language but his own.”

“There is an English legation at Stuttgart,” persisted Mr. Neal.

“And there are miles on miles of the forest between this and Stuttgart,”
 rejoined the doctor. “If we sent this moment, we could get no help from
the legation before to-morrow; and it is as likely as not, in the
state of this dying man’s articulation, that to-morrow may find him
speechless. I don’t know whether his last wishes are wishes harmless to
his child and to others, wishes hurtful to his child and to others; but
I _do_ know that they must be fulfilled at once or never, and that you
are the only man that can help him.”

That open declaration brought the discussion to a close. It fixed Mr.
Neal fast between the two alternatives of saying Yes, and committing an
act of imprudence, or of saying No, and committing an act of inhumanity.
There was a silence of some minutes. The Scotchman steadily reflected;
and the German steadily watched him.

The responsibility of saying the next words rested on Mr. Neal, and in
course of time Mr. Neal took it. He rose from his chair with a sullen
sense of injury lowering on his heavy eyebrows, and working sourly in
the lines at the corners of his mouth.

“My position is forced on me,” he said. “I have no choice but to accept
it.”

The doctor’s impulsive nature rose in revolt against the merciless
brevity and gracelessness of that reply. “I wish to God,” he broke out
fervently, “I knew English enough to take your place at Mr. Armadale’s
bedside!”

“Bating your taking the name of the Almighty in vain,” answered the
Scotchman, “I entirely agree with you. I wish you did.”

Without another word on either side, they left the room together--the
doctor leading the way.




III. THE WRECK OF THE TIMBER SHIP.

NO one answered the doctor’s knock when he and his companion reached the
antechamber door of Mr. Armadale’s apartments. They entered unannounced;
and when they looked into the sitting-room, the sitting-room was empty.

“I must see Mrs. Armadale,” said Mr. Neal. “I decline acting in the
matter unless Mrs. Armadale authorizes my interference with her own
lips.”

“Mrs. Armadale is probably with her husband,” replied the doctor.
He approached a door at the inner end of the sitting-room while he
spoke--hesitated--and, turning round again, looked at his sour companion
anxiously. “I am afraid I spoke a little harshly, sir, when we were
leaving your room,” he said. “I beg your pardon for it, with all my
heart. Before this poor afflicted lady comes in, will you--will you
excuse my asking your utmost gentleness and consideration for her?”

“No, sir,” retorted the other harshly; “I won’t excuse you. What right
have I given you to think me wanting in gentleness and consideration
toward anybody?”

The doctor saw it was useless. “I beg your pardon again,” he said,
resignedly, and left the unapproachable stranger to himself.

Mr. Neal walked to the window, and stood there, with his eyes
mechanically fixed on the prospect, composing his mind for the coming
interview.

It was midday; the sun shone bright and warm; and all the little world
of Wildbad was alive and merry in the genial springtime. Now and again
heavy wagons, with black-faced carters in charge, rolled by the window,
bearing their precious lading of charcoal from the forest. Now and
again, hurled over the headlong current of the stream that runs
through the town, great lengths of timber, loosely strung together in
interminable series--with the booted raftsmen, pole in hand, poised
watchful at either end--shot swift and serpent-like past the houses
on their course to the distant Rhine. High and steep above the gabled
wooden buildings on the river-bank, the great hillsides, crested black
with firs, shone to the shining heavens in a glory of lustrous green.
In and out, where the forest foot-paths wound from the grass through the
trees, from the trees over the grass, the bright spring dresses of women
and children, on the search for wild flowers, traveled to and fro in
the lofty distance like spots of moving light. Below, on the walk by the
stream side, the booths of the little bazar that had opened punctually
with the opening season showed all their glittering trinkets, and
fluttered in the balmy air their splendor of many-colored flags.
Longingly, here the children looked at the show; patiently the sunburned
lasses plied their knitting as they paced the walk; courteously the
passing townspeople, by fours and fives, and the passing visitors, by
ones and twos, greeted each other, hat in hand; and slowly, slowly,
the cripple and the helpless in their chairs on wheels came out in the
cheerful noontide with the rest, and took their share of the blessed
light that cheers, of the blessed sun that shines for all.

On this scene the Scotchman looked, with eyes that never noted its
beauty, with a mind far away from every lesson that it taught. One by
one he meditated the words he should say when the wife came in. One by
one he pondered over the conditions he might impose before he took the
pen in hand at the husband’s bedside.

“Mrs. Armadale is here,” said the doctor’s voice, interposing suddenly
between his reflections and himself.

He turned on the instant, and saw before him, with the pure midday light
shining full on her, a woman of the mixed blood of the European and the
African race, with the Northern delicacy in the shape of her face, and
the Southern richness in its color--a woman in the prime of her beauty,
who moved with an inbred grace, who looked with an inbred fascination,
whose large, languid black eyes rested on him gratefully, whose little
dusky hand offered itself to him in mute expression of her thanks, with
the welcome that is given to the coming of a friend. For the first time
in his life the Scotchman was taken by surprise. Every self-preservative
word that he had been meditating but an instant since dropped out of his
memory. His thrice impenetrable armor of habitual suspicion, habitual
self-discipline, and habitual reserve, which had never fallen from him
in a woman’s presence before, fell from him in this woman’s presence,
and brought him to his knees, a conquered man. He took the hand she
offered him, and bowed over it his first honest homage to the sex, in
silence.

She hesitated on her side. The quick feminine perception which,
in happier circumstances, would have pounced on the secret of his
embarrassment in an instant, failed her now. She attributed his
strange reception of her to pride, to reluctance--to any cause but the
unexpected revelation of her own beauty. “I have no words to thank you,”
 she said, faintly, trying to propitiate him. “I should only distress you
if I tried to speak.” Her lip began to tremble, she drew back a little,
and turned away her head in silence.

The doctor, who had been standing apart, quietly observant in a corner,
advanced before Mr. Neal could interfere, and led Mrs. Armadale to a
chair. “Don’t be afraid of him,” whispered the good man, patting her
gently on the shoulder. “He was hard as iron in my hands, but I think,
by the look of him, he will be soft as wax in yours. Say the words I
told you to say, and let us take him to your husband’s room, before
those sharp wits of his have time to recover themselves.”

She roused her sinking resolution, and advanced half-way to the window
to meet Mr. Neal. “My kind friend, the doctor, has told me, sir, that
your only hesitation in coming here is a hesitation on my account,” she
said, her head drooping a little, and her rich color fading away while
she spoke. “I am deeply grateful, but I entreat you not to think
of _me_. What my husband wishes--” Her voice faltered; she waited
resolutely, and recovered herself. “What my husband wishes in his last
moments, I wish too.”

This time Mr. Neal was composed enough to answer her. In low, earnest
tones, he entreated her to say no more. “I was only anxious to show you
every consideration,” he said. “I am only anxious now to spare you every
distress.” As he spoke, something like a glow of color rose slowly on
his sallow face. Her eyes were looking at him, softly attentive; and he
thought guiltily of his meditations at the window before she came in.

The doctor saw his opportunity. He opened the door that led into Mr.
Armadale’s room, and stood by it, waiting silently. Mrs. Armadale
entered first. In a minute more the door was closed again; and Mr.
Neal stood committed to the responsibility that had been forced on
him--committed beyond recall.

The room was decorated in the gaudy continental fashion, and the warm
sunlight was shining in joyously. Cupids and flowers were painted on
the ceiling; bright ribbons looped up the white window-curtains; a smart
gilt clock ticked on a velvet-covered mantelpiece; mirrors gleamed on
the walls, and flowers in all the colors of the rainbow speckled the
carpet. In the midst of the finery, and the glitter, and the light,
lay the paralyzed man, with his wandering eyes, and his lifeless lower
face--his head propped high with many pillows; his helpless hands laid
out over the bed-clothes like the hands of a corpse. By the bed head
stood, grim, and old, and silent, the shriveled black nurse; and on the
counter-pane, between his father’s outspread hands, lay the child, in
his little white frock, absorbed in the enjoyment of a new toy. When the
door opened, and Mrs. Armadale led the way in, the boy was tossing
his plaything--a soldier on horseback--backward and forward over the
helpless hands on either side of him; and the father’s wandering
eyes were following the toy to and fro, with a stealthy and ceaseless
vigilance--a vigilance as of a wild animal, terrible to see.

The moment Mr. Neal appeared in the doorway, those restless eyes
stopped, looked up, and fastened on the stranger with a fierce eagerness
of inquiry. Slowly the motionless lips struggled into movement. With
thick, hesitating articulation, they put the question which the eyes
asked mutely, into words: “Are you the man?”

Mr. Neal advanced to the bedside, Mrs. Armadale drawing back from it
as he approached, and waiting with the doctor at the further end of
the room. The child looked up, toy in hand, as the stranger came near,
opened his bright brown eyes in momentary astonishment, and then went on
with his game.

“I have been made acquainted with your sad situation, sir,” said
Mr. Neal; “and I have come here to place my services at your
disposal--services which no one but myself, as your medical attendant
informs me, is in a position to render you in this strange place.
My name is Neal. I am a writer to the signet in Edinburgh; and I may
presume to say for myself that any confidence you wish to place in me
will be confidence not improperly bestowed.”

The eyes of the beautiful wife were not confusing him now. He spoke
to the helpless husband quietly and seriously, without his customary
harshness, and with a grave compassion in his manner which presented him
at his best. The sight of the death-bed had steadied him.

“You wish me to write something for you?” he resumed, after waiting for
a reply, and waiting in vain.

“Yes!” said the dying man, with the all-mastering impatience which his
tongue was powerless to express, glittering angrily in his eye. “My hand
is gone, and my speech is going. Write!”

Before there was time to speak again, Mr. Neal heard the rustling of a
woman’s dress, and the quick creaking of casters on the carpet behind
him. Mrs. Armadale was moving the writing-table across the room to
the foot of the bed. If he was to set up those safeguards of his own
devising that were to bear him harmless through all results to come, now
was the time, or never. He, kept his back turned on Mrs. Armadale, and
put his precautionary question at once in the plainest terms.

“May I ask, sir, before I take the pen in hand, what it is you wish me
to write?”

The angry eyes of the paralyzed man glittered brighter and brighter. His
lips opened and closed again. He made no reply.

Mr. Neal tried another precautionary question, in a new direction.

“When I have written what you wish me to write,” he asked, “what is to
be done with it?”

This time the answer came:

“Seal it up in my presence, and post it to my ex--”

His laboring articulation suddenly stopped and he looked piteously in
the questioner’s face for the next word.

“Do you mean your executor?”

“Yes.”

“It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?” There was no answer.
“May I ask if it is a letter altering your will?”

“Nothing of the sort.”

Mr. Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one way
out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that strange story
of the unfinished letter which the doctor had repeated to him in Mrs.
Armadale’s words. The nearer he approached his unknown responsibility,
the more ominous it seemed of something serious to come. Should he risk
another question before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt
crossed his mind, he felt Mrs. Armadale’s silk dress touch him on the
side furthest from her husband. Her delicate dark hand was laid gently
on his arm; her full deep African eyes looked at him in submissive
entreaty. “My husband is very anxious,” she whispered. “Will you quiet
his anxiety, sir, by taking your place at the writing-table?”

It was from _her_ lips that the request came--from the lips of the
person who had the best right to hesitate, the wife who was excluded
from the secret! Most men in Mr. Neal’s position would have given up all
their safeguards on the spot. The Scotchman gave them all up but one.

“I will write what you wish me to write,” he said, addressing Mr.
Armadale. “I will seal it in your presence; and I will post it to your
executor myself. But, in engaging to do this, I must beg you to remember
that I am acting entirely in the dark; and I must ask you to excuse
me, if I reserve my own entire freedom of action, when your wishes
in relation to the writing and the posting of the letter have been
fulfilled.”

“Do you give me your promise?”

“If you want my promise, sir, I will give it--subject to the condition I
have just named.”

“Take your condition, and keep your promise. My desk,” he added, looking
at his wife for the first time.

She crossed the room eagerly to fetch the desk from a chair in a corner.
Returning with it, she made a passing sign to the negress, who still
stood, grim and silent, in the place that she had occupied from the
first. The woman advanced, obedient to the sign, to take the child from
the bed. At the instant when she touched him, the father’s eyes--fixed
previously on the desk--turned on her with the stealthy quickness of
a cat. “No!” he said. “No!” echoed the fresh voice of the boy, still
charmed with his plaything, and still liking his place on the bed. The
negress left the room, and the child, in high triumph, trotted his toy
soldier up and down on the bedclothes that lay rumpled over his father’s
breast. His mother’s lovely face contracted with a pang of jealousy as
she looked at him.

“Shall I open your desk?” she asked, pushing back the child’s plaything
sharply while she spoke. An answering look from her husband guided her
hand to the place under his pillow where the key was hidden. She opened
the desk, and disclosed inside some small sheets of manuscript pinned
together. “These?” she inquired, producing them.

“Yes,” he said. “You can go now.”

The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring a
stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an anxiety in
both their faces which they could neither of them control. The words
that banished the wife from the room were spoken. The moment had come.

“You can go now,” said Mr. Armadale, for the second time.

She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and an ashy
paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the fatal
letter which was a sealed secret to her, and a torture of jealous
suspicion--suspicion of that other woman who had been the shadow and
the poison of her life--wrung her to the heart. After moving a few
steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back again. Armed with the
double courage of her love and her despair, she pressed her lips on
her dying husband’s cheek, and pleaded with him for the last time. Her
burning tears dropped on his face as she whispered to him: “Oh, Allan,
think how I have loved you! think how hard I have tried to make you
happy! think how soon I shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don’t, don’t
send me away!”

The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the recollection
of the love that had been given to him, and never returned, touched the
heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing had touched it since the day
of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke from him. He looked at her, and
hesitated.

“Let me stay,” she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.

“It will only distress you,” he whispered back.

“Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from _you_!”

He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.

“If I let you stay a little--?”

“Yes! yes!”

“Will you go when I tell you?”

“I will.”

“On your oath?”

The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for a moment in
the great outburst of anxiety which forced that question to his lips. He
spoke those startling words as he had spoken no words yet.

“On my oath!” she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the bedside,
passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the room turned their
heads away by common consent. In the silence that followed, the one
sound stirring was the small sound of the child’s toy, as he moved it
hither and thither on the bed.

The doctor was the first who broke the spell of stillness which had
fallen on all the persons present. He approached the patient, and
examined him anxiously. Mrs. Armadale rose from her knees; and, first
waiting for her husband’s permission, carried the sheets of manuscript
which she had taken out of the desk to the table at which Mr. Neal was
waiting. Flushed and eager, more beautiful than ever in the vehement
agitation which still possessed her, she stooped over him as she put
the letter into his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a
woman’s headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to
him, “Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!” Her
eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on his cheek.
Before he could answer, before he could think, she was back with her
husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that instant her beauty
had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning in reluctant acknowledgment
of his own inability to resist her, he turned over the leaves of the
letter; looked at the blank place where the pen had dropped from the
writer’s hand and had left a blot on the paper; turned back again to the
beginning, and said the words, in the wife’s interest, which the wife
herself had put into his lips.

“Perhaps, sir, you may wish to make some corrections,” he began, with
all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with every outward
appearance of letting his sour temper again get the better of him.
“Shall I read over to you what you have already written?”

Mrs. Armadale, sitting at the bed head on one side, and the doctor, with
his fingers on the patient’s pulse, sitting on the other, waited with
widely different anxieties for the answer to Mr. Neal’s question. Mr.
Armadale’s eyes turned searchingly from his child to his wife.

“You _will_ hear it?” he said. Her breath came and went quickly; her
hand stole up and took his; she bowed her head in silence. Her husband
paused, taking secret counsel with his thoughts, and keeping his eyes
fixed on his wife. At last he decided, and gave the answer. “Read it,”
 he said, “and stop when I tell you.”

It was close on one o’clock, and the bell was ringing which summoned the
visitors to their early dinner at the inn. The quick beat of footsteps,
and the gathering hum of voices outside, penetrated gayly into the room,
as Mr. Neal spread the manuscript before him on the table, and read the
opening sentences in these words:


“I address this letter to my son, when my son is of an age to understand
it. Having lost all hope of living to see my boy grow up to manhood, I
have no choice but to write here what I would fain have said to him at a
future time with my own lips.

“I have three objects in writing. First, to reveal the circumstances
which attended the marriage of an English lady of my acquaintance, in
the island of Madeira. Secondly, to throw the true light on the death of
her husband a short time afterward, on board the French timber ship _La
Grace de Dieu_. Thirdly, to warn my son of a danger that lies in wait
for him--a danger that will rise from his father’s grave when the earth
has closed over his father’s ashes.

“The story of the English lady’s marriage begins with my inheriting the
great Armadale property, and my taking the fatal Armadale name.

