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.