THE first cool breathings of the coming dawn fluttered through the open
window as Mr. Brock read the closing lines of the Confession. He put it
from him in silence, without looking up. The first shock of discovery
had struck his mind, and had passed away again. At his age, and with
his habits of thought, his grasp was not strong enough to hold the whole
revelation that had fallen on him. All his heart, when he closed the
manuscript, was with the memory of the woman who had been the beloved
friend of his later and happier life; all his thoughts were busy with
the miserable secret of her treason to her own father which the letter
had disclosed.
He was startled out of the narrow limits of his own little grief by the
vibration of the table at which he sat, under a hand that was laid on it
heavily. The instinct of reluctance was strong in him; but he conquered
it, and looked up. There, silently confronting him in the mixed light of
the yellow candle flame and the faint gray dawn, stood the castaway of
the village inn--the inheritor of the fatal Armadale name.
Mr. Brock shuddered as the terror of the present time and the darker
terror yet of the future that might be coming rushed back on him at the
sight of the man’s face. The man saw it, and spoke first.
“Is my father’s crime looking at you out of my eyes?” he asked. “Has the
ghost of the drowned man followed me into the room?”
The suffering and the passion that he was forcing back shook the hand
that he still kept on the table, and stifled the voice in which he spoke
until it sank to a whisper.
“I have no wish to treat you otherwise than justly and kindly,” answered
Mr. Brock. “Do me justice on my side, and believe that I am incapable of
cruelly holding you responsible for your father’s crime.”
The reply seemed to compose him. He bowed his head in silence, and took
up the confession from the table.
“Have you read this through?” he asked, quietly.
“Every word of it, from first to last.”
“Have I dealt openly with you so far. Has Ozias Midwinter--”
“Do you still call yourself by that name,” interrupted Mr. Brock, “now
your true name is known to me?”
“Since I have read my father’s confession,” was the answer, “I like my
ugly alias better than ever. Allow me to repeat the question which I was
about to put to you a minute since: Has Ozias Midwinter done his best
thus far to enlighten Mr. Brock?”
The rector evaded a direct reply. “Few men in your position,” he said,
“would have had the courage to show me that letter.”
“Don’t be too sure, sir, of the vagabond you picked up at the inn till
you know a little more of him than you know now. You have got the secret
of my birth, but you are not in possession yet of the story of my life.
You ought to know it, and you shall know it, before you leave me alone
with Mr. Armadale. Will you wait, and rest a little while, or shall I
tell it you now?”
“Now,” said Mr. Brock, still as far away as ever from knowing the real
character of the man before him.
Everything Ozias Midwinter said, everything Ozias Midwinter did, was
against him. He had spoken with a sardonic indifference, almost with an
insolence of tone, which would have repelled the sympathies of any man
who heard him. And now, instead of placing himself at the table, and
addressing his story directly to the rector, he withdrew silently and
ungraciously to the window-seat. There he sat, his face averted, his
hands mechanically turning the leaves of his father’s letter till
he came to the last. With his eyes fixed on the closing lines of the
manuscript, and with a strange mixture of recklessness and sadness in
his voice, he began his promised narrative in these words:
“The first thing you know of me,” he said, “is what my father’s
confession has told you already. He mentions here that I was a child,
asleep on his breast, when he spoke his last words in this world, and
when a stranger’s hand wrote them down for him at his deathbed.
That stranger’s name, as you may have noticed, is signed on the
cover--‘Alexander Neal, Writer to the Signet, Edinburgh.’ The first
recollection I have is of Alexander Neal beating me with a horsewhip (I
dare say I deserved it), in the character of my stepfather.”
“Have you no recollection of your mother at the same time?” asked Mr.
Brock.