“I am the only surviving son of the late Mathew Wrentmore, of Barbadoes.
I was born on our family estate in that island, and I lost my father
when I was still a child. My mother was blindly fond of me; she denied
me nothing, she let me live as I pleased. My boyhood and youth were
passed in idleness and self-indulgence, among people--slaves and
half-castes mostly--to whom my will was law. I doubt if there is a
gentleman of my birth and station in all England as ignorant as I am at
this moment. I doubt if there was ever a young man in this world whose
passions were left so entirely without control of any kind as mine were
in those early days.

“My mother had a woman’s romantic objection to my father’s homely
Christian name. I was christened Allan, after the name of a wealthy
cousin of my father’s--the late Allan Armadale--who possessed estates in
our neighborhood, the largest and most productive in the island, and who
consented to be my godfather by proxy. Mr. Armadale had never seen his
West Indian property. He lived in England; and, after sending me the
customary godfather’s present, he held no further communication with my
parents for years afterward. I was just twenty-one before we heard again
from Mr. Armadale. On that occasion my mother received a letter from
him asking if I was still alive, and offering no less (if I was) than to
make me the heir to his West Indian property.

“This piece of good fortune fell to me entirely through the misconduct
of Mr. Armadale’s son, an only child. The young man had disgraced
himself beyond all redemption; had left his home an outlaw; and had been
thereupon renounced by his father at once and forever. Having no other
near male relative to succeed him, Mr. Armadale thought of his cousin’s
son and his own godson; and he offered the West Indian estate to me, and
my heirs after me, on one condition--that I and my heirs should take
his name. The proposal was gratefully accepted, and the proper legal
measures were adopted for changing my name in the colony and in the
mother country. By the next mail information reached Mr. Armadale that
his condition had been complied with. The return mail brought news
from the lawyers. The will had been altered in my favor, and in a week
afterward the death of my benefactor had made me the largest proprietor
and the richest man in Barbadoes.

“This was the first event in the chain. The second event followed it six
weeks afterward.

“At that time there happened to be a vacancy in the clerk’s office on
the estate, and there came to fill it a young man about my own age who
had recently arrived in the island. He announced himself by the name of
Fergus Ingleby. My impulses governed me in everything; I knew no law but
the law of my own caprice, and I took a fancy to the stranger the moment
I set eyes on him. He had the manners of a gentleman, and he possessed
the most attractive social qualities which, in my small experience, I
had ever met with. When I heard that the written references to character
which he had brought with him were pronounced to be unsatisfactory, I
interfered, and insisted that he should have the place. My will was law,
and he had it.

“My mother disliked and distrusted Ingleby from the first. When she
found the intimacy between us rapidly ripening; when she found me
admitting this inferior to the closest companionship and confidence
(I had lived with my inferiors all my life, and I liked it), she made
effort after effort to part us, and failed in one and all. Driven to her
last resources, she resolved to try the one chance left--the chance of
persuading me to take a voyage which I had often thought of--a voyage to
England.

“Before she spoke to me on the subject, she resolved to interest me
in the idea of seeing England, as I had never been interested yet. She
wrote to an old friend and an old admirer of hers, the late Stephen
Blanchard, of Thorpe Ambrose, in Norfolk--a gentleman of landed estate,
and a widower with a grown-up family. After-discoveries informed me that
she must have alluded to their former attachment (which was checked,
I believe, by the parents on either side); and that, in asking Mr.
Blanchard’s welcome for her son when he came to England, she made
inquiries about his daughter, which hinted at the chance of a marriage
uniting the two families, if the young lady and I met and liked one
another. We were equally matched in every respect, and my mother’s
recollection of her girlish attachment to Mr. Blanchard made the
prospect of my marrying her old admirer’s daughter the brightest and
happiest prospect that her eyes could see. Of all this I knew nothing
until Mr. Blanchard’s answer arrived at Barbadoes. Then my mother showed
me the letter, and put the temptation which was to separate me from
Fergus Ingleby openly in my way.

“Mr. Blanchard’s letter was dated from the Island of Madeira. He was
out of health, and he had been ordered there by the doctors to try the
climate. His daughter was with him. After heartily reciprocating all my
mother’s hopes and wishes, he proposed (if I intended leaving Barbadoes
shortly) that I should take Madeira on my way to England, and pay him a
visit at his temporary residence in the island. If this could not be,
he mentioned the time at which he expected to be back in England, when
I might be sure of finding a welcome at his own house of Thorpe
Ambrose. In conclusion, he apologized for not writing at greater length;
explaining that his sight was affected, and that he had disobeyed the
doctor’s orders by yielding to the temptation of writing to his old
friend with his own hand.

“Kindly as it was expressed, the letter itself might have had little
influence on me. But there was something else besides the letter; there
was inclosed in it a miniature portrait of Miss Blanchard. At the back
of the portrait, her father had written, half-jestingly, half-tenderly,
‘I can’t ask my daughter to spare my eyes as usual, without telling her
of your inquiries, and putting a young lady’s diffidence to the blush.
So I send her in effigy (without her knowledge) to answer for herself.
It is a good likeness of a good girl. If she likes your son--and if I
like him, which I am sure I shall--we may yet live, my good friend, to
see our children what we might once have been ourselves--man and wife.’
My mother gave me the miniature with the letter. The portrait at once
struck me--I can’t say why, I can’t say how--as nothing of the kind had
ever struck me before.

“Harder intellects than mine might have attributed the extraordinary
impression produced on me to the disordered condition of my mind at that
time; to the weariness of my own base pleasures which had been gaining
on me for months past, to the undefined longing which that weariness
implied for newer interests and fresher hopes than any that had
possessed me yet. I attempted no such sober self-examination as this: I
believed in destiny then, I believe in destiny now. It was enough for
me to know--as I did know--that the first sense I had ever felt of
something better in my nature than my animal self was roused by that
girl’s face looking at me from her picture as no woman’s face had ever
looked at me yet. In those tender eyes--in the chance of making that
gentle creature my wife--I saw my destiny written. The portrait which
had come into my hands so strangely and so unexpectedly was the silent
messenger of happiness close at hand, sent to warn, to encourage, to
rouse me before it was too late. I put the miniature under my pillow at
night; I looked at it again the next morning. My conviction of the day
before remained as strong as ever; my superstition (if you please to
call it so) pointed out to me irresistibly the way on which I should go.
There was a ship in port which was to sail for England in a fortnight,
touching at Madeira. In that ship I took my passage.”


Thus far the reader had advanced with no interruption to disturb him.
But at the last words the tones of another voice, low and broken,
mingled with his own.

“Was she a fair woman,” asked the voice, “or dark, like me?”

Mr. Neal paused, and looked up. The doctor was still at the bed head,
with his fingers mechanically on the patient’s pulse. The child, missing
his midday sleep, was beginning to play languidly with his new toy. The
father’s eyes were watching him with a rapt and ceaseless attention. But
one great change was visible in the listeners since the narrative had
begun. Mrs. Armadale had dropped her hold of her husband’s hand, and sat
with her face steadily turned away from him The hot African blood burned
red in her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question: “Was
she a fair woman, or dark, like me?”

“Fair,” said her husband, without looking at her.

Her hands, lying clasped together in her lap, wrung each other hard--she
said no more. Mr. Neal’s overhanging eyebrows lowered ominously as
he returned to the narrative. He had incurred his own severe
displeasure--he had caught himself in the act of secretly pitying her.


“I have said”--the letter proceeded--“that Ingleby was admitted to my
closest confidence. I was sorry to leave him; and I was distressed by
his evident surprise and mortification when he heard that I was going
away. In my own justification, I showed him the letter and the likeness,
and told him the truth. His interest in the portrait seemed to be hardly
inferior to my own. He asked me about Miss Blanchard’s family and
Miss Blanchard’s fortune with the sympathy of a true friend; and he
strengthened my regard for him, and my belief in him, by putting himself
out of the question, and by generously encouraging me to persist in my
new purpose. When we parted, I was in high health and spirits. Before
we met again the next day, I was suddenly struck by an illness which
threatened both my reason and my life.

“I have no proof against Ingleby. There was more than one woman on the
island whom I had wronged beyond all forgiveness, and whose vengeance
might well have reached me at that time. I can accuse nobody. I can only
say that my life was saved by my old black nurse; and that the woman
afterward acknowledged having used the known negro antidote to a known
negro poison in those parts. When my first days of convalescence came,
the ship in which my passage had been taken had long since sailed. When
I asked for Ingleby, he was gone. Proofs of his unpardonable misconduct
in his situation were placed before me, which not even my partiality for
him could resist. He had been turned out of the office in the first days
of my illness, and nothing more was known of him but that he had left
the island.

“All through my sufferings the portrait had been under my pillow. All
through my convalescence it was my one consolation when I remembered the
past, and my one encouragement when I thought of the future. No words
can describe the hold that first fancy had now taken of me--with time
and solitude and suffering to help it. My mother, with all her interest
in the match, was startled by the unexpected success of her own project.
She had written to tell Mr. Blanchard of my illness, but had received no
reply. She now offered to write again, if I would promise not to leave
her before my recovery was complete. My impatience acknowledged no
restraint. Another ship in port gave me another chance of leaving for
Madeira. Another examination of Mr. Blanchard’s letter of invitation
assured me that I should find him still in the island, if I seized
my opportunity on the spot. In defiance of my mother’s entreaties, I
insisted on taking my passage in the second ship--and this time, when
the ship sailed, I was on board.

“The change did me good; the sea-air made a man of me again. After an
unusually rapid voyage, I found myself at the end of my pilgrimage. On
a fine, still evening which I can never forget, I stood alone on the
shore, with her likeness in my bosom, and saw the white walls of the
house where I knew that she lived.

“I strolled round the outer limits of the grounds to compose myself
before I went in. Venturing through a gate and a shrubbery, I looked
into the garden, and saw a lady there, loitering alone on the lawn. She
turned her face toward me--and I beheld the original of my portrait, the
fulfillment of my dream! It is useless, and worse than useless, to write
of it now. Let me only say that every promise which the likeness had
made to my fancy the living woman kept to my eyes in the moment when
they first looked on her. Let me say this--and no more.

“I was too violently agitated to trust myself in her presence. I drew
back undiscovered, and, making my way to the front door of the house,
asked for her father first. Mr. Blanchard had retired to his room,
and could see nobody. Upon that I took courage, and asked for Miss
Blanchard. The servant smiled. ‘My young lady is not Miss Blanchard any
longer, sir,’ he said. ‘She is married.’ Those words would have struck
some men, in my position, to the earth. They fired my hot blood, and I
seized the servant by the throat, in a frenzy of rage ‘It’s a lie!’ I
broke out, speaking to him as if he had been one of the slaves on my own
estate. ‘It’s the truth,’ said the man, struggling with me; ‘her husband
is in the house at this moment.’ ‘Who is he, you scoundrel?’ The servant
answered by repeating my own name, to my own face: ‘_Allan Armadale_.’

“You can now guess the truth. Fergus Ingleby was the outlawed son whose
name and whose inheritance I had taken. And Fergus Ingleby was even with
me for depriving him of his birthright.

“Some account of the manner in which the deception had been carried out
is necessary to explain--I don’t say to justify--the share I took in the
events that followed my arrival at Madeira.

“By Ingleby’s own confession, he had come to Barbadoes--knowing of his
father’s death and of my succession to the estates--with the settled
purpose of plundering and injuring me. My rash confidence put such an
opportunity into his hands as he could never have hoped for. He had
waited to possess himself of the letter which my mother wrote to Mr.
Blanchard at the outset of my illness--had then caused his own dismissal
from his situation--and had sailed for Madeira in the very ship that was
to have sailed with me. Arrived at the island, he had waited again till
the vessel was away once more on her voyage, and had then presented
himself at Mr. Blanchard’s--not in the assumed name by which I shall
continue to speak of him here, but in the name which was as certainly
his as mine, ‘Allan Armadale.’ The fraud at the outset presented few
difficulties. He had only an ailing old man (who had not seen my mother
for half a lifetime) and an innocent, unsuspicious girl (who had never
seen her at all) to deal with; and he had learned enough in my service
to answer the few questions that were put to him as readily as I might
have answered them myself. His looks and manners, his winning ways with
women, his quickness and cunning, did the rest. While I was still on my
sickbed, he had won Miss Blanchard’s affections. While I was dreaming
over the likeness in the first days of my convalescence, he had secured
Mr. Blanchard’s consent to the celebration of the marriage before he and
his daughter left the island.

“Thus far Mr. Blanchard’s infirmity of sight had helped the deception.
He had been content to send messages to my mother, and to receive the
messages which were duly invented in return. But when the suitor was
accepted, and the wedding-day was appointed, he felt it due to his old
friend to write to her, asking her formal consent and inviting her to
the marriage. He could only complete part of the letter himself; the
rest was finished, under his dictation, by Miss Blanchard. There was no
chance of being beforehand with the post-office this time; and Ingleby,
sure of his place in the heart of his victim, waylaid her as she came
out of her father’s room with the letter, and privately told her the
truth. She was still under age, and the position was a serious one.
If the letter was posted, no resource would be left but to wait and be
parted forever, or to elope under circumstances which made detection
almost a certainty. The destination of any ship which took them away
would be known beforehand; and the fast-sailing yacht in which Mr.
Blanchard had come to Madeira was waiting in the harbor to take him back
to England. The only other alternative was to continue the deception by
suppressing the letter, and to confess the truth when they were securely
married. What arts of persuasion Ingleby used--what base advantage he
might previously have taken of her love and her trust in him to degrade
Miss Blanchard to his own level--I cannot say. He did degrade her. The
letter never went to its destination; and, with the daughter’s privity
and consent, the father’s confidence was abused to the very last.

“The one precaution now left to take was to fabricate the answer from
my mother which Mr. Blanchard expected, and which would arrive in due
course of post before the day appointed for the marriage. Ingleby had
my mother’s stolen letter with him; but he was without the imitative
dexterity which would have enabled him to make use of it for a forgery
of her handwriting. Miss Blanchard, who had consented passively to the
deception, refused to take any active share in the fraud practiced on
her father. In this difficulty, Ingleby found an instrument ready to
his hand in an orphan girl of barely twelve years old, a marvel of
precocious ability, whom Miss Blanchard had taken a romantic fancy
to befriend and whom she had brought away with her from England to
be trained as her maid. That girl’s wicked dexterity removed the one
serious obstacle left to the success of the fraud. I saw the imitation
of my mother’s writing which she had produced under Ingleby’s
instructions and (if the shameful truth must be told) with her young
mistress’s knowledge--and I believe I should have been deceived by it
myself. I saw the girl afterward--and my blood curdled at the sight of
her. If she is alive now, woe to the people who trust her! No creature
more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever walked this
earth.

“The forged letter paved the way securely for the marriage; and when I
reached the house, they were (as the servant had truly told me) man and
wife. My arrival on the scene simply precipitated the confession
which they had both agreed to make. Ingleby’s own lips shamelessly
acknowledged the truth. He had nothing to lose by speaking out--he was
married, and his wife’s fortune was beyond her father’s control. I pass
over all that followed--my interview with the daughter, and my interview
with the father--to come to results. For two days the efforts of the
wife, and the efforts of the clergyman who had celebrated the marriage,
were successful in keeping Ingleby and myself apart. On the third day
I set my trap more successfully, and I and the man who had mortally
injured me met together alone, face to face.

“Remember how my confidence had been abused; remember how the one good
purpose of my life had been thwarted; remember the violent passions
rooted deep in my nature, and never yet controlled--and then imagine for
yourself what passed between us. All I need tell here is the end. He was
a taller and a stronger man than I, and he took his brute’s advantage
with a brute’s ferocity. He struck me.

“Think of the injuries I had received at that man’s hands, and then
think of his setting his mark on my face by a blow!

“I went to an English officer who had been my fellow-passenger on the
voyage from Barbadoes. I told him the truth, and he agreed with me that
a meeting was inevitable. Dueling had its received formalities and its
established laws in those days; and he began to speak of them. I stopped
him. ‘I will take a pistol in my right hand,’ I said, ‘and he shall take
a pistol in his: I will take one end of a handkerchief in my left hand,
and he shall take the other end in his; and across that handkerchief the
duel shall be fought.’ The officer got up, and looked at me as if I had
personally insulted him. ‘You are asking me to be present at a murder
and a suicide,’ he said; ‘I decline to serve you.’ He left the room. As
soon as he was gone I wrote down the words I had said to the officer and
sent them by a messenger to Ingleby. While I was waiting for an answer,
I sat down before the glass, and looked at his mark on my face. ‘Many a
man has had blood on his hands and blood on his conscience,’ I thought,
‘for less than this.’

“The messenger came back with Ingleby’s answer. It appointed a meeting
for three o’clock the next day, at a lonely place in the interior of the
island. I had resolved what to do if he refused; his letter released
me from the horror of my own resolution. I felt grateful to him--yes,
absolutely grateful to him--for writing it.

