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.”