“Yes; I remember her having shabby old clothes made up to fit me,
and having fine new frocks bought for her two children by her second
husband. I remember the servants laughing at me in my old things, and
the horsewhip finding its way to my shoulders again for losing my temper
and tearing my shabby clothes. My next recollection gets on to a year or
two later. I remember myself locked up in a lumber-room, with a bit of
bread and a mug of water, wondering what it was that made my mother and
my stepfather seem to hate the very sight of me. I never settled that
question till yesterday, and then I solved the mystery, when my father’s
letter was put into my hands. My mother knew what had really happened
on board the French timber-ship, and my stepfather knew what had really
happened, and they were both well aware that the shameful secret which
they would fain have kept from every living creature was a secret
which would be one day revealed to _me_. There was no help for
it--the confession was in the executor’s hands, and there was I, an
ill-conditioned brat, with my mother’s negro blood in my face, and my
murdering father’s passions in my heart, inheritor of their secret in
spite of them! I don’t wonder at the horsewhip now, or the shabby old
clothes, or the bread and water in the lumber-room. Natural penalties
all of them, sir, which the child was beginning to pay already for the
father’s sin.”
Mr. Brock looked at the swarthy, secret face, still obstinately turned
away from him. “Is this the stark insensibility of a vagabond,” he asked
himself, “or the despair, in disguise, of a miserable man?”
“School is my next recollection,” the other went on--“a cheap place in a
lost corner of Scotland. I was left there, with a bad character to
help me at starting. I spare you the story of the master’s cane in the
schoolroom, and the boys’ kicks in the playground. I dare say there was
ingrained ingratitude in my nature; at any rate, I ran away. The first
person who met me asked my name. I was too young and too foolish to know
the importance of concealing it, and, as a matter of course, I was taken
back to school the same evening. The result taught me a lesson which I
have not forgotten since. In a day or two more, like the vagabond I
was, I ran away for the second time. The school watch-dog had had his
instructions, I suppose: he stopped me before I got outside the gate.
Here is his mark, among the rest, on the back of my hand. His master’s
marks I can’t show you; they are all on my back. Can you believe in my
perversity? There was a devil in me that no dog could worry out. I
ran away again as soon as I left my bed, and this time I got off. At
nightfall I found myself (with a pocketful of the school oatmeal) lost
on a moor. I lay down on the fine soft heather, under the lee of a
great gray rock. Do you think I felt lonely? Not I! I was away from the
master’s cane, away from my schoolfellows’ kicks, away from my mother,
away from my stepfather; and I lay down that night under my good friend
the rock, the happiest boy in all Scotland!”
Through the wretched childhood which that one significant circumstance
disclosed, Mr. Brock began to see dimly how little was really strange,
how little really unaccountable, in the character of the man who was now
speaking to him.
“I slept soundly,” Midwinter continued, “under my friend the rock. When
I woke in the morning, I found a sturdy old man with a fiddle sitting
on one side of me, and two performing dogs on the other. Experience
had made me too sharp to tell the truth when the man put his first
questions. He didn’t press them; he gave me a good breakfast out of his
knapsack, and he let me romp with the dogs. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he
said, when he had got my confidence in this manner, ‘you want three
things, my man: you want a new father, a new family, and a new name.
I’ll be your father. I’ll let you have the dogs for your brothers; and,
if you’ll promise to be very careful of it, I’ll give you my own
name into the bargain. Ozias Midwinter, Junior, you have had a good
breakfast; if you want a good dinner, come along with me!’ He got up,
the dogs trotted after him, and I trotted after the dogs. Who was my new
father? you will ask. A half-breed gypsy, sir; a drunkard, a ruffian,
and a thief--and the best friend I ever had! Isn’t a man your friend who
gives you your food, your shelter, and your education? Ozias Midwinter
taught me to dance the Highland fling, to throw somersaults, to walk
on stilts, and to sing songs to his fiddle. Sometimes we roamed the
country, and performed at fairs. Sometimes we tried the large towns, and
enlivened bad company over its cups. I was a nice, lively little boy of
eleven years old, and bad company, the women especially, took a fancy to
me and my nimble feet. I was vagabond enough to like the life. The dogs
and I lived together, ate, and drank, and slept together. I can’t think
of those poor little four-footed brothers of mine, even now, without a
choking in the throat. Many is the beating we three took together; many
is the hard day’s dancing we did together; many is the night we have
slept together, and whimpered together, on the cold hill-side. I’m not
trying to distress you, sir; I’m only telling you the truth. The life
with all its hardships was a life that fitted me, and the half-breed
gypsy who gave me his name, ruffian as he was, was a ruffian I liked.”
“A man who beat you!” exclaimed Mr. Brock, in astonishment.