“The next day I went to the place. He was not there. I waited two hours,
and he never came. At last the truth dawned on me. ‘Once a coward,
always a coward,’ I thought. I went back to Mr. Blanchard’s house.
Before I got there, a sudden misgiving seized me, and I turned aside
to the harbor. I was right; the harbor was the place to go to. A ship
sailing for Lisbon that afternoon had offered him the opportunity of
taking a passage for himself and his wife, and escaping me. His answer
to my challenge had served its purpose of sending me out of the way into
the interior of the island. Once more I had trusted in Fergus Ingleby,
and once more those sharp wits of his had been too much for me.

“I asked my informant if Mr. Blanchard was aware as yet of his
daughter’s departure. He had discovered it, but not until the ship had
sailed. This time I took a lesson in cunning from Ingleby. Instead of
showing myself at Mr. Blanchard’s house, I went first and looked at Mr.
Blanchard’s yacht.

“The vessel told me what the vessel’s master might have concealed--the
truth. I found her in the confusion of a sudden preparation for sea.
All the crew were on board, with the exception of some few who had been
allowed their leave on shore, and who were away in the interior of the
island, nobody knew where. When I discovered that the sailing-master was
trying in, to supply their places with the best men he could pick up at
a moment’s notice, my resolution was instantly taken. I knew the duties
on board a yacht well enough, having had a vessel of my own, and having
sailed her myself. Hurrying into the town, I changed my dress for a
sailor’s coat and hat, and, returning to the harbor, I offered myself as
one of the volunteer crew. I don’t know what the sailing-master saw in
my face. My answers to his questions satisfied him, and yet he looked at
me and hesitated. But hands were scarce, and it ended in my being taken
on board. An hour later Mr. Blanchard joined us, and was assisted into
the cabin, suffering pitiably in mind and body both. An hour after
that we were at sea, with a starless night overhead, and a fresh breeze
behind us.

“As I had surmised, we were in pursuit of the vessel in which Ingleby
and his wife had left the island that afternoon. The ship was French,
and was employed in the timber trade: her name was _La Grace de Dieu_.
Nothing more was known of her than that she was bound for Lisbon; that
she had been driven out of her course; and that she had touched at
Madeira, short of men and short of provisions. The last want had been
supplied, but not the first. Sailors distrusted the sea-worthiness of
the ship, and disliked the look of the vagabond crew. When those two
serious facts had been communicated to Mr. Blanchard, the hard words he
had spoken to his child in the first shock of discovering that she had
helped to deceive him smote him to the heart. He instantly determined to
give his daughter a refuge on board his own vessel, and to quiet her by
keeping her villain of a husband out of the way of all harm at my hands.
The yacht sailed three feet and more to the ship’s one. There was no
doubt of our overtaking _La Grace de Dieu_; the only fear was that we
might pass her in the darkness.

“After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly dropped, and
there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the order came to get
the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large sails, we all knew what to
expect. In little better than an hour more, the storm was upon us, the
thunder was pealing over our heads, and the yacht was running for it.
She was a powerful schooner-rigged vessel of three hundred tons,
as strong as wood and iron could make her; she was handled by a
sailing-master who thoroughly understood his work, and she behaved
nobly. As the new morning came, the fury of the wind, blowing still from
the southwest quarter, subsided a little, and the sea was less heavy.
Just before daybreak we heard faintly, through the howling of the gale,
the report of a gun. The men collected anxiously on deck, looked at each
other, and said: ‘There she is!’

“With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber-ship it was. She
lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her mainmast
both gone--a water-logged wreck. The yacht carried three boats;
one amidships, and two slung to davits on the quarters; and the
sailing-master, seeing signs of the storm renewing its fury before long,
determined on lowering the quarter-boats while the lull lasted. Few as
the people were on board the wreck, they were too many for one boat, and
the risk of trying two boats at once was thought less, in the critical
state of the weather, than the risk of making two separate trips from
the yacht to the ship. There might be time to make one trip in safety,
but no man could look at the heavens and say there would be time enough
for two.

“The boats were manned by volunteers from the crew, I being in the
second of the two. When the first boat was got alongside of the
timber-ship--a service of difficulty and danger which no words can
describe--all the men on board made a rush to leave the wreck together.
If the boat had not been pulled off again before the whole of them had
crowded in, the lives of all must have been sacrificed. As our boat
approached the vessel in its turn, we arranged that four of us should
get on board--two (I being one of them) to see to the safety of Mr.
Blanchard’s daughter, and two to beat back the cowardly remnant of the
crew if they tried to crowd in first. The other three--the coxswain and
two oarsmen--were left in the boat to keep her from being crushed by the
ship. What the others saw when they first boarded _La Grace de Dieu_ I
don’t know; what I saw was the woman whom I had lost, the woman
vilely stolen from me, lying in a swoon on the deck. We lowered her,
insensible, into the boat. The remnant of the crew--five in number--were
compelled by main force to follow her in an orderly manner, one by one,
and minute by minute, as the chance offered for safely taking them in. I
was the last who left; and, at the next roll of the ship toward us, the
empty length of the deck, without a living creature on it from stem to
stern, told the boat’s crew that their work was done. With the louder
and louder howling of the fast-rising tempest to warn them, they rowed
for their lives back to the yacht.

“A succession of heavy squalls had brought round the course of the
new storm that was coming, from the south to the north; and the
sailing-master, watching his opportunity, had wore the yacht to be ready
for it. Before the last of our men had got on board again, it burst on
us with the fury of a hurricane. Our boat was swamped, but not a life
was lost. Once more we ran before it, due south, at the mercy of the
wind. I was on deck with the rest, watching the one rag of sail we could
venture to set, and waiting to supply its place with another, if it blew
out of the bolt-ropes, when the mate came close to me, and shouted in my
ear through the thunder of the storm: ‘She has come to her senses in the
cabin, and has asked for her husband. Where is he?’ Not a man on board
knew. The yacht was searched from one end to another without finding
him. The men were mustered in defiance of the weather--he was not among
them. The crews of the two boats were questioned. All the first crew
could say was that they had pulled away from the wreck when the rush
into their boat took place, and that they knew nothing of whom they let
in or whom they kept out. All the second crew could say was that they
had brought back to the yacht every living soul left by the first boat
on the deck of the timber-ship. There was no blaming anybody; but, at
the same time, there was no resisting the fact that the man was missing.

“All through that day the storm, raging unabatedly, never gave us even
the shadow of a chance of returning and searching the wreck. The one
hope for the yacht was to scud. Toward evening the gale, after having
carried us to the southward of Madeira, began at last to break--the wind
shifted again--and allowed us to bear up for the island. Early the next
morning we got back into port. Mr. Blanchard and his daughter were taken
ashore, the sailing-master accompanying them, and warning us that he
should have something to say on his return which would nearly concern
the whole crew.

“We were mustered on deck, and addressed by the sailing-master as soon
as he came on board again. He had Mr. Blanchard’s orders to go back at
once to the timber-ship and to search for the missing man. We were bound
to do this for his sake, and for the sake of his wife, whose reason was
despaired of by the doctors if something was not done to quiet her. We
might be almost sure of finding the vessel still afloat, for her ladling
of timber would keep her above water as long as her hull held together.
If the man was on board--living or dead--he must be found and brought
back. And if the weather continued to be moderate, there was no reason
why the men, with proper assistance, should not bring the ship back,
too, and (their master being quite willing) earn their share of the
salvage with the officers of the yacht.

“Upon this the crew gave three cheers, and set to work forthwith to get
the schooner to sea again. I was the only one of them who drew back
from the enterprise. I told them the storm had upset me--I was ill, and
wanted rest. They all looked me in the face as I passed through them on
my way out of the yacht, but not a man of them spoke to me.

“I waited through that day at a tavern on the port for the first
news from the wreck. It was brought toward night-fall by one of the
pilot-boats which had taken part in the enterprise--a successful
enterprise, as the event proved--for saving the abandoned ship. _La
Grace de Dieu_ had been discovered still floating, and the body of
Ingleby had been found on board, drowned in the cabin. At dawn the next
morning the dead man was brought back by the yacht; and on the same day
the funeral took place in the Protestant cemetery.”


“Stop!” said the voice from the bed, before the reader could turn to a
new leaf and begin the next paragraph.

There was a change in the room, and there were changes in the audience,
since Mr. Neal had last looked up from the narrative. A ray of sunshine
was crossing the death-bed; and the child, overcome by drowsiness, lay
peacefully asleep in the golden light. The father’s countenance had
altered visibly. Forced into action by the tortured mind, the muscles of
the lower face, which had never moved yet, were moving distortedly now.
Warned by the damps gathering heavily on his forehead, the doctor had
risen to revive the sinking man. On the other side of the bed the wife’s
chair stood empty. At the moment when her husband had interrupted the
reading, she had drawn back behind the bed head, out of his sight.
Supporting herself against the wall, she stood there in hiding, her eyes
fastened in hungering suspense on the manuscript in Mr. Neal’s hand.

In a minute more the silence was broken again by Mr. Armadale.

“Where is she?” he asked, looking angrily at his wife’s empty chair. The
doctor pointed to the place. She had no choice but to come forward. She
came slowly and stood before him.

“You promised to go when I told you,” he said. “Go now.”

Mr. Neal tried hard to control his hand as it kept his place between the
leaves of the manuscripts but it trembled in spite of him. A suspicion
which had been slowly forcing itself on his mind, while he was reading,
became a certainty when he heard those words. From one revelation to
another the letter had gone on, until it had now reached the brink of a
last disclosure to come. At that brink the dying man had predetermined
to silence the reader’s voice, before he had permitted his wife to hear
the narrative read. There was the secret which the son was to know
in after years, and which the mother was never to approach. From that
resolution, his wife’s tenderest pleadings had never moved him an
inch--and now, from his own lips, his wife knew it.

She made him no answer. She stood there and looked at him; looked her
last entreaty--perhaps her last farewell. His eyes gave her back no
answering glance: they wandered from her mercilessly to the sleeping
boy. She turned speechless from the bed. Without a look at the
child--without a word to the two strangers breathlessly watching
her--she kept the promise she had given, and in dead silence left the
room.

There was something in the manner of her departure which shook the
self-possession of both the men who witnessed it. When the door closed
on her, they recoiled instinctively from advancing further in the dark.
The doctor’s reluctance was the first to express itself. He attempted
to obtain the patient’s permission to withdraw until the letter was
completed. The patient refused.

Mr. Neal spoke next at greater length and to more serious purpose.

“The doctor is accustomed in his profession,” he began, “and I am
accustomed in mine, to have the secrets of others placed in our keeping.
But it is my duty, before we go further, to ask if you really understand
the extraordinary position which we now occupy toward one another. You
have just excluded Mrs. Armadale, before our own eyes, from a place in
your confidence. And you are now offering that same place to two men who
are total strangers to you.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Armadale, “_because_ you are strangers.”

Few as the words were, the inference to be drawn from them was not of a
nature to set distrust at rest. Mr. Neal put it plainly into words.

“You are in urgent need of my help and of the doctor’s help,” he said.
“Am I to understand (so long as you secure our assistance) that the
impression which the closing passages of this letter may produce on us
is a matter of indifference to you?”

“Yes. I don’t spare you. I don’t spare myself. I _do_ spare my wife.”

“You force me to a conclusion, sir, which is a very serious one,” said
Mr. Neal. “If I am to finish this letter under your dictation, I must
claim permission--having read aloud the greater part of it already--to
read aloud what remains, in the hearing of this gentleman, as a
witness.”

“Read it.”

Gravely doubting, the doctor resumed his chair. Gravely doubting, Mr.
Neal turned the leaf, and read the next words:


“There is more to tell before I can leave the dead man to his rest. I
have described the finding of his body. But I have not described the
circumstances under which he met his death.

“He was known to have been on deck when the yacht’s boats were seen
approaching the wreck; and he was afterward missed in the confusion
caused by the panic of the crew. At that time the water was five feet
deep in the cabin, and was rising fast. There was little doubt of his
having gone down into that water of his own accord. The discovery of his
wife’s jewel box, close under him, on the floor, explained his presence
in the cabin. He was known to have seen help approaching, and it was
quite likely that he had thereupon gone below to make an effort at
saving the box. It was less probable--though it might still have been
inferred--that his death was the result of some accident in diving,
which had for the moment deprived him of his senses. But a discovery
made by the yacht’s crew pointed straight to a conclusion which struck
the men, one and all, with the same horror. When the course of their
search brought them to the cabin, they found the scuttle bolted, and the
door locked on the outside. Had some one closed the cabin, not knowing
he was there? Setting the panic-stricken condition of the crew out of
the question, there was no motive for closing the cabin before leaving
the wreck. But one other conclusion remained. Had some murderous hand
purposely locked the man in, and left him to drown as the water rose
over him?

“Yes. A murderous hand had locked him in, and left him to drown. That
hand was mine.”


The Scotchman started up from the table; the doctor shrank from the
bedside. The two looked at the dying wretch, mastered by the same
loathing, chilled by the same dread. He lay there, with his child’s
head on his breast; abandoned by the sympathies of man, accursed by the
justice of God--he lay there, in the isolation of Cain, and looked back
at them.

At the moment when the two men rose to their feet, the door leading into
the next room was shaken heavily on the outer side, and a sound like
the sound of a fall, striking dull on their ears, silenced them both.
Standing nearest to the door, the doctor opened it, passed through, and
closed it instantly. Mr. Neal turned his back on the bed, and waited the
event in silence. The sound, which had failed to awaken the child, had
failed also to attract the father’s notice. His own words had taken him
far from all that was passing at his deathbed. His helpless body was
back on the wreck, and the ghost of his lifeless hand was turning the
lock of the cabin door.

A bell rang in the next room--eager voices talked; hurried footsteps
moved in it--an interval passed, and the doctor returned. “Was she
listening?” whispered Mr. Neal, in German. “The women are restoring
her,” the doctor whispered back. “She has heard it all. In God’s name,
what are we to do next?” Before it was possible to reply, Mr. Armadale
spoke. The doctor’s return had roused him to a sense of present things.

“Go on,” he said, as if nothing had happened.

“I refuse to meddle further with your infamous secret,” returned Mr.
Neal. “You are a murderer on your own confession. If that letter is to
be finished, don’t ask _me_ to hold the pen for you.”

“You gave me your promise,” was the reply, spoken with the same
immovable self-possession. “You must write for me, or break your word.”

For the moment, Mr. Neal was silenced. There the man lay--sheltered
from the execration of his fellow-creatures, under the shadow of
Death--beyond the reach of all human condemnation, beyond the dread of
all mortal laws; sensitive to nothing but his one last resolution to
finish the letter addressed to his son.

Mr. Neal drew the doctor aside. “A word with you,” he said, in German.
“Do you persist in asserting that he may be speechless before we can
send to Stuttgart?”

“Look at his lips,” said the doctor, “and judge for yourself.”

His lips answered for him: the reading of the narrative had left its
mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his mouth, which
had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the room, was plainly
visible now. His slow articulation labored more and more painfully with
every word he uttered. The position was emphatically a terrible one.
After a moment more of hesitation, Mr. Neal made a last attempt to
withdraw from it.

“Now my eyes are open,” he said, sternly, “do you dare hold me to an
engagement which you forced on me blindfold?”

“No,” answered Mr. Armadale. “I leave you to break your word.”

The look which accompanied that reply stung the Scotchman’s pride to the
quick. When he spoke next, he spoke seated in his former place at the
table.

“No man ever yet said of me that I broke my word,” he retorted, angrily;
“and not even you shall say it of me now. Mind this! If you hold me to
my promise, I hold you to my condition. I have reserved my freedom of
action, and I warn you I will use it at my own sole discretion, as soon
as I am released from the sight of you.”

“Remember he is dying,” pleaded the doctor, gently.

“Take your place, sir,” said Mr. Neal, pointing to the empty chair.
“What remains to be read, I will only read in your hearing. What remains
to be written, I will only write in your presence. _You_ brought me
here. I have a right to insist--and I do insist--on your remaining as a
witness to the last.”

The doctor accepted his position without remonstrance. Mr. Neal returned
to the manuscript, and read what remained of it uninterruptedly to the
end:


“Without a word in my own defense, I have acknowledged my guilt. Without
a word in my own defense, I will reveal how the crime was committed.

“No thought of him was in my mind, when I saw his wife insensible on the
deck of the timber-ship. I did my part in lowering her safely into the
boat. Then, and not till then, I felt the thought of him coming back. In
the confusion that prevailed while the men of the yacht were forcing the
men of the ship to wait their time, I had an opportunity of searching
for him unobserved. I stepped back from the bulwark, not knowing whether
he was away in the first boat, or whether he was still on board--I
stepped back, and saw him mount the cabin stairs empty-handed, with the
water dripping from him. After looking eagerly toward the boat (without
noticing me), he saw there was time to spare before the crew were taken.
‘Once more!’ he said to himself--and disappeared again, to make a last
effort at recovering the jewel box. The devil at my elbow whispered,
‘Don’t shoot him like a man: drown him like a dog!’ He was under water
when I bolted the scuttle. But his head rose to the surface before I
could close the cabin door. I looked at him, and he looked at me--and I
locked the door in his face. The next minute, I was back among the last
men left on deck. The minute after, it was too late to repent. The storm
was threatening us with destruction, and the boat’s crew were pulling
for their lives from the ship.

“My son! I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which my
love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why.

“I will say nothing of my sufferings; I will plead for no mercy to my
memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange trembling in
my hand, while I write these lines, which warns me to hasten to the end.
I left the island without daring to look for the last time at the woman
whom I had lost so miserably, whom I had injured so vilely. When I left,
the whole weight of the suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby’s
death rested on the crew of the French vessel. No motive for the
supposed murder could be brought home to any of them; but they were
known to be, for the most part, outlawed ruffians capable of any crime,
and they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till
afterward that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting round at
last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague description given
of the strange man who had made one of the yacht’s crew, and who had
disappeared the day afterward. The widow alone knew, from that time
forth, why her husband had been murdered, and who had done the deed.
When she made that discovery, a false report of my death had been
previously circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the
report for my immunity from all legal proceedings; perhaps (no eye but
Ingleby’s having seen me lock the cabin door) there was not evidence
enough to justify an inquiry; perhaps the widow shrank from the
disclosures which must have followed a public charge against me, based
on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However it might be, the crime
which I had committed unseen has remained a crime unpunished from that
time to this.

“I left Madeira for the West Indies in disguise. The first news that met
me when the ship touched at Barbadoes was the news of my mother’s death.
I had no heart to return to the old scenes. The prospect of living at
home in solitude, with the torment of my own guilty remembrances gnawing
at me day and night, was more than I had the courage to confront.
Without landing, or discovering myself to any one on shore, I went on as
far as the ship would take me--to the island of Trinidad.

“At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell her the
truth--and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty to spare
her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her happiness to such an
existence as mine--and I did her the injury of marrying her. If she is
alive when you read this, grant her the mercy of still concealing the
truth. The one atonement I can make to her is to keep her unsuspicious
to the last of the man she has married. Pity her, as I have pitied her.
Let this letter be a sacred confidence between father and son.

“The time when you were born was the time when my health began to give
way. Some months afterward, in the first days of my recovery, you were
brought to me; and I was told that you had been christened during
my illness. Your mother had done as other loving mothers do--she had
christened her first-born by his father’s name. You, too, were Allan
Armadale. Even in that early time--even while I was happily ignorant of
what I have discovered since--my mind misgave me when I looked at you,
and thought of that fatal name.

“As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my estates in
Barbadoes. It crossed my mind--wild as the idea may appear to you--to
renounce the condition which compelled my son as well as myself to take
the Armadale name, or lose the succession to the Armadale property.
But, even in those days, the rumor of a contemplated emancipation of
the slaves--the emancipation which is now close at hand--was spreading
widely in the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian
property might be affected if that threatened change ever took place.
No man could tell--if I gave you back my own paternal name, and left you
without other provision in the future than my own paternal estate--how
you might one day miss the broad Armadale acres, or to what future
penury I might be blindly condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how
the fatalities gathered one on the other! Mark how your Christian name
came to you, how your surname held to you, in spite of me!

“My health had improved in my old home--but it was for a time only. I
sank again, and the doctors ordered me to Europe. Avoiding England (why,
you may guess), I took my passage, with you and your mother, for France.
From France we passed into Italy. We lived here; we lived there. It was
useless. Death had got met and Death followed me, go where I might. I
bore it, for I had an alleviation to turn to which I had not deserved.
You may shrink in horror from the very memory of me now. In those days,
you comforted me. The only warmth I still felt at my heart was the
warmth you brought to it. My last glimpses of happiness in this world
were the glimpses given me by my infant son.

“We removed from Italy, and went next to Lausanne--the place from which
I am now writing to you. The post of this morning has brought me news,
later and fuller than any I had received thus far, of the widow of the
murdered man. The letter lies before me while I write. It comes from a
friend of my early days, who has seen her, and spoken to her--who has
been the first to inform her that the report of my death in Madeira was
false. He writes, at a loss to account for the violent agitation which
she showed on hearing that I was still alive, that I was married, and
that I had an infant son. He asks me if I can explain it. He speaks in
terms of sympathy for her--a young and beautiful woman, buried in the
retirement of a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast; her father
dead; her family estranged from her, in merciless disapproval of her
marriage. He writes words which might have cut me to the heart, but for
a closing passage in his letter, which seized my whole attention the
instant I came to it, and which has forced from me the narrative that
these pages contain.

“I now know what never even entered my mind as a suspicion till the
letter reached me. I now know that the widow of the man whose death lies
at my door has borne a posthumous child. That child is a boy--a year
older than my own son. Secure in her belief in my death, his mother
has done what my son’s mother did: she has christened her child by his
father’s name. Again, in the second generation, there are two Allan
Armadales as there were in the first. After working its deadly mischief
with the fathers, the fatal resemblance of names has descended to work
its deadly mischief with the sons.

“Guiltless minds may see nothing thus far but the result of a series of
events which could lead no other way. I--with that man’s life to answer
for--I, going down into my grave, with my crime unpunished and unatoned,
see what no guiltless minds can discern. I see danger in the future,
begotten of the danger in the past--treachery that is the offspring of
_his_ treachery, and crime that is the child of _my_ crime. Is the dread
that now shakes me to the soul a phantom raised by the superstition of a
dying man? I look into the Book which all Christendom venerates, and the
Book tells me that the sin of the father shall be visited on the child.
I look out into the world, and I see the living witnesses round me to
that terrible truth. I see the vices which have contaminated the father
descending, and contaminating the child; I see the shame which has
disgraced the father’s name descending, and disgracing the child’s. I
look in on myself, and I see my crime ripening again for the future
in the self-same circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the
past, and descending, in inherited contamination of evil, from me to my
son.”


At those lines the writing ended. There the stroke had struck him, and
the pen had dropped from his hand.

He knew the place; he remembered the words. At the instant when the
reader’s voice stopped, he looked eagerly at the doctor. “I have
got what comes next in my mind,” he said, with slower and slower
articulation. “Help me to speak it.”

The doctor administered a stimulant, and signed to Mr. Neal to give him
time. After a little delay, the flame of the sinking spirit leaped up
in his eyes once more. Resolutely struggling with his failing speech,
he summoned the Scotchman to take the pen, and pronounced the closing
sentences of the narrative, as his memory gave them back to him, one by
one, in these words:


“Despise my dying conviction if you will, but grant me, I solemnly
implore you, one last request. My son! the only hope I have left for
you hangs on a great doubt--the doubt whether we are, or are not,
the masters of our own destinies. It may be that mortal free-will can
conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we all do, inevitably to death,
we go inevitably to nothing that is before death. If this be so, indeed,
respect--though you respect nothing else--the warning which I give you
from my grave. Never, to your dying day, let any living soul approach
you who is associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your
father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if the widow
still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to the
marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And more than all,
avoid the man who bears the same name as your own. Offend your best
benefactor, if that benefactor’s influence has connected you one with
the other. Desert the woman who loves you, if that woman is a link
between you and him. Hide yourself from him under an assumed name. Put
the mountains and the seas between you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving;
be all that is most repellent to your own gentler nature, rather than
live under the same roof, and breathe the same air, with that man. Never
let the two Allan Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!

“There lies the way by which you may escape--if any way there be. Take
it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness, through all
your life to come!

“I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than the
influence of this confession to incline you to my will, I would have
spared you the disclosure which these pages contain. You are lying on my
breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a child, while a stranger’s hand
writes these words for you as they fall from my lips. Think what the
strength of my conviction must be, when I can find the courage, on my
death-bed, to darken all your young life at its outset with the shadow
of your father’s crime. Think, and be warned. Think, and forgive me if
you can.”


There it ended. Those were the father’s last words to the son.

Inexorably faithful to his forced duty, Mr. Neal laid aside the pen, and
read over aloud the lines he had just written. “Is there more to add?”
 he asked, with his pitilessly steady voice. There was no more to add.

Mr. Neal folded the manuscript, inclosed it in a sheet of paper, and
sealed it with Mr. Armadale’s own seal. “The address?” he said, with his
merciless business formality. “To Allan Armadale, junior,” he wrote, as
the words were dictated from the bed. “Care of Godfrey Hammick, Esq.,
Offices of Messrs. Hammick and Ridge, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.”
 Having written the address, he waited, and considered for a moment. “Is
your executor to open this?” he asked.

“No! he is to give it to my son when my son is of an age to understand
it.”

“In that case,” pursued Mr. Neal, with all his wits in remorseless
working order, “I will add a dated note to the address, repeating your
own words as you have just spoken them, and explaining the circumstances
under which my handwriting appears on the document.” He wrote the note
in the briefest and plainest terms, read it over aloud as he had read
over what went before, signed his name and address at the end, and made
the doctor sign next, as witness of the proceedings, and as medical
evidence of the condition in which Mr. Armadale then lay. This done,
he placed the letter in a second inclosure, sealed it as before, and
directed it to Mr. Hammick, with the superscription of “private” added
to the address. “Do you insist on my posting this?” he asked, rising
with the letter in his hand.

“Give him time to think,” said the doctor. “For the child’s sake, give
him time to think! A minute may change him.”

“I will give him five minutes,” answered Mr. Neal, placing his watch on
the table, implacable just to the very last.

They waited, both looking attentively at Mr. Armadale. The signs of
change which had appeared in him already were multiplying fast. The
movement which continued mental agitation had communicated to the
muscles of his face was beginning, under the same dangerous influence,
to spread downward. His once helpless hands lay still no longer; they
struggled pitiably on the bedclothes. At sight of that warning token,
the doctor turned with a gesture of alarm, and beckoned Mr. Neal to
come nearer. “Put the question at once,” he said; “if you let the five
minutes pass, you may be too late.”

Mr. Neal approached the bed. He, too, noticed the movement of the hands.
“Is that a bad sign?” he asked.

The doctor bent his head gravely. “Put your question at once,” he
repeated, “or you may be too late.”

Mr. Neal held the letter before the eyes of the dying man “Do you know
what this is?”

“My letter.”

“Do you insist on my posting it?”

He mastered his failing speech for the last time, and gave the answer:
“Yes!”

Mr. Neal moved to the door, with the letter in his hand. The German
followed him a few steps, opened his lips to plead for a longer delay,
met the Scotchman’s inexorable eye, and drew back again in silence.
The door closed and parted them, without a word having passed on either
side.

The doctor went back to the bed and whispered to the sinking man: “Let
me call him back; there is time to stop him yet!” It was useless. No
answer came; nothing showed that he heeded, or even heard. His eyes
wandered from the child, rested for a moment on his own struggling hand,
and looked up entreatingly in the compassionate face that bent over him.
The doctor lifted the hand, paused, followed the father’s longing eyes
back to the child, and, interpreting his last wish, moved the hand
gently toward the boy’s head. The hand touched it, and trembled
violently. In another instant the trembling seized on the arm, and
spread over the whole upper part of the body. The face turned from pale
to red, from red to purple, from purple to pale again. Then the toiling
hands lay still, and the shifting color changed no more.


The window of the next room was open, when the doctor entered it from
the death chamber, with the child in his arms. He looked out as he
passed by, and saw Mr. Neal in the street below, slowly returning to the
inn.

“Where is the letter?” he asked.

Three words sufficed for the Scotchman’s answer.

“In the post.”

THE END OF THE PROLOGUE.




THE STORY.

BOOK THE FIRST.

I. THE MYSTERY OF OZIAS MIDWINTER.


ON a warm May night, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one,
the Reverend Decimus Brock--at that time a visitor to the Isle of
Man--retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious personal
responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no distinct idea of the
means by which he might relieve himself from the pressure of his present
circumstances.

The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life at which a
sensible man learns to decline (as often as his temper will let him) all
useless conflict with the tyranny of his own troubles. Abandoning any
further effort to reach a decision in the emergency that now beset him,
Mr. Brock sat down placidly in his shirt sleeves on the side of his bed,
and applied his mind to consider next whether the emergency itself was
as serious as he had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this
new way out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly
traveling to the end in view by the least inspiriting of all human
journeys--a journey through the past years of his own life.

One by one the events of those years--all connected with the same little
group of characters, and all more or less answerable for the anxiety
which was now intruding itself between the clergyman and his night’s
rest--rose, in progressive series, on Mr. Brock’s memory. The first of
the series took him back, through a period of fourteen years, to his own
rectory on the Somersetshire shores of the Bristol Channel, and closeted
him at a private interview with a lady who had paid him a visit in the
character of a total stranger to the parson and the place.


The lady’s complexion was fair, the lady’s figure was well preserved;
she was still a young woman, and she looked even younger than her age.
There was a shade of melancholy in her expression, and an undertone of
suffering in her voice--enough, in each case, to indicate that she had
known trouble, but not enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of
others. She brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old,
whom she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way, at the
beginning of the interview, to amuse himself in the rectory garden. Her
card had preceded her entrance into the study, and had announced her
under the name of “Mrs. Armadale.” Mr. Brock began to feel interested in
her before she had opened her lips; and when the son had been dismissed,
he awaited with some anxiety to hear what the mother had to say to him.

Mrs. Armadale began by informing the rector that she was a widow. Her
husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their union, on the
voyage from Madeira to Lisbon. She had been brought to England,
after her affliction, under her father’s protection; and her child--a
posthumous son--had been born on the family estate in Norfolk. Her
father’s death, shortly afterward, had deprived her of her only
surviving parent, and had exposed her to neglect and misconstruction on
the part of her remaining relatives (two brothers), which had estranged
her from them, she feared, for the rest of her days. For some time past
she had lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devoting herself
to the education of her boy, who had now reached an age at which he
required other than his mother’s teaching. Leaving out of the question
her own unwillingness to part with him, in her solitary position, she
was especially anxious that he should not be thrown among strangers by
being sent to school. Her darling project was to bring him up privately
at home, and to keep him, as he advanced in years, from all contact with
the temptations and the dangers of the world.

With these objects in view, her longer sojourn in her own locality
(where the services of the resident clergyman, in the capacity of tutor,
were not obtainable) must come to an end. She had made inquiries, had
heard of a house that would suit her in Mr. Brock’s neighborhood, and
had also been told that Mr. Brock himself had formerly been in the habit
of taking pupils. Possessed of this information, she had ventured to
present herself, with references that vouched for her respectability,
but without a formal introduction; and she had now to ask whether (in
the event of her residing in the neighborhood) any terms that could be
offered would induce Mr. Brock to open his doors once more to a pupil,
and to allow that pupil to be her son.

If Mrs. Armadale had been a woman of no personal attractions, or if
Mr. Brock had been provided with an intrenchment to fight behind in the
shape of a wife, it is probable that the widow’s journey might have been
taken in vain. As things really were, the rector examined the references
which were offered to him, and asked time for consideration. When the
time had expired, he did what Mrs. Armadale wished him to do--he
offered his back to the burden, and let the mother load him with the
responsibility of the son.

This was the first event of the series; the date of it being the year
eighteen hundred and thirty-seven. Mr. Brock’s memory, traveling forward
toward the present from that point, picked up the second event in its
turn, and stopped next at the year eighteen hundred and forty-five.

-------------

The fishing-village on the Somersetshire coast was still the scene, and
the characters were once again--Mrs. Armadale and her son.

Through the eight years that had passed, Mr. Brock’s responsibility had
rested on him lightly enough. The boy had given his mother and his tutor
but little trouble. He was certainly slow over his books, but more from
a constitutional inability to fix his attention on his tasks than from
want of capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be
denied, was heedless to the last degree: he acted recklessly on his
first impulses, and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions. On the
other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his disposition was open
as the day; a more generous, affectionate, sweet-tempered lad it
would have been hard to find anywhere. A certain quaint originality of
character, and a natural healthiness in all his tastes, carried him
free of most of the dangers to which his mother’s system of education
inevitably exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of the sea and
of all that belongs to it; and as he grew in years, there was no
luring him away from the water-side, and no keeping him out of the
boat-builder’s yard. In course of time his mother caught him actually
working there, to her infinite annoyance and surprise, as a volunteer.
He acknowledged that his whole future ambition was to have a yard of his
own, and that his one present object was to learn to build a boat for
himself. Wisely foreseeing that such a pursuit as this for his leisure
hours was exactly what was wanted to reconcile the lad to a position of
isolation from companions of his own rank and age, Mr. Brock prevailed
on Mrs. Armadale, with no small difficulty, to let her son have his
way. At the period of that second event in the clergyman’s life with
his pupil which is now to be related, young Armadale had practiced long
enough in the builder’s yard to have reached the summit of his wishes,
by laying with his own hands the keel of his own boat.

Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allan had completed his
sixteenth year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the yard,
and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking the _Times_
newspaper with him in his hand.