“Didn’t I tell you just now, sir, that I lived with the dogs? and did
you ever hear of a dog who liked his master the worse for beating him?
Hundreds of thousands of miserable men, women, and children would have
liked that man (as I liked him) if he had always given them what he
always gave me--plenty to eat. It was stolen food mostly, and my new
gypsy father was generous with it. He seldom laid the stick on us when
he was sober; but it diverted him to hear us yelp when he was drunk. He
died drunk, and enjoyed his favorite amusement with his last breath. One
day (when I had been two years in his service), after giving us a good
dinner out on the moor, he sat down with his back against a stone, and
called us up to divert himself with his stick. He made the dogs yelp
first, and then he called to me. I didn’t go very willingly; he had been
drinking harder than usual, and the more he drank the better he liked
his after-dinner amusement. He was in high good-humor that day, and
he hit me so hard that he toppled over, in his drunken state, with the
force of his own blow. He fell with his face in a puddle, and lay there
without moving. I and the dogs stood at a distance, and looked at him:
we thought he was feigning, to get us near and have another stroke at
us. He feigned so long that we ventured up to him at last. It took me
some time to pull him over; he was a heavy man. When I did get him on
his back, he was dead. We made all the outcry we could; but the dogs
were little, and I was little, and the place was lonely; and no help
came to us. I took his fiddle and his stick; I said to my two brothers,
‘Come along, we must get our own living now;’ and we went away
heavy-hearted, and left him on the moor. Unnatural as it may seem
to you, I was sorry for him. I kept his ugly name through all my
after-wanderings, and I have enough of the old leaven left in me to like
the sound of it still. Midwinter or Armadale, never mind my name now, we
will talk of that afterward; you must know the worst of me first.”
“Why not the best of you?” said Mr. Brock, gently.
“Thank you, sir; but I am here to tell the truth. We will get on, if you
please, to the next chapter in my story. The dogs and I did badly, after
our master’s death; our luck was against us. I lost one of my little
brothers--the best performer of the two; he was stolen, and I never
recovered him. My fiddle and my stilts were taken from me next, by main
force, by a tramp who was stronger than I. These misfortunes drew Tommy
and me--I beg your pardon, sir, I mean the dog--closer together than
ever.
“I think we had some kind of dim foreboding on both sides that we had not
done with our misfortunes yet; anyhow, it was not very long before we
were parted forever. We were neither of us thieves (our master had been
satisfied with teaching us to dance); but we both committed an invasion
of the rights of property, for all that. Young creatures, even when
they are half starved, cannot resist taking a run sometimes on a fine
morning. Tommy and I could not resist taking a run into a gentleman’s
plantation; the gentleman preserved his game; and the gentleman’s keeper
knew his business. I heard a gun go off; you can guess the rest. God
preserve me from ever feeling such misery again as I felt when I lay
down by Tommy, and took him, dead and bloody, in my arms! The keeper
attempted to part us; I bit him, like the wild animal I was. He tried
the stick on me next; he might as well have tried it on one of the
trees. The noise reached the ears of two young ladies riding near the
place--daughters of the gentleman on whose property I was a trespasser.
They were too well brought up to lift their voices against the sacred
right of preserving game, but they were kind-hearted girls, and they
pitied me, and took me home with them. I remember the gentlemen of the
house (keen sportsmen all of them) roaring with laughter as I went by
the windows, crying, with my little dead dog in my arms. Don’t suppose
I complain of their laughter; it did me good service; it roused the
indignation of the two ladies. One of them took me into her own garden,
and showed me a place where I might bury my dog under the flowers, and
be sure that no other hands should ever disturb him again. The other
went to her father, and persuaded him to give the forlorn little
vagabond a chance in the house, under one of the upper servants. Yes!
you have been cruising in company with a man who was once a foot-boy.
I saw you look at me, when I amused Mr. Armadale by laying the cloth
on board the yacht. Now you know why I laid it so neatly, and forgot
nothing. It has been my good fortune to see something of society; I have
helped to fill its stomach and black its boots. My experience of the
servants’ hall was not a long one. Before I had worn out my first suit
of livery, there was a scandal in the house. It was the old story; there
is no need to tell it over again for the thousandth time. Loose money
left on a table, and not found there again; all the servants with
characters to appeal to except the foot-boy, who had been rashly taken
on trial. Well! well! I was lucky in that house to the last; I was not
prosecuted for taking what I had not only never touched, but never even
seen: I was only turned out. One morning I went in my old clothes to the
grave where I had buried Tommy. I gave the place a kiss; I said good-by
to my little dead dog; and there I was, out in the world again, at the
ripe age of thirteen years!”