The years that had passed since they had first met had long since
regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbor. The first
advances which Mr. Brock’s growing admiration for the widow had led him
to make in the early days of their intercourse had been met on her
side by an appeal to his forbearance which had closed his lips for the
future. She had satisfied him, at once and forever, that the one place
in her heart which he could hope to occupy was the place of a friend.
He loved her well enough to take what she would give him: friends they
became, and friends they remained from that time forth. No jealous
dread of another man’s succeeding where he had failed imbittered the
clergyman’s placid relations with the woman whom he loved. Of the few
resident gentlemen in the neighborhood, none were ever admitted by Mrs.
Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her. Contentedly
self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof against every social
attraction that would have tempted other women in her position and
at her age. Mr. Brock and his newspaper, appearing with monotonous
regularity at her tea-table three times a week, told her all she knew
or cared to know of the great outer world which circled round the narrow
and changeless limits of her daily life.

On the evening in question Mr. Brock took the arm-chair in which he
always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank, and
opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs. Armadale, who
invariably listened to him reclining on the same sofa, with the same
sort of needle-work everlastingly in her hand.

“Bless my soul!” cried the rector, with his voice in a new octave, and
his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of the newspaper.

No such introduction to the evening readings as this had ever happened
before in all Mrs. Armadale’s experience as a listener. She looked
up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity, and besought her reverend
friend to favor her with an explanation.

“I can hardly believe my own eyes,” said Mr. Brock. “Here is an
advertisement, Mrs. Armadale, addressed to your son.”

Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows:


IF this should meet the eye of ALLAN ARMADALE, he is desired to
communicate, either personally or by letter, with Messrs. Hammick and
Ridge (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London), on business of importance which
seriously concerns him. Any one capable of informing Messrs. H. and R.
where the person herein advertised can be found would confer a favor
by doing the same. To prevent mistakes, it is further notified that
the missing Allan Armadale is a youth aged fifteen years, and that this
advertisement is inserted at the instance of his family and friends.


“Another family, and other friends,” said Mrs. Armadale. “The person
whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son.”

The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in her face,
when he looked up, shocked him. Her delicate complexion had faded away
to a dull white; her eyes were averted from her visitor with a strange
mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked an older woman than she was,
by ten good years at least.

“The name is so very uncommon,” said Mr. Brock, imagining he had
offended her, and trying to excuse himself. “It really seemed impossible
there could be two persons--”

“There _are_ two,” interposed Mrs. Armadale. “Allan, as you know, is
sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you will find
the missing person described as being only fifteen. Although he bears
the same surname and the same Christian name, he is, I thank God, in no
way whatever related to my son. As long as I live, it will be the object
of my hopes and prayers that Allan may never see him, may never even
hear of him. My kind friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with
me if I leave these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past
misfortune and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of,
even to _you_. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by never
referring to this again? Will you do even more--will you promise not to
speak of it to Allan, and not to let that newspaper fall in his way?”

Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left her to
herself.

The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs. Armadale to
be capable of regarding her with any unworthy distrust. But it would be
idle to deny that he felt disappointed by her want of confidence in him,
and that he looked inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on
his way back to his own house.

It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale’s motives for burying her
son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote country village was
not so much to keep him under her own eye as to keep him from discovery
by his namesake. Why did she dread the idea of their ever meeting? Was
it a dread for herself, or a dread for her son? Mr. Brock’s loyal belief
in his friend rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at
some past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale’s. That night he destroyed the
advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the subject
should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There was another
Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his pupil’s blood, and
a vagabond advertised in the public newspapers. So much accident had
revealed to him. More, for Mrs. Armadale’s sake, he had no wish to
discover--and more he would never seek to know.

This was the second in the series of events which dated from the
rector’s connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock’s memory,
traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances, reached the
third stage of its journey through the by-gone time, and stopped at the
year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.

The five years that had passed had made little if any change in Allan’s
character. He had simply developed (to use his tutor’s own expression)
from a boy of sixteen to a boy of twenty-one. He was just as easy and
open in his disposition as ever; just as quaintly and inveterately
good-humored; just as heedless in following his own impulses, lead him
where they might. His bias toward the sea had strengthened with his
advance to the years of manhood. From building a boat, he had now got
on--with two journeymen at work under him--to building a decked vessel
of five-and-thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to divert
him to higher aspirations; had taken him to Oxford, to see what college
life was like; had taken him to London, to expand his mind by the
spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had diverted Allan, but
had not altered him in the least. He was as impenetrably superior to
all worldly ambition as Diogenes himself. “Which is best,” asked this
unconscious philosopher, “to find out the way to be happy for yourself,
or to let other people try if they can find it out for you?” From that
moment Mr. Brock permitted his pupil’s character to grow at its own rate
of development, and Allan went on uninterruptedly with the work of his
yacht.

Time, which had wrought so little change in the son, had not passed
harmless over the mother.

Mrs. Armadale’s health was breaking fast. As her strength failed, her
temper altered for the worse: she grew more and more fretful, more and
more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more reluctant to
leave her own room. Since the appearance of the advertisement five years
since, nothing had happened to force her memory back to the painful
associations connected with her early life. No word more on the
forbidden topic had passed between the rector and herself; no suspicion
had ever been raised in Allan’s mind of the existence of his namesake;
and yet, without the shadow of a reason for any special anxiety, Mrs.
Armadale had become, of late years, obstinately and fretfully uneasy
on the subject of her son. More than once Mr. Brock dreaded a serious
disagreement between them; but Allan’s natural sweetness of temper,
fortified by his love for his mother, carried him triumphantly through
all trials. Not a hard word or a harsh look ever escaped him in her
presence; he was unchangeably loving and forbearing with her to the very
last.

Such were the positions of the son, the mother, and the friend, when
the next notable event happened in the lives of the three. On a dreary
afternoon, early in the month of November, Mr. Brock was disturbed
over the composition of his sermon by a visit from the landlord of the
village inn.

After making his introductory apologies, the landlord stated the urgent
business on which he had come to the rectory clearly enough.

A few hours since a young man had been brought to the inn by some farm
laborers in the neighborhood, who had found him wandering about one of
their master’s fields in a disordered state of mind, which looked to
their eyes like downright madness. The landlord had given the poor
creature shelter while he sent for medical help; and the doctor, on
seeing him, had pronounced that he was suffering from fever on the
brain, and that his removal to the nearest town at which a hospital or
a work-house infirmary could be found to receive him would in all
probability be fatal to his chances of recovery. After hearing this
expression of opinion, and after observing for himself that the
stranger’s only luggage consisted of a small carpet-bag which had been
found in the field near him, the landlord had set off on the spot to
consult the rector, and to ask, in this serious emergency, what course
he was to take next.

Mr. Brock was the magistrate as well as the clergyman of the district,
and the course to be taken, in the first instance, was to his mind clear
enough. He put on his hat, and accompanied the landlord back to the inn.

At the inn door they were joined by Allan, who had heard the news
through another channel, and who was waiting Mr. Brock’s arrival, to
follow in the magistrate’s train, and to see what the stranger was like.
The village surgeon joined them at the same moment, and the four went
into the inn together.

They found the landlord’s son on one side, and the hostler on the other,
holding the man down in his chair. Young, slim, and undersized, he was
strong enough at that moment to make it a matter of difficulty for the
two to master him. His tawny complexion, his large, bright brown eyes,
and his black beard gave him something of a foreign look. His dress was
a little worn, but his linen was clean. His dusky hands were wiry and
nervous, and were lividly discolored in more places than one by the
scars of old wounds. The toes of one of his feet, off which he had
kicked the shoe, grasped at the chair rail through his stocking, with
the sensitive muscular action which is only seen in those who have been
accustomed to go barefoot. In the frenzy that now possessed him, it was
impossible to notice, to any useful purpose, more than this. After
a whispered consultation with Mr. Brock, the surgeon personally
superintended the patient’s removal to a quiet bedroom at the back of
the house. Shortly afterward his clothes and his carpet-bag were sent
downstairs, and were searched, on the chance of finding a clew by which
to communicate with his friends, in the magistrate’s presence.

The carpet-bag contained nothing but a change of clothing, and two
books--the Plays of Sophocles, in the original Greek, and the “Faust” of
Goethe, in the original German. Both volumes were much worn by reading,
and on the fly-leaf of each were inscribed the initials O. M. So much
the bag revealed, and no more.

The clothes which the man wore when he was discovered in the field were
tried next. A purse (containing a sovereign and a few shillings), a
pipe, a tobacco pouch, a handkerchief, and a little drinking-cup of horn
were produced in succession. The next object, and the last, was found
crumpled up carelessly in the breast-pocket of the coat. It was a
written testimonial to character, dated and signed, but without any
address.

So far as this document could tell it, the stranger’s story was a sad
one indeed. He had apparently been employed for a short time as usher at
a school, and had been turned adrift in the world, at the outset of his
illness, from the fear that the fever might be infectious, and that
the prosperity of the establishment might suffer accordingly. Not the
slightest imputation of any misbehavior in his employment rested on him.
On the contrary, the schoolmaster had great pleasure in testifying to
his capacity and his character, and in expressing a fervent hope that
he might (under Providence) succeed in recovering his health in somebody
else’s house. The written testimonial which afforded this glimpse at the
man’s story served one purpose more: it connected him with the initials
on the books, and identified him to the magistrate and the landlord
under the strangely uncouth name of Ozias Midwinter.

Mr. Brock laid aside the testimonial, suspecting that the schoolmaster
had purposely abstained from writing his address on it, with the view
of escaping all responsibility in the event of his usher’s death. In any
case, it was manifestly useless, under existing circumstances, to think
of tracing the poor wretch’s friends, if friends he had. To the inn he
had been brought, and, as a matter of common humanity, at the inn he
must remain for the present. The difficulty about expenses, if it came
to the worst, might possibly be met by charitable contributions from
the neighbors, or by a collection after a sermon at church. Assuring the
landlord that he would consider this part of the question and would let
him know the result, Mr. Brock quitted the inn, without noticing for the
moment that he had left Allan there behind him.

Before he had got fifty yards from the house his pupil overtook him.
Allan had been most uncharacteristically silent and serious all through
the search at the inn; but he had now recovered his usual high spirits.
A stranger would have set him down as wanting in common feeling.

“This is a sad business,” said the rector. “I really don’t know what to
do for the best about that unfortunate man.”

“You may make your mind quite easy, sir,” said young Armadale, in his
off-hand way. “I settled it all with the landlord a minute ago.”

“You!” exclaimed Mr. Brock, in the utmost astonishment.

“I have merely given a few simple directions,” pursued Allan. “Our
friend the usher is to have everything he requires, and is to be treated
like a prince; and when the doctor and the landlord want their money
they are to come to me.”

“My dear Allan,” Mr. Brock gently remonstrated, “when will you learn
to think before you act on those generous impulses of yours? You
are spending more money already on your yacht-building than you can
afford--”

“Only think! we laid the first planks of the deck the day before
yesterday,” said Allan, flying off to the new subject in his usual
bird-witted way. “There’s just enough of it done to walk on, if you
don’t feel giddy. I’ll help you up the ladder, Mr. Brock, if you’ll only
come and try.”

“Listen to me,” persisted the rector. “I’m not talking about the
yacht now; that is to say, I am only referring to the yacht as an
illustration--”

“And a very pretty illustration, too,” remarked the incorrigible Allan.
“Find me a smarter little vessel of her size in all England, and
I’ll give up yacht-building to-morrow. Whereabouts were we in our
conversation, sir? I’m rather afraid we have lost ourselves somehow.”

“I am rather afraid one of us is in the habit of losing himself every
time he opens his lips,” retorted Mr. Brock. “Come, come, Allan, this is
serious. You have been rendering yourself liable for expenses which you
may not be able to pay. Mind, I am far from blaming you for your kind
feeling toward this poor friendless man--”

“Don’t be low-spirited about him, sir. He’ll get over it--he’ll be all
right again in a week or so. A capital fellow, I have not the least
doubt!” continued Allan, whose habit it was to believe in everybody and
to despair of nothing. “Suppose you ask him to dinner when he gets well,
Mr. Brock? I should like to find out (when we are all three snug
and friendly together over our wine, you know) how he came by that
extraordinary name of his. Ozias Midwinter! Upon my life, his father
ought to be ashamed of himself.”

“Will you answer me one question before I go in?” said the rector,
stopping in despair at his own gate. “This man’s bill for lodging and
medical attendance may mount to twenty or thirty pounds before he gets
well again, if he ever does get well. How are you to pay for it?”

“What’s that the Chancellor of the Exchequer says when he finds himself
in a mess with his accounts, and doesn’t see his way out again?” asked
Allan. “He always tells his honorable friend he is quite willing to
leave a something or other--”

“A margin?” suggested Mr. Brock.

“That’s it,” said Allan. “I’m like the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I’m
quite willing to leave a margin. The yacht (bless her heart!) doesn’t
eat up everything. If I’m short by a pound or two, don’t be afraid,
sir. There’s no pride about me; I’ll go round with the hat, and get
the balance in the neighborhood. Deuce take the pounds, shillings,
and pence! I wish they could all three get rid of themselves, like the
Bedouin brothers at the show. Don’t you remember the Bedouin brothers,
Mr. Brock? ‘Ali will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat
of his brother Muli; Muli will take a lighted torch, and jump down the
throat of his brother Hassan; and Hassan, taking a third lighted torch,
will conclude the performances by jumping down his own throat, and
leaving the spectators in total darkness.’ Wonderfully good, that--what
I call real wit, with a fine strong flavor about it. Wait a minute!
Where are we? We have lost ourselves again. Oh, I remember--money. What
I can’t beat into my thick head,” concluded Allan, quite unconscious
that he was preaching socialist doctrines to a clergyman; “is the
meaning of the fuss that’s made about giving money away. Why can’t the
people who have got money to spare give it to the people who haven’t got
money to spare, and make things pleasant and comfortable all the world
over in that way? You’re always telling me to cultivate ideas, Mr. Brock
There’s an idea, and, upon my life, I don’t think it’s a bad one.”

Mr. Brock gave his pupil a good-humored poke with the end of his stick.
“Go back to your yacht,” he said. “All the little discretion you have
got in that flighty head of yours is left on board in your tool-chest.
How that lad will end,” pursued the rector, when he was left by himself,
“is more than any human being can say. I almost wish I had never taken
the responsibility of him on my shoulders.”

Three weeks passed before the stranger with the uncouth name was
pronounced to be at last on the way to recovery.

During this period Allan had made regular inquiries at the inn, and, as
soon as the sick man was allowed to see visitors, Allan was the first
who appeared at his bedside. So far Mr. Brock’s pupil had shown no more
than a natural interest in one of the few romantic circumstances
which had varied the monotony of the village life: he had committed
no imprudence, and he had exposed himself to no blame. But as the
days passed, young Armadale’s visits to the inn began to lengthen
considerably, and the surgeon (a cautious elderly man) gave the rector a
private hint to bestir himself. Mr. Brock acted on the hint immediately,
and discovered that Allan had followed his usual impulses in his usual
headlong way. He had taken a violent fancy to the castaway usher and had
invited Ozias Midwinter to reside permanently in the neighborhood in the
new and interesting character of his bosom friend.

Before Mr. Brock could make up his mind how to act in this emergency, he
received a note from Allan’s mother, begging him to use his privilege as
an old friend, and to pay her a visit in her room.

He found Mrs. Armadale suffering under violent nervous agitation, caused
entirely by a recent interview with her son. Allan had been sitting with
her all the morning, and had talked of nothing but his new friend. The
man with the horrible name (as poor Mrs. Armadale described him) had
questioned Allan, in a singularly inquisitive manner, on the subject of
himself and his family, but had kept his own personal history entirely
in the dark. At some former period of his life he had been accustomed to
the sea and to sailing. Allan had, unfortunately, found this out, and
a bond of union between them was formed on the spot. With a merciless
distrust of the stranger--simply _because_ he was a stranger--which
appeared rather unreasonable to Mr. Brock, Mrs. Armadale besought the
rector to go to the inn without a moment’s loss of time, and never to
rest until he had made the man give a proper account of himself. “Find
out everything about his father and mother!” she said, in her vehement
female way. “Make sure before you leave him that he is not a vagabond
roaming the country under an assumed name.”

“My dear lady,” remonstrated the rector, obediently taking his hat,
“whatever else we may doubt, I really think we may feel sure about the
man’s name! It is so remarkably ugly that it must be genuine. No sane
human being would _assume_ such a name as Ozias Midwinter.”

“You may be quite right, and I may be quite wrong; but pray go and see
him,” persisted Mrs. Armadale. “Go, and don’t spare him, Mr. Brock.
How do we know that this illness of his may not have been put on for a
purpose?”

It was useless to reason with her. The whole College of Physicians might
have certified to the man’s illness, and, in her present frame of mind,
Mrs. Armadale would have disbelieved the College, one and all, from
the president downward. Mr. Brock took the wise way out of the
difficulty--he said no more, and he set off for the inn immediately.

Ozias Midwinter, recovering from brain-fever, was a startling object to
contemplate on a first view of him. His shaven head, tied up in an old
yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown
eyes, preternaturally large and wild; his rough black beard; his long,
supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering till they looked like
claws--all tended to discompose the rector at the outset of the
interview. When the first feeling of surprise had worn off, the
impression that followed it was not an agreeable one. Mr. Brock could
not conceal from himself that the stranger’s manner was against him.
The general opinion has settled that, if a man is honest, he is bound to
assert it by looking straight at his fellow-creatures when he speaks to
them. If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in
looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree
by a nervous restlessness in his organization, which appeared to pervade
every fiber in his lean, lithe body. The rector’s healthy Anglo-Saxon
flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher’s supple
brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher’s haggard
yellow face. “God forgive me!” thought Mr. Brock, with his mind running
on Allan and Allan’s mother, “I wish I could see my way to turning Ozias
Midwinter adrift in the world again!”

The conversation which ensued between the two was a very guarded one.
Mr. Brock felt his way gently, and found himself, try where he might,
always kept politely, more or less, in the dark.

From first to last, the man’s real character shrank back with a savage
shyness from the rector’s touch. He started by an assertion which it
was impossible to look at him and believe--he declared that he was only
twenty years of age. All he could be persuaded to say on the subject of
the school was that the bare recollection of it was horrible to him.
He had only filled the usher’s situation for ten days when the first
appearance of his illness caused his dismissal. How he had reached
the field in which he had been found was more than he could say. He
remembered traveling a long distance by railway, with a purpose (if he
had a purpose) which it was now impossible to recall, and then wandering
coastward, on foot, all through the day, or all through the night--he
was not sure which. The sea kept running in his mind when his mind began
to give way. He had been employed on the sea as a lad. He had left it,
and had filled a situation at a bookseller’s in a country town. He had
left the bookseller’s, and had tried the school. Now the school had
turned him out, he must try something else. It mattered little what he
tried--failure (for which nobody was ever to blame but himself) was
sure to be the end of it, sooner or later. Friends to assist him, he
had none to apply to; and as for relations, he wished to be excused from
speaking of them. For all he knew they might be dead, and for all _they_
knew _he_ might be dead. That was a melancholy acknowledgment to make at
his time of life, there was no denying it. It might tell against him in
the opinions of others; and it did tell against him, no doubt, in the
opinion of the gentleman who was talking to him at that moment.

These strange answers were given in a tone and manner far removed from
bitterness on the one side, or from indifference on the other. Ozias
Midwinter at twenty spoke of his life as Ozias Midwinter at seventy
might have spoken with a long weariness of years on him which he had
learned to bear patiently.

Two circumstances pleaded strongly against the distrust with which, in
sheer perplexity of mind, Mr. Brock blindly regarded him. He had written
to a savings-bank in a distant part of England, had drawn his money, and
had paid the doctor and the landlord. A man of vulgar mind, after acting
in this manner, would have treated his obligations lightly when he
had settled his bills. Ozias Midwinter spoke of his obligations--and
especially of his obligation to Allan--with a fervor of thankfulness
which it was not surprising only, but absolutely painful to witness. He
showed a horrible sincerity of astonishment at having been treated
with common Christian kindness in a Christian land. He spoke of Allan’s
having become answerable for all the expenses of sheltering, nursing,
and curing him, with a savage rapture of gratitude and surprise which
burst out of him like a flash of lightning. “So help me God!” cried the
castaway usher, “I never met with the like of him: I never heard of the
like of him before!” In the next instant, the one glimpse of light which
the man had let in on his own passionate nature was quenched again
in darkness. His wandering eyes, returning to their old trick, looked
uneasily away from Mr. Brock, and his voice dropped back once more into
its unnatural steadiness and quietness of tone. “I beg your pardon,
sir,” he said. “I have been used to be hunted, and cheated, and starved.
Everything else comes strange to me.” Half attracted by the man, half
repelled by him, Mr. Brock, on rising to take leave, impulsively offered
his hand, and then, with a sudden misgiving, confusedly drew it back
again. “You meant that kindly, sir,” said Ozias Midwinter, with his own
hands crossed resolutely behind him. “I don’t complain of your thinking
better of it. A man who can’t give a proper account of himself is not a
man for a gentleman in your position to take by the hand.”

Mr. Brock left the inn thoroughly puzzled. Before returning to Mrs.
Armadale he sent for her son. The chances were that the guard had been
off the stranger’s tongue when he spoke to Allan, and with Allan’s
frankness there was no fear of his concealing anything that had passed
between them from the rector’s knowledge.

Here again Mr. Brock’s diplomacy achieved no useful results.

Once started on the subject of Ozias Midwinter, Allan rattled on about
his new friend in his usual easy, light-hearted way. But he had really
nothing of importance to tell, for nothing of importance had been
revealed to him. They had talked about boat-building and sailing by the
hour together, and Allan had got some valuable hints. They had discussed
(with diagrams to assist them, and with more valuable hints for Allan)
the serious impending question of the launch of the yacht. On other
occasions they had diverged to other subjects--to more of them than
Allan could remember, on the spur of the moment. Had Midwinter said
nothing about his relations in the flow of all this friendly talk?
Nothing, except that they had not behaved well to him--hang his
relations! Was he at all sensitive on the subject of his own odd name?
Not the least in the world; he had set the example, like a sensible
fellow, of laughing at it himself.

Mr. Brock still persisted. He inquired next what Allan had seen in the
stranger to take such a fancy to? Allan had seen in him--what he didn’t
see in people in general. He wasn’t like all the other fellows in the
neighborhood. All the other fellows were cut out on the same pattern.
Every man of them was equally healthy, muscular, loud, hard-hearted,
clean-skinned, and rough; every man of them drank the same draughts of
beer, smoked the same short pipes all day long, rode the best horse,
shot over the best dog, and put the best bottle of wine in England on
his table at night; every man of them sponged himself every morning
in the same sort of tub of cold water and bragged about it in frosty
weather in the same sort of way; every man of them thought getting
into debt a capital joke and betting on horse-races one of the most
meritorious actions that a human being can perform. They were, no doubt,
excellent fellows in their way; but the worst of them was, they were
all exactly alike. It was a perfect godsend to meet with a man like
Midwinter--a man who was not cut out on the regular local pattern, and
whose way in the world had the one great merit (in those parts) of being
a way of his own.

Leaving all remonstrances for a fitter opportunity, the rector went back
to Mrs. Armadale. He could not disguise from himself that Allan’s mother
was the person really answerable for Allan’s present indiscretion. If
the lad had seen a little less of the small gentry in the neighborhood,
and a little more of the great outside world at home and abroad, the
pleasure of cultivating Ozias Midwinter’s society might have had fewer
attractions for him.

Conscious of the unsatisfactory result of his visit to the inn, Mr.
Brock felt some anxiety about the reception of his report when he found
himself once more in Mrs. Armadale’s presence. His forebodings were soon
realized. Try as he might to make the best of it, Mrs. Armadale seized
on the one suspicious fact of the usher’s silence about himself as
justifying the strongest measures that could be taken to separate him
from her son. If the rector refused to interfere, she declared her
intention of writing to Ozias Midwinter with her own hand. Remonstrance
irritated her to such a pitch that she astounded Mr. Brock by reverting
to the forbidden subject of five years since, and referring him to the
conversation which had passed between them when the advertisement had
been discovered in the newspaper. She passionately declared that the
vagabond Armadale of that advertisement, and the vagabond Midwinter at
the village inn, might, for all she know to the contrary, be one and the
same. Foreboding a serious disagreement between the mother and son if
the mother interfered, Mr. Brock undertook to see Midwinter again, and
to tell him plainly that he must give a proper account of himself, or
that his intimacy with Allan must cease. The two concessions which he
exacted from Mrs. Armadale in return were that she should wait patiently
until the doctor reported the man fit to travel, and that she should be
careful in the interval not to mention the matter in any way to her son.

In a week’s time Midwinter was able to drive out (with Allan for his
coachman) in the pony chaise belonging to the inn, and in ten days the
doctor privately reported him as fit to travel. Toward the close of
that tenth day, Mr. Brock met Allan and his new friend enjoying the last
gleams of wintry sunshine in one of the inland lanes. He waited until
the two had separated, and then followed the usher on his way back to
the inn.

The rector’s resolution to speak pitilessly to the purpose was in some
danger of failing him as he drew nearer and nearer to the friendless
man, and saw how feebly he still walked, how loosely his worn coat
hung about him, and how heavily he leaned on his cheap, clumsy stick.
Humanely reluctant to say the decisive words too precipitately, Mr.
Brock tried him first with a little compliment on the range of his
reading, as shown by the volume of Sophocles and the volume of Goethe
which had been found in his bag, and asked how long he had been
acquainted with German and Greek. The quick ear of Midwinter detected
something wrong in the tone of Mr. Brock’s voice. He turned in the
darkening twilight, and looked suddenly and suspiciously in the rector’s
face.

“You have something to say to me,” he answered; “and it is not what you
are saying now.”

There was no help for it but to accept the challenge. Very delicately,
with many preparatory words, to which the other listened in unbroken
silence, Mr. Brock came little by little nearer and nearer to the point.
Long before he had really reached it--long before a man of no more than
ordinary sensibility would have felt what was coming--Ozias Midwinter
stood still in the lane, and told the rector that he need say no more.

“I understand you, sir,” said the usher. “Mr. Armadale has an
ascertained position in the world; Mr. Armadale has nothing to conceal,
and nothing to be ashamed of. I agree with you that I am not a fit
companion for him. The best return I can make for his kindness is
to presume on it no longer. You may depend on my leaving this place
to-morrow morning.”

He spoke no word more; he would hear no word more. With a self-control
which, at his years and with his temperament, was nothing less than
marvelous, he civilly took off his hat, bowed, and returned to the inn
by himself.

Mr. Brock slept badly that night. The issue of the interview in the lane
had made the problem of Ozias Midwinter a harder problem to solve than
ever.

Early the next morning a letter was brought to the rector from the inn,
and the messenger announced that the strange gentleman had taken his
departure. The letter inclosed an open note addressed to Allan, and
requested Allan’s tutor (after first reading it himself) to forward it
or not at his own sole discretion. The note was a startlingly short one;
it began and ended in a dozen words: “Don’t blame Mr. Brock; Mr. Brock
is right. Thank you, and good-by.--O. M.”

The rector forwarded the note to its proper destination, as a matter of
course, and sent a few lines to Mrs. Armadale at the same time to quiet
her anxiety by the news of the usher’s departure. This done, he waited
the visit from his pupil, which would probably follow the delivery of
the note, in no very tranquil frame of mind. There might or might not be
some deep motive at the bottom of Midwinter’s conduct; but thus far it
was impossible to deny that he had behaved in such a manner as to rebuke
the rector’s distrust, and to justify Allan’s good opinion of him.

The morning wore on, and young Armadale never appeared. After looking
for him vainly in the yard where the yacht was building, Mr. Brock went
to Mrs. Armadale’s house, and there heard news from the servant which
turned his steps in the direction of the inn. The landlord at once
acknowledged the truth: young Mr. Armadale had come there with an open
letter in his hand, and had insisted on being informed of the road which
his friend had taken. For the first time in the landlord’s experience of
him, the young gentleman was out of temper; and the girl who waited on
the customers had stupidly mentioned a circumstance which had added
fuel to the fire. She had acknowledged having heard Mr. Midwinter lock
himself into his room overnight, and burst into a violent fit of crying.
That trifling particular had set Mr. Armadale’s face all of a flame; he
had shouted and sworn; he had rushed into the stables; and forced the
hostler to saddle him a horse, and had set off full gallop on the road
that Ozias Midwinter had taken before him.

After cautioning the landlord to keep Allan’s conduct a secret if any
of Mrs. Armadale’s servants came that morning to the inn, Mr. Brock went
home again, and waited anxiously to see what the day would bring forth.

To his infinite relief his pupil appeared at the rectory late in the
afternoon.

Allan looked and spoke with a dogged determination which was quite new
in his old friend’s experience of him. Without waiting to be questioned,
he told his story in his usual straightforward way. He had overtaken
Midwinter on the road; and--after trying vainly first to induce him to
return, then to find out where he was going to--had threatened to
keep company with him for the rest of the day, and had so extorted the
confession that he was going to try his luck in London. Having gained
this point, Allan had asked next for his friend’s address in London, had
been entreated by the other not to press his request, had pressed it,
nevertheless, with all his might, and had got the address at last by
making an appeal to Midwinter’s gratitude, for which (feeling heartily
ashamed of himself) he had afterward asked Midwinter’s pardon. “I like
the poor fellow, and I won’t give him up,” concluded Allan, bringing his
clinched fist down with a thump on the rectory table. “Don’t be afraid
of my vexing my mother; I’ll leave you to speak to her, Mr. Brock, at
your own time and in your own way; and I’ll just say this much more
by way of bringing the thing to an end. Here is the address safe in my
pocket-book, and here am I, standing firm for once on a resolution of my
own. I’ll give you and my mother time to reconsider this; and, when the
time is up, if my friend Midwinter doesn’t come to _me_, I’ll go to my
friend Midwinter.”

So the matter rested for the present; and such was the result of turning
the castaway usher adrift in the world again.

-------------

A month passed, and brought in the new year--‘51. Overleaping that short
lapse of time, Mr. Brock paused, with a heavy heart, at the next
event; to his mind the one mournful, the one memorable event of the
series--Mrs. Armadale’s death.

The first warning of the affliction that was near at hand had followed
close on the usher’s departure in December, and had arisen out of a
circumstance which dwelt painfully on the rector’s memory from that time
forth.

But three days after Midwinter had left for London, Mr. Brock was
accosted in the village by a neatly dressed woman, wearing a gown and
bonnet of black silk and a red Paisley shawl, who was a total stranger
to him, and who inquired the way to Mrs. Armadale’s house. She put the
question without raising the thick black veil that hung over her face.
Mr. Brock, in giving her the necessary directions, observed that she
was a remarkably elegant and graceful woman, and looked after her as she
bowed and left him, wondering who Mrs. Armadale’s visitor could possibly
be.

A quarter of an hour later the lady, still veiled as before, passed Mr.
Brock again close to the inn. She entered the house, and spoke to the
landlady. Seeing the landlord shortly afterward hurrying round to the
stables, Mr. Brock asked him if the lady was going away. Yes; she had
come from the railway in the omnibus, but she was going back again more
creditably in a carriage of her own hiring, supplied by the inn.

The rector proceeded on his walk, rather surprised to find his thoughts
running inquisitively on a woman who was a stranger to him. When he
got home again, he found the village surgeon waiting his return with an
urgent message from Allan’s mother. About an hour since, the surgeon
had been sent for in great haste to see Mrs. Armadale. He had found her
suffering from an alarming nervous attack, brought on (as the servants
suspected) by an unexpected, and, possibly, an unwelcome visitor, who
had called that morning. The surgeon had done all that was needful,
and had no apprehension of any dangerous results. Finding his patient
eagerly desirous, on recovering herself, to see Mr. Brock immediately,
he had thought it important to humor her, and had readily undertaken to
call at the rectory with a message to that effect.

Looking at Mrs. Armadale with a far deeper interest in her than the
surgeon’s interest, Mr. Brock saw enough in her face, when it turned
toward him on his entering the room, to justify instant and serious
alarm. She allowed him no opportunity of soothing her; she heeded none
of his inquiries. Answers to certain questions of her own were what
she wanted, and what she was determined to have: Had Mr. Brock seen the
woman who had presumed to visit her that morning? Yes. Had Allan seen
her? No; Allan had been at work since breakfast, and was at work still,
in his yard by the water-side.

This latter reply appeared to quiet Mrs. Armadale for the moment;
she put her next question--the most extraordinary question of the
three--more composedly: Did the rector think Allan would object to
leaving his vessel for the present, and to accompanying his mother on
a journey to look out for a new house in some other part of England? In
the greatest amazement Mr. Brock asked what reason there could possibly
be for leaving her present residence? Mrs. Armadale’s reason, when she
gave it, only added to his surprise. The woman’s first visit might be
followed by a second; and rather than see her again, rather than run
the risk of Allan’s seeing her and speaking to her, Mrs. Armadale would
leave England if necessary, and end her days in a foreign land. Taking
counsel of his experience as a magistrate, Mr. Brock inquired if the
woman had come to ask for money. Yes; respectably as she was dressed,
she had described herself as being “in distress”; had asked for money,
and had got it. But the money was of no importance; the one thing
needful was to get away before the woman came again. More and more
surprised, Mr. Brock ventured on another question: Was it long since
Mrs. Armadale and her visitor had last met? Yes; longer than all Allan’s
lifetime--as long ago as the year before Allan was born.

At that reply, the rector shifted his ground, and took counsel next of
his experience as a friend.

“Is this person,” he asked, “connected in any way with the painful
remembrances of your early life?”

“Yes; with the painful remembrance of the time when I was married,” said
Mrs. Armadale. “She was associated, as a mere child, with a circumstance
which I must think of with shame and sorrow to my dying day.”

Mr. Brock noticed the altered tone in which his old friend spoke, and
the unwillingness with which she gave her answer.

“Can you tell me more about her without referring to yourself?” he went
on. “I am sure I can protect you, if you will only help me a little. Her
name, for instance--you can tell me her name?”