“In that friendless state, and at that tender age,” said Mr. Brock, “did
no thought cross your mind of going home again?”
“I went home again, sir, that very night--I slept on the hill-side. What
other home had I? In a day or two’s time I drifted back to the large
towns and the bad company, the great open country was so lonely to me,
now I had lost the dogs! Two sailors picked me up next. I was a handy
lad, and I got a cabin-boy’s berth on board a coasting-vessel. A
cabin-boy’s berth means dirt to live in, offal to eat, a man’s work on
a boy’s shoulders, and the rope’s-end at regular intervals. The vessel
touched at a port in the Hebrides. I was as ungrateful as usual to my
best benefactors; I ran away again. Some women found me, half dead of
starvation, in the northern wilds of the Isle of Skye. It was near the
coast and I took a turn with the fishermen next. There was less of the
rope’s-end among my new masters; but plenty of exposure to wind and
weather, and hard work enough to have killed a boy who was not a
seasoned tramp like me. I fought through it till the winter came, and
then the fishermen turned me adrift again. I don’t blame them; food was
scarce, and mouths were many. With famine staring the whole community in
the face, why should they keep a boy who didn’t belong to them? A great
city was my only chance in the winter-time; so I went to Glasgow, and
all but stepped into the lion’s mouth as soon as I got there. I was
minding an empty cart on the Broomielaw, when I heard my stepfather’s
voice on the pavement side of the horse by which I was standing. He had
met some person whom he knew, and, to my terror and surprise, they
were talking about me. Hidden behind the horse, I heard enough of their
conversation to know that I had narrowly escaped discovery before I
went on board the coasting-vessel. I had met at that time with another
vagabond boy of my own age; we had quarreled and parted. The day after,
my stepfather’s inquiries were made in that very district, and it became
a question with him (a good personal description being unattainable in
either case) which of the two boys he should follow. One of them, he was
informed, was known as “Brown,” and the other as “Midwinter.” Brown was
just the common name which a cunning runaway boy would be most likely
to assume; Midwinter, just the remarkable name which he would be most
likely to avoid. The pursuit had accordingly followed Brown, and had
allowed me to escape. I leave you to imagine whether I was not doubly
and trebly determined to keep my gypsy master’s name after that. But
my resolution did not stop here. I made up my mind to leave the country
altogether. After a day or two’s lurking about the outward-bound vessels
in port, I found out which sailed first, and hid myself on board. Hunger
tried hard to force me out before the pilot had left; but hunger was not
new to me, and I kept my place. The pilot was out of the vessel when I
made my appearance on deck, and there was nothing for it but to keep me
or throw me overboard. The captain said (I have no doubt quite truly)
that he would have preferred throwing me overboard; but the majesty of
the law does sometimes stand the friend even of a vagabond like me. In
that way I came back to a sea-life. In that way I learned enough to
make me handy and useful (as I saw you noticed) on board Mr. Armadale’s
yacht. I sailed more than one voyage, in more than one vessel, to more
than one part of the world, and I might have followed the sea for life,
if I could only have kept my temper under every provocation that could
be laid on it. I had learned a great deal; but, not having learned that,
I made the last part of my last voyage home to the port of Bristol in
irons; and I saw the inside of a prison for the first time in my life,
on a charge of mutinous conduct to one of my officers. You have heard me
with extraordinary patience, sir, and I am glad to tell you, in return,
that we are not far now from the end of my story. You found some books,
if I remember right, when you searched my luggage at the Somersetshire
inn?”
Mr. Brock answered in the affirmative.