Mrs. Armadale shook her head, “The name I knew her by,” she said, “would
be of no use to you. She has been married since then; she told me so
herself.”

“And without telling you her married name?”

“She refused to tell it.”

“Do you know anything of her friends?”

“Only of her friends when she was a child. They called themselves her
uncle and aunt. They were low people, and they deserted her at the
school on my father’s estate. We never heard any more of them.”

“Did she remain under your father’s care?”

“She remained under my care; that is to say, she traveled with us. We
were leaving England, just as that time, for Madeira. I had my father’s
leave to take her with me, and to train the wretch to be my maid--”

At those words Mrs. Armadale stopped confusedly. Mr. Brock tried gently
to lead her on. It was useless; she started up in violent agitation, and
walked excitedly backward and forward in the room.

“Don’t ask me any more!” she cried out, in loud, angry tones. “I parted
with her when she was a girl of twelve years old. I never saw her again,
I never heard of her again, from that time to this. I don’t know how
she has discovered me, after all the years that have passed; I only know
that she _has_ discovered me. She will find her way to Allan next; she
will poison my son’s mind against me. Help me to get away from her! help
me to take Allan away before she comes back!”

The rector asked no more questions; it would have been cruel to press
her further. The first necessity was to compose her by promising
compliance with all that she desired. The second was to induce her to
see another medical man. Mr. Brock contrived to reach his end harmlessly
in this latter case by reminding her that she wanted strength to travel,
and that her own medical attendant might restore her all the more
speedily to herself if he were assisted by the best professional advice.
Having overcome her habitual reluctance to seeing strangers by this
means, the rector at once went to Allan; and, delicately concealing what
Mrs. Armadale had said at the interview, broke the news to him that his
mother was seriously ill. Allan would hear of no messengers being sent
for assistance: he drove off on the spot to the railway, and telegraphed
himself to Bristol for medical help.

On the next morning the help came, and Mr. Brock’s worst fears were
confirmed. The village surgeon had fatally misunderstood the case from
the first, and the time was past now at which his errors of treatment
might have been set right. The shock of the previous morning had
completed the mischief. Mrs. Armadale’s days were numbered.

The son who dearly loved her, the old friend to whom her life was
precious, hoped vainly to the last. In a month from the physician’s
visit all hope was over; and Allan shed the first bitter tears of his
life at his mother’s grave.

She had died more peacefully than Mr. Brock had dared to hope, leaving
all her little fortune to her son, and committing him solemnly to the
care of her one friend on earth. The rector had entreated her to let him
write and try to reconcile her brothers with her before it was too
late. She had only answered sadly that it was too late already. But one
reference escaped her in her last illness to those early sorrows which
had weighed heavily on all her after-life, and which had passed thrice
already, like shadows of evil, between the rector and herself. Even on
her deathbed she had shrunk from letting the light fall clearly on the
story of the past. She had looked at Allan kneeling by the bedside,
and had whispered to Mr. Brock: “_Never let his Namesake come near him!
Never let that Woman find him out_!” No word more fell from her that
touched on the misfortunes which had tried her in the past, or on the
dangers which she dreaded in the future. The secret which she had kept
from her son and from her friend was a secret which she carried with her
to the grave.

When the last offices of affection and respect had been performed, Mr.
Brock felt it his duty, as executor to the deceased lady, to write to
her brothers, and to give them information of her death. Believing that
he had to deal with two men who would probably misinterpret his motives
if he left Allan’s position unexplained, he was careful to remind them
that Mrs. Armadale’s son was well provided for, and that the object of
his letter was simply to communicate the news of their sister’s decease.
The two letters were dispatched toward the middle of January, and by
return of post the answers were received. The first which the rector
opened was written not by the elder brother, but by the elder brother’s
only son. The young man had succeeded to the estates in Norfolk on his
father’s death, some little time since. He wrote in a frank and friendly
spirit, assuring Mr. Brock that, however strongly his father might have
been prejudiced against Mrs. Armadale, the hostile feeling had never
extended to her son. For himself, he had only to add that he would be
sincerely happy to welcome his cousin to Thorpe Ambrose whenever his
cousin came that way.

The second letter was a far less agreeable reply to receive than the
first. The younger brother was still alive, and still resolute neither
to forget nor forgive. He informed Mr. Brock that his deceased sister’s
choice of a husband, and her conduct to her father at the time of her
marriage, had made any relations of affection or esteem impossible, on
his side, from that time forth. Holding the opinions he did, it would
be equally painful to his nephew and himself if any personal intercourse
took place between them. He had adverted, as generally as possible, to
the nature of the differences which had kept him apart from his
late sister, in order to satisfy Mr. Brock’s mind that a personal
acquaintance with young Mr. Armadale was, as a matter of delicacy, quite
out of the question and, having done this, he would beg leave to close
the correspondence.

Mr. Brock wisely destroyed the second letter on the spot, and, after
showing Allan his cousin’s invitation, suggested that he should go to
Thorpe Ambrose as soon as he felt fit to present himself to strangers.

Allan listened to the advice patiently enough; but he declined to profit
by it. “I will shake hands with my cousin willingly if I ever meet him,”
 he said; “but I will visit no family, and be a guest in no house, in
which my mother has been badly treated.” Mr. Brock remonstrated gently,
and tried to put matters in their proper light. Even at that time--even
while he was still ignorant of events which were then impending--Allan’s
strangely isolated position in the world was a subject of serious
anxiety to his old friend and tutor. The proposed visit to Thorpe
Ambrose opened the very prospect of his making friends and connections
suited to him in rank and age which Mr. Brock most desired to see; but
Allan was not to be persuaded; he was obstinate and unreasonable; and
the rector had no alternative but to drop the subject.

One on another the weeks passed monotonously, and Allan showed but
little of the elasticity of his age and character in bearing the
affliction that had made him motherless. He finished and launched his
yacht; but his own journeymen remarked that the work seemed to have lost
its interest for him. It was not natural to the young man to brood
over his solitude and his grief as he was brooding now. As the spring
advanced, Mr. Brock began to feel uneasy about the future, if Allan was
not roused at once by change of scene. After much pondering, the
rector decided on trying a trip to Paris, and on extending the journey
southward if his companion showed an interest in Continental traveling.
Allan’s reception of the proposal made atonement for his obstinacy in
refusing to cultivate his cousin’s acquaintance; he was willing to go
with Mr. Brock wherever Mr. Brock pleased. The rector took him at his
word, and in the middle of March the two strangely assorted companions
left for London on their way to Paris.

Arrived in London, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly face to face
with a new anxiety. The unwelcome subject of Ozias Midwinter, which
had been buried in peace since the beginning of December, rose to the
surface again, and confronted the rector at the very outset of his
travels, more unmanageably than ever.

Mr. Brock’s position in dealing with this difficult matter had been
hard enough to maintain when he had first meddled with it. He now found
himself with no vantage-ground left to stand on. Events had so ordered
it that the difference of opinion between Allan and his mother on the
subject of the usher was entirely disassociated with the agitation
which had hastened Mrs. Armadale’s death. Allan’s resolution to say no
irritating words, and Mr. Brock’s reluctance to touch on a disagreeable
topic, had kept them both silent about Midwinter in Mrs. Armadale’s
presence during the three days which had intervened between that
person’s departure and the appearance of the strange woman in the
village. In the period of suspense and suffering that had followed no
recurrence to the subject of the usher had been possible, and none had
taken place. Free from all mental disquietude on this score, Allan
had stoutly preserved his perverse interest in his new friend. He had
written to tell Midwinter of his affliction, and he now proposed (unless
the rector formally objected to it) paying a visit to his friend before
he started for Paris the next morning.

What was Mr. Brock to do? There was no denying that Midwinter’s conduct
had pleaded unanswerably against poor Mrs. Armadale’s unfounded distrust
of him. If the rector, with no convincing reason to allege against it,
and with no right to interfere but the right which Allan’s courtesy gave
him, declined to sanction the proposed visit, then farewell to all
the old sociability and confidence between tutor and pupil on the
contemplated tour. Environed by difficulties, which might have been
possibly worsted by a less just and a less kind-hearted man, Mr. Brock
said a cautious word or two at parting, and (with more confidence
in Midwinter’s discretion and self-denial than he quite liked to
acknowledge, even to himself) left Allan free to take his own way.

After whiling away an hour, during the interval of his pupil’s absence,
by a walk in the streets, the rector returned to his hotel, and, finding
the newspaper disengaged in the coffee-room, sat down absently to look
over it. His eye, resting idly on the title-page, was startled into
instant attention by the very first advertisement that it chanced
to light on at the head of the column. There was Allan’s mysterious
namesake again, figuring in capital letters, and associated this time
(in the character of a dead man) with the offer of a pecuniary reward.
Thus it ran:


SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.--To parish clerks, sextons, and others. Twenty
Pounds reward will be paid to any person who can produce evidence of
the death of ALLAN ARMADALE, only son of the late Allan Armadale, of
Barbadoes, and born in Trinidad in the year 1830. Further particulars on
application to Messrs. Hammick and Ridge, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.


Even Mr. Brock’s essentially unimaginative mind began to stagger
superstitiously in the dark as he laid the newspaper down again. Little
by little a vague suspicion took possession of him that the whole series
of events which had followed the first appearance of Allan’s namesake
in the newspaper six years since was held together by some mysterious
connection, and was tending steadily to some unimaginable end. Without
knowing why, he began to feel uneasy at Allan’s absence. Without knowing
why, he became impatient to get his pupil away from England before
anything else happened between night and morning.

In an hour more the rector was relieved of all immediate anxiety by
Allan’s return to the hotel. The young man was vexed and out of spirits.
He had discovered Midwinter’s lodgings, but he had failed to find
Midwinter himself. The only account his landlady could give of him was
that he had gone out at his customary time to get his dinner at the
nearest eating-house, and that he had not returned, in accordance with
his usual regular habits, at his usual regular hour. Allan had therefore
gone to inquire at the eating-house, and had found, on describing him,
that Midwinter was well known there. It was his custom, on other days,
to take a frugal dinner, and to sit half an hour afterward reading the
newspaper. On this occasion, after dining, he had taken up the paper
as usual, had suddenly thrown it aside again, and had gone, nobody knew
where, in a violent hurry. No further information being attainable,
Allan had left a note at the lodgings, giving his address at the hotel,
and begging Midwinter to come and say good-by before his departure for
Paris.

The evening passed, and Allan’s invisible friend never appeared. The
morning came, bringing no obstacles with it, and Mr. Brock and his pupil
left London. So far Fortune had declared herself at last on the rector’s
side. Ozias Midwinter, after intrusively rising to the surface, had
conveniently dropped out of sight again. What was to happen next?

-------------

Advancing once more, by three weeks only, from past to present, Mr.
Brock’s memory took up the next event on the seventh of April. To all
appearance, the chain was now broken at last. The new event had no
recognizable connection (either to his mind or to Allan’s) with any
of the persons who had appeared, or any of the circumstances that had
happened, in the by-gone time.

The travelers had as yet got no further than Paris. Allan’s spirits had
risen with the change; and he had been made all the readier to enjoy the
novelty of the scene around him by receiving a letter from Midwinter,
containing news which Mr. Brock himself acknowledged promised fairly for
the future. The ex-usher had been away on business when Allan had called
at his lodgings, having been led by an accidental circumstance to open
communications with his relatives on that day. The result had taken him
entirely by surprise: it had unexpectedly secured to him a little income
of his own for the rest of his life. His future plans, now that this
piece of good fortune had fallen to his share, were still unsettled.
But if Allan wished to hear what he ultimately decided on, his agent in
London (whose direction he inclosed) would receive communications
for him, and would furnish Mr. Armadale at all future times with his
address.

On receipt of this letter, Allan had seized the pen in his usual
headlong way, and had insisted on Midwinter’s immediately joining Mr.
Brock and himself on their travels. The last days of March passed, and
no answer to the proposal was received. The first days of April came,
and on the seventh of the month there was a letter for Allan at last on
the breakfast-table. He snatched it up, looked at the address, and threw
the letter down again impatiently. The handwriting was not Midwinter’s.
Allan finished his breakfast before he cared to read what his
correspondent had to say to him.

The meal over, young Armadale lazily opened the letter. He began it with
an expression of supreme indifference. He finished it with a sudden leap
out of his chair, and a loud shout of astonishment. Wondering, as he
well might, at this extraordinary outbreak, Mr. Brock took up the letter
which Allan had tossed across the table to him. Before he had come to
the end of it, his hands dropped helplessly on his knees, and the blank
bewilderment of his pupil’s expression was accurately reflected on his
own face.

If ever two men had good cause for being thrown completely off their
balance, Allan and the rector were those two. The letter which had
struck them both with the same shock of astonishment did, beyond all
question, contain an announcement which, on a first discovery of it, was
simply incredible. The news was from Norfolk, and was to this effect. In
little more than one week’s time death had mown down no less than three
lives in the family at Thorpe Ambrose, and Allan Armadale was at that
moment heir to an estate of eight thousand a year!

A second perusal of the letter enabled the rector and his companion to
master the details which had escaped them on a first reading.

The writer was the family lawyer at Thorpe Ambrose. After announcing to
Allan the deaths of his cousin Arthur at the age of twenty-five, of his
uncle Henry at the age of forty-eight, and of his cousin John at the
age of twenty-one, the lawyer proceeded to give a brief abstract of the
terms of the elder Mr. Blanchard’s will. The claims of male issue were,
as is not unusual in such cases, preferred to the claims of female
issue. Failing Arthur and his issue male, the estate was left to Henry
and his issue male. Failing them, it went to the issue male of Henry’s
sister; and, in default of such issue, to the next heir male. As events
had happened, the two young men, Arthur and John, had died unmarried,
and Henry Blanchard had died, leaving no surviving child but a daughter.
Under these circumstances, Allan was the next heir male pointed at by
the will, and was now legally successor to the Thorpe Ambrose estate.
Having made this extraordinary announcement, the lawyer requested to be
favored with Mr. Armadale’s instructions, and added, in conclusion, that
he would be happy to furnish any further particulars that were desired.

It was useless to waste time in wondering at an event which neither
Allan nor his mother had ever thought of as even remotely possible. The
only thing to be done was to go back to England at once. The next day
found the travelers installed once more in their London hotel, and the
day after the affair was placed in the proper professional hands. The
inevitable corresponding and consulting ensued, and one by one the
all-important particulars flowed in, until the measure of information
was pronounced to be full.

This was the strange story of the three deaths:

At the time when Mr. Brock had written to Mrs. Armadale’s relatives to
announce the news of her decease (that is to say, in the middle of
the month of January), the family at Thorpe Ambrose numbered five
persons--Arthur Blanchard (in possession of the estate), living in the
great house with his mother; and Henry Blanchard, the uncle, living in
the neighborhood, a widower with two children, a son and a daughter. To
cement the family connection still more closely, Arthur Blanchard was
engaged to be married to his cousin. The wedding was to be celebrated
with great local rejoicings in the coming summer, when the young lady
had completed her twentieth year.

The month of February had brought changes with it in the family
position. Observing signs of delicacy in the health of his son, Mr.
Henry Blanchard left Norfolk, taking the young man with him, under
medical advice, to try the climate of Italy. Early in the ensuing month
of March, Arthur Blanchard also left Thorpe Ambrose, for a few days
only, on business which required his presence in London. The business
took him into the City. Annoyed by the endless impediments in the
streets, he returned westward by one of the river steamers, and, so
returning, met his death.

As the steamer left the wharf, he noticed a woman near him who had shown
a singular hesitation in embarking, and who had been the last of the
passengers to take her place in the vessel. She was neatly dressed in
black silk, with a red Paisley shawl over her shoulders, and she kept
her face hidden behind a thick veil. Arthur Blanchard was struck by the
rare grace and elegance of her figure, and he felt a young man’s passing
curiosity to see her face. She neither lifted her veil nor turned her
head his way. After taking a few steps hesitatingly backward and forward
on the deck, she walked away on a sudden to the stern of the vessel. In
a minute more there was a cry of alarm from the man at the helm, and
the engines were stopped immediately. The woman had thrown herself
overboard.

The passengers all rushed to the side of the vessel to look. Arthur
Blanchard alone, without an instant’s hesitation, jumped into the river.
He was an excellent swimmer, and he reached the woman as she rose again
to the surface, after sinking for the first time. Help was at hand, and
they were both brought safely ashore. The woman was taken to the nearest
police station, and was soon restored to her senses, her preserver
giving his name and address, as usual in such cases, to the inspector on
duty, who wisely recommended him to get into a warm bath, and to send to
his lodgings for dry clothes. Arthur Blanchard, who had never known an
hour’s illness since he was a child, laughed at the caution, and went
back in a cab. The next day he was too ill to attend the examination
before the magistrate. A fortnight afterward he was a dead man.

The news of the calamity reached Henry Blanchard and his son at Milan,
and within an hour of the time when they received it they were on their
way back to England. The snow on the Alps had loosened earlier than
usual that year, and the passes were notoriously dangerous. The father
and son, traveling in their own carriage, were met on the mountain by
the mail returning, after sending the letters on by hand. Warnings which
would have produced their effect under any ordinary circumstances were
now vainly addressed to the two Englishmen. Their impatience to be
at home again, after the catastrophe which had befallen their family,
brooked no delay. Bribes lavishly offered to the postilions, tempted
them to go on. The carriage pursued its way, and was lost to view in the
mist. When it was seen again, it was disinterred from the bottom of a
precipice--the men, the horses, and the vehicle all crushed together
under the wreck and ruin of an avalanche.

So the three lives were mown down by death. So, in a clear sequence of
events, a woman’s suicide-leap into a river had opened to Allan Armadale
the succession to the Thorpe Ambrose estates.

Who was the woman? The man who saved her life never knew. The magistrate
who remanded her, the chaplain who exhorted her, the reporter who
exhibited her in print, never knew. It was recorded of her with surprise
that, though most respectably dressed, she had nevertheless described
herself as being “in distress.” She had expressed the deepest
contrition, but had persisted in giving a name which was on the face of
it a false one; in telling a commonplace story, which was manifestly
an invention; and in refusing to the last to furnish any clew to her
friends. A lady connected with a charitable institution (“interested by
her extreme elegance and beauty”) had volunteered to take charge of her,
and to bring her into a better frame of mind. The first day’s experience
of the penitent had been far from cheering, and the second day’s
experience had been conclusive. She had left the institution by stealth;
and--though the visiting clergyman, taking a special interest in the
case, had caused special efforts to be made--all search after her, from
that time forth, had proved fruitless.

While this useless investigation (undertaken at Allan’s express desire)
was in progress, the lawyers had settled the preliminary formalities
connected with the succession to the property. All that remained was
for the new master of Thorpe Ambrose to decide when he would personally
establish himself on the estate of which he was now the legal possessor.

Left necessarily to his own guidance in this matter, Allan settled
it for himself in his usual hot-headed, generous way. He positively
declined to take possession until Mrs. Blanchard and her niece (who had
been permitted thus far, as a matter of courtesy, to remain in their old
home) had recovered from the calamity that had befallen them, and were
fit to decide for themselves what their future proceedings should be.
A private correspondence followed this resolution, comprehending, on
Allan’s side, unlimited offers of everything he had to give (in a house
which he had not yet seen), and, on the ladies’ side, a discreetly
reluctant readiness to profit by the young gentleman’s generosity in the
matter of time. To the astonishment of his legal advisers, Allan entered
their office one morning, accompanied by Mr. Brock, and announced, with
perfect composure, that the ladies had been good enough to take his own
arrangements off his hands, and that, in deference to their convenience,
he meant to defer establishing himself at Thorpe Ambrose till that
day two months. The lawyers stared at Allan, and Allan, returning the
compliment, stared at the lawyers.

“What on earth are you wondering at, gentlemen?” he inquired, with a
boyish bewilderment in his good-humored blue eyes. “Why shouldn’t I
give the ladies their two months, if the ladies want them? Let the poor
things take their own time, and welcome. My rights? and my position? Oh,
pooh! pooh! I’m in no hurry to be squire of the parish; it’s not in my
way. What do I mean to do for the two months? What I should have done
anyhow, whether the ladies had stayed or not; I mean to go cruising
at sea. That’s what _I_ like! I’ve got a new yacht at home in
Somersetshire--a yacht of my own building. And I’ll tell you what, sir,”
 continued Allan, seizing the head partner by the arm in the fervor of
his friendly intentions, “you look sadly in want of a holiday in the
fresh air, and you shall come along with me on the trial trip of my new
vessel. And your partners, too, if they like. And the head clerk, who
is the best fellow I ever met with in my life. Plenty of room--we’ll all
shake down together on the floor, and we’ll give Mr. Brock a rug on the
cabin table. Thorpe Ambrose be hanged! Do you mean to say, if you had
built a vessel yourself (as I have), you would go to any estate in the
three kingdoms, while your own little beauty was sitting like a duck on
the water at home, and waiting for you to try her? You legal gentlemen
are great hands at argument. What do you think of that argument? I think
it’s unanswerable--and I’m off to Somersetshire to-morrow.”

With those words, the new possessor of eight thousand a year dashed into
the head clerk’s office, and invited that functionary to a cruise on the
high seas, with a smack on the shoulder which was heard distinctly by
his masters in the next room. The firm looked in interrogative wonder at
Mr. Brock. A client who could see a position among the landed gentry of
England waiting for him, without being in a hurry to occupy it at the
earliest possible opportunity, was a client of whom they possessed no
previous experience.

“He must have been very oddly brought up,” said the lawyers to the
rector.

“Very oddly,” said the rector to the lawyers.

A last leap over one month more brought Mr. Brock to the present
time--to the bedroom at Castletown, in which he was sitting thinking,
and to the anxiety which was obstinately intruding itself between
him and his night’s rest. That anxiety was no unfamiliar enemy to the
rector’s peace of mind. It had first found him out in Somersetshire six
months since, and it had now followed him to the Isle of Man under the
inveterately obtrusive form of Ozias Midwinter.

The change in Allan’s future prospects had worked no corresponding
alteration in his perverse fancy for the castaway at the village inn.
In the midst of the consultations with the lawyers he had found time
to visit Midwinter, and on the journey back with the rector there was
Allan’s friend in the carriage, returning with them to Somersetshire by
Allan’s own invitation.

The ex-usher’s hair had grown again on his shaven skull, and his dress
showed the renovating influence of an accession of pecuniary means, but
in all other respects the man was unchanged. He met Mr. Brock’s distrust
with the old uncomplaining resignation to it; he maintained the same
suspicious silence on the subject of his relatives and his early life;
he spoke of Allan’s kindness to him with the same undisciplined fervor
of gratitude and surprise. “I have done what I could, sir,” he said to
Mr. Brock, while Allan was asleep in the railway carriage. “I have kept
out of Mr. Armadale’s way, and I have not even answered his last letter
to me. More than that is more than I can do. I don’t ask you to consider
my own feeling toward the only human creature who has never suspected
and never ill-treated me. I can resist my own feeling, but I can’t
resist the young gentleman himself. There’s not another like him in the
world. If we are to be parted again, it must be his doing or yours--not
mine. The dog’s master has whistled,” said this strange man, with a
momentary outburst of the hidden passion in him, and a sudden springing
of angry tears in his wild brown eyes, “and it is hard, sir, to blame
the dog when the dog comes.”

Once more Mr. Brock’s humanity got the better of Mr. Brock’s caution. He
determined to wait, and see what the coming days of social intercourse
might bring forth.

The days passed; the yacht was rigged and fitted for sea; a cruise
was arranged to the Welsh coast--and Midwinter the Secret was the same
Midwinter still. Confinement on board a little vessel of five-and-thirty
tons offered no great attraction to a man of Mr. Brock’s time of life.
But he sailed on the trial trip of the yacht nevertheless, rather than
trust Allan alone with his new friend.

Would the close companionship of the three on their cruise tempt the
man into talking of his own affairs? No; he was ready enough on other
subjects, especially if Allan led the way to them. But not a word
escaped him about himself. Mr. Brock tried him with questions about
his recent inheritance, and was answered as he had been answered
once already at the Somersetshire inn. It was a curious coincidence,
Midwinter admitted, that Mr. Armadale’s prospects and his own prospects
should both have unexpectedly changed for the better about the same
time. But there the resemblance ended. It was no large fortune that
had fallen into his lap, though it was enough for his wants. It had not
reconciled him with his relations, for the money had not come to him as
a matter of kindness, but as a matter of right. As for the circumstance
which had led to his communicating with his family, it was not worth
mentioning, seeing that the temporary renewal of intercourse which had
followed had produced no friendly results. Nothing had come of it but
the money--and, with the money, an anxiety which troubled him sometimes,
when he woke in the small hours of the morning.

At those last words he became suddenly silent, as if for once his
well-guarded tongue had betrayed him.

Mr. Brock seized the opportunity, and bluntly asked him what the nature
of the anxiety might be. Did it relate to money? No; it related to a
Letter which had been waiting for him for many years. Had he received
the letter? Not yet; it had been left under charge of one of the
partners in the firm which had managed the business of his inheritance
for him; the partner had been absent from England; and the letter,
locked up among his own private papers, could not be got at till he
returned. He was expected back toward the latter part of that present
May, and, if Midwinter could be sure where the cruise would take them to
at the close of the month, he thought he would write and have the letter
forwarded. Had he any family reasons to be anxious about it? None that
he knew of; he was curious to see what had been waiting for him for many
years, and that was all. So he answered the rector’s questions, with
his tawny face turned away over the low bulwark of the yacht, and his
fishing-line dragging in his supple brown hands.

Favored by wind and weather, the little vessel had done wonders on her
trial trip. Before the period fixed for the duration of the cruise had
half expired, the yacht was as high up on the Welsh coast as Holyhead;
and Allan, eager for adventure in unknown regions, had declared boldly
for an extension of the voyage northward to the Isle of Man. Having
ascertained from reliable authority that the weather really promised
well for a cruise in that quarter, and that, in the event of any
unforeseen necessity for return, the railway was accessible by the
steamer from Douglas to Liverpool, Mr. Brock agreed to his pupil’s
proposal. By that night’s post he wrote to Allan’s lawyers and to his
own rectory, indicating Douglas in the Isle of Man as the next
address to which letters might be forwarded. At the post-office he met
Midwinter, who had just dropped a letter into the box. Remembering what
he had said on board the yacht, Mr. Brock concluded that they had both
taken the same precaution, and had ordered their correspondence to be
forwarded to the same place.

Late the next day they set sail for the Isle of Man.

For a few hours all went well; but sunset brought with it the signs of
a coming change. With the darkness the wind rose to a gale, and the
question whether Allan and his journeymen had or had not built a stout
sea-boat was seriously tested for the first time. All that night, after
trying vainly to bear up for Holyhead, the little vessel kept the sea,
and stood her trial bravely. The next morning the Isle of Man was in
view, and the yacht was safe at Castletown. A survey by daylight of hull
and rigging showed that all the damage done might be set right again
in a week’s time. The cruising party had accordingly remained at
Castletown, Allan being occupied in superintending the repairs, Mr.
Brock in exploring the neighborhood, and Midwinter in making daily
pilgrimages on foot to Douglas and back to inquire for letters.

The first of the cruising party who received a letter was Allan. “More
worries from those everlasting lawyers,” was all he said, when he had
read the letter, and had crumpled it up in his pocket. The rector’s turn
came next, before the week’s sojourn at Castletown had expired. On the
fifth day he found a letter from Somersetshire waiting for him at the
hotel. It had been brought there by Midwinter, and it contained news
which entirely overthrew all Mr. Brock’s holiday plans. The clergyman
who had undertaken to do duty for him in his absence had been
unexpectedly summoned home again; and Mr. Brock had no choice (the day
of the week being Friday) but to cross the next morning from Douglass
to Liverpool, and get back by railway on Saturday night in time for
Sunday’s service.

Having read his letter, and resigned himself to his altered
circumstances as patiently as he might, the rector passed next to a
question that pressed for serious consideration in its turn. Burdened
with his heavy responsibility toward Allan, and conscious of his own
undiminished distrust of Allan’s new friend, how was he to act, in the
emergency that now beset him, toward the two young men who had been his
companions on the cruise?

Mr. Brock had first asked himself that awkward question on the Friday
afternoon, and he was still trying vainly to answer it, alone in his own
room, at one o’clock on the Saturday morning. It was then only the end
of May, and the residence of the ladies at Thorpe Ambrose (unless they
chose to shorten it of their own accord) would not expire till the
middle of June. Even if the repairs of the yacht had been completed
(which was not the case), there was no possible pretense for hurrying
Allan back to Somersetshire. But one other alternative remained--to
leave him where he was. In other words, to leave him, at the
turning-point of his life, under the sole influence of a man whom he had
first met with as a castaway at a village inn, and who was still, to all
practical purposes, a total stranger to him.

In despair of obtaining any better means of enlightenment to guide
his decision, Mr. Brock reverted to the impression which Midwinter had
produced on his own mind in the familiarity of the cruise.

Young as he was, the ex-usher had evidently lived a varied life. He
could speak of books like a man who had really enjoyed them; he could
take his turn at the helm like a sailor who knew his duty; he could
cook, and climb the rigging, and lay the cloth for dinner, with an odd
delight in the exhibition of his own dexterity. The display of these,
and other qualities like them, as his spirits rose with the cruise, had
revealed the secret of his attraction for Allan plainly enough. But had
all disclosures rested there? Had the man let no chance light in on his
character in the rector’s presence? Very little; and that little did
not set him forth in a morally alluring aspect. His way in the world had
lain evidently in doubtful places; familiarity with the small villainies
of vagabonds peeped out of him now and then; and, more significant
still, he habitually slept the light, suspicious sleep of a man who has
been accustomed to close his eyes in doubt of the company under the same
roof with him. Down to the very latest moment of the rector’s experience
of him--down to that present Friday night--his conduct had been
persistently secret and unaccountable to the very last. After bringing
Mr. Brock’s letter to the hotel, he had mysterious disappeared from
the house without leaving any message for his companions, and without
letting anybody see whether he had or had not received a letter himself.
At nightfall he had come back stealthily in the darkness, had been
caught on the stairs by Allan, eager to tell him of the change in the
rector’s plans, had listened to the news without a word of remark! and
had ended by sulkily locking himself into his own room. What was
there in his favor to set against such revelations of his character
as these--against his wandering eyes, his obstinate reserve with the
rector, his ominous silence on the subject of family and friends? Little
or nothing: the sum of all his merits began and ended with his gratitude
to Allan.


Mr. Brock left his seat on the side of the bed, trimmed his candle, and,
still lost in his own thoughts, looked out absently at the night. The
change of place brought no new ideas with it. His retrospect over
his own past life had amply satisfied him that his present sense of
responsibility rested on no merely fanciful grounds, and, having brought
him to that point, had left him there, standing at the window, and
seeing nothing but the total darkness in his own mind faithfully
reflected by the total darkness of the night.

“If I only had a friend to apply to!” thought the rector. “If I could
only find some one to help me in this miserable place!”

At the moment when the aspiration crossed his mind, it was suddenly
answered by a low knock at the door, and a voice said softly in the
passage outside, “Let me come in.”

After an instant’s pause to steady his nerves, Mr. Brock opened the
door, and found himself, at one o’clock in the morning, standing face to
face on the threshold of his own bedroom with Ozias Midwinter.

“Are you ill?” asked the rector, as soon as his astonishment would allow
him to speak.

“I have come here to make a clean breast of it!” was the strange answer.
“Will you let me in?”

With those words he walked into the room, his eyes on the ground, his
lips ashy pale, and his hand holding something hidden behind him.

“I saw the light under your door,” he went on, without looking up, and
without moving his hand, “and I know the trouble on your mind which is
keeping you from your rest. You are going away to-morrow morning, and
you don’t like leaving Mr. Armadale alone with a stranger like me.”

Startled as he was, Mr. Brock saw the serious necessity of being plain
with a man who had come at that time, and had said those words to him.

“You have guessed right,” he answered. “I stand in the place of a father
to Allan Armadale, and I am naturally unwilling to leave him, at his
age, with a man whom I don’t know.”

Ozias Midwinter took a step forward to the table. His wandering eyes
rested on the rector’s New Testament, which was one of the objects lying
on it.

“You have read that Book, in the years of a long life, to many
congregations,” he said. “Has it taught you mercy to your miserable
fellow-creatures?”

Without waiting to be answered, he looked Mr. Brock in the face for the
first time, and brought his hidden hand slowly into view.

“Read that,” he said; “and, for Christ’s sake, pity me when you know who
I am.”

He laid a letter of many pages on the table. It was the letter that Mr.
Neal had posted at Wildbad nineteen years since.




II. THE MAN REVEALED.

THE first cool breathings of the coming dawn fluttered through the open
window as Mr. Brock read the closing lines of the Confession. He put it
from him in silence, without looking up. The first shock of discovery
had struck his mind, and had passed away again. At his age, and with
his habits of thought, his grasp was not strong enough to hold the whole
revelation that had fallen on him. All his heart, when he closed the
manuscript, was with the memory of the woman who had been the beloved
friend of his later and happier life; all his thoughts were busy with
the miserable secret of her treason to her own father which the letter
had disclosed.

He was startled out of the narrow limits of his own little grief by the
vibration of the table at which he sat, under a hand that was laid on it
heavily. The instinct of reluctance was strong in him; but he conquered
it, and looked up. There, silently confronting him in the mixed light of
the yellow candle flame and the faint gray dawn, stood the castaway of
the village inn--the inheritor of the fatal Armadale name.

Mr. Brock shuddered as the terror of the present time and the darker
terror yet of the future that might be coming rushed back on him at the
sight of the man’s face. The man saw it, and spoke first.

“Is my father’s crime looking at you out of my eyes?” he asked. “Has the
ghost of the drowned man followed me into the room?”

The suffering and the passion 

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