“Those books mark the next change in my life--and the last, before I
took the usher’s place at the school. My term of imprisonment was not
a long one. Perhaps my youth pleaded for me; perhaps the Bristol
magistrates took into consideration the time I had passed in irons on
board ship. Anyhow, I was just turned seventeen when I found myself out
on the world again. I had no friends to receive me; I had no place to go
to. A sailor’s life, after what had happened, was a life I recoiled from
in disgust. I stood in the crowd on the bridge at Bristol, wondering
what I should do with my freedom now I had got it back. Whether I had
altered in the prison, or whether I was feeling the change in character
that comes with coming manhood, I don’t know; but the old reckless
enjoyment of the old vagabond life seemed quite worn out of my nature.
An awful sense of loneliness kept me wandering about Bristol, in horror
of the quiet country, till after nightfall. I looked at the lights
kindling in the parlor windows, with a miserable envy of the happy
people inside. A word of advice would have been worth something to me
at that time. Well! I got it: a policeman advised me to move on. He was
quite right; what else could I do? I looked up at the sky, and there
was my old friend of many a night’s watch at sea, the north star. ‘All
points of the compass are alike to me,’ I thought to myself; ‘I’ll go
_your_ way.’ Not even the star would keep me company that night. It got
behind a cloud, and left me alone in the rain and darkness. I groped my
way to a cart-shed, fell asleep, and dreamed of old times, when I served
my gypsy master and lived with the dogs. God! what I would have given
when I woke to have felt Tommy’s little cold muzzle in my hand! Why am
I dwelling on these things? Why don’t I get on to the end? You shouldn’t
encourage me, sir, by listening, so patiently. After a week more of
wandering, without hope to help me, or prospects to look to, I found
myself in the streets of Shrewsbury, staring in at the windows of a
book-seller’s shop. An old man came to the shop door, looked about him,
and saw me. ‘Do you want a job?’ he asked. ‘And are you not above
doing it cheap?’ The prospect of having something to do, and some human
creature to speak a word to, tempted me, and I did a day’s dirty work
in the book-seller’s warehouse for a shilling. More work followed at the
same rate. In a week I was promoted to sweep out the shop and put up the
shutters. In no very long time after, I was trusted to carry the books
out; and when quarter-day came, and the shop-man left, I took his place.
Wonderful luck! you will say; here I had found my way to a friend at
last. I had found my way to one of the most merciless misers in
England; and I had risen in the little world of Shrewsbury by the purely
commercial process of underselling all my competitors. The job in the
warehouse had been declined at the price by every idle man in the town,
and I did it. The regular porter received his weekly pittance under
weekly protest. I took two shillings less, and made no complaint. The
shop-man gave warning on the ground that he was underfed as well as
underpaid. I received half his salary, and lived contentedly on his
reversionary scraps. Never were two men so well suited to each other as
that book-seller and I. _His_ one object in life was to find somebody
who would work for him at starvation wages. _My_ one object in life was
to find somebody who would give me an asylum over my head. Without a
single sympathy in common--without a vestige of feeling of any sort,
hostile or friendly, growing up between us on either side--without
wishing each other good-night when we parted on the house stairs, or
good-morning when we met at the shop counter, we lived alone in that
house, strangers from first to last, for two whole years. A dismal
existence for a lad of my age, was it not? You are a clergyman and a
scholar--surely you can guess what made the life endurable to me?”
Mr. Brock remembered the well-worn volumes which had been found in the
usher’s bag. “The books made it endurable to you,” he said.
The eyes of the castaway kindled with a new light.
“Yes!” he said, “the books--the generous friends who met me without
suspicion--the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of
my life that I can look back on with something like pride are the years
I passed in the miser’s house. The only unalloyed pleasure I have ever
tasted is the pleasure that I found for myself on the miser’s shelves.
Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer
days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the
draught. There were few customers to serve, for the books were mostly of
the solid and scholarly kind. No responsibilities rested on me, for the
accounts were kept by my master, and only the small sums of money were
suffered to pass through my hands. He soon found out enough of me to
know that my honesty was to be trusted, and that my patience might be
counted on, treat me as he might. The one insight into _his_ character
which I obtained, on my side, widened the distance between us to its
last limits. He was a confirmed opium-eater in secret--a prodigal in
laudanum, though a miser in all besides. He never confessed his frailty,
and I never told him I had found it out. He had his pleasure apart from
me, and I had my pleasure apart from _him_. Week after week, month after
month, there we sat, without a friendly word ever passing between us--I,
alone with my book at the counter; he, alone with his ledger in the
parlor, dimly visible to me through the dirty window-pane of the glass
door, sometimes poring over his figures, sometimes lost and motionless
for hours in the ecstasy of his opium trance. Time passed, and made no
impression on us; the seasons of two years came and went, and found
us still unchanged. One morning, at the opening of the third year, my
master did not appear, as usual, to give me my allowance for breakfast.
I went upstairs, and found him helpless in his bed. He refused to trust
me with the keys of the cupboard, or to let me send for a doctor.
I bought a morsel of bread, and went back to my books, with no more
feeling for _him_ (I honestly confess it) than he would have had for
_me_ under the same circumstances. An hour or two later I was roused
from my reading by an occasional customer of ours, a retired medical
man. He went upstairs. I was glad to get rid of him and return to my
books. He came down again, and disturbed me once more. ‘I don’t much
like you, my lad,’ he said; ‘but I think it my duty to say that you will
soon have to shift for yourself. You are no great favorite in the
town, and you may have some difficulty in finding a new place. Provide
yourself with a written character from your master before it is too
late.’ He spoke to me coldly. I thanked him coldly on my side, and got
my character the same day. Do you think my master let me have it
for nothing? Not he! He bargained with me on his deathbed. I was his
creditor for a month’s salary, and he wouldn’t write a line of my
testimonial until I had first promised to forgive him the debt. Three
days afterward he died, enjoying to the last the happiness of having
overreached his shop-man. ‘Aha!’ he whispered, when the doctor
formally summoned me to take leave of him, ‘I got you cheap!’ Was Ozias
Midwinter’s stick as cruel as that? I think not. Well! there I was, out
on the world again, but surely with better prospects this time. I had
taught myself to read Latin, Greek, and German; and I had got my written
character to speak for me. All useless! The doctor was quite right; I
was not liked in the town. The lower order of the people despised me for
selling my services to the miser at the miser’s price. As for the better
classes, I did with them (God knows how!) what I have always done with
everybody except Mr. Armadale--I produced a disagreeable impression at
first sight; I couldn’t mend it afterward; and there was an end of me
in respectable quarters. It is quite likely I might have spent all my
savings, my puny little golden offspring of two years’ miserable
growth, but for a school advertisement which I saw in a local paper. The
heartlessly mean terms that were offered encouraged me to apply; and I
got the place. How I prospered in it, and what became of me next, there
is no need to tell you. The thread of my story is all wound off; my
vagabond life stands stripped of its mystery; and you know the worst of
me at last.”
A moment of silence followed those closing words. Midwinter rose from
the window-seat, and came back to the table with the letter from Wildbad
in his hand.
“My father’s confession has told you who I am; and my own confession has
told you what my life has been,” he said, addressing Mr. Brock, without
taking the chair to which the rector pointed. “I promised to make a
clean breast of it when I first asked leave to enter this room. Have I
kept my word?”
“It is impossible to doubt it,” replied Mr. Brock. “You have established
your claim on my confidence and my sympathy. I should be insensible,
indeed, if I could know what I now know of your childhood and your
youth, and not feel something of Allan’s kindness for Allan’s friend.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Midwinter, simply and gravely.
He sat down opposite Mr. Brook at the table for the first time.
“In a few hours you will have left this place,” he proceeded. “If I can
help you to leave it with your mind at ease, I will. There is more to be
said between us than we have said up to this time. My future relations
with Mr. Armadale are still left undecided; and the serious question
raised by my father’s letter is a question which we have neither of us
faced yet.”
He paused, and looked with a momentary impatience at the candle still
burning on the table, in the morning light. The struggle to speak with
composure, and to keep his own feelings stoically out of view, was
evidently growing harder and harder to him.
“It may possibly help your decision,” he went on, “if I tell you how I
determined to act toward Mr. Armadale--in the matter of the similarity
of our names--when I first read this letter, and when I had composed
myself sufficiently to be able to think at all.” He stopped, and cast
a second impatient look at the lighted candle. “Will you excuse the odd
fancy of an odd man?” he asked, with a faint smile. “I want to put out
the candle: I want to speak of the new subject, in the new light.”
He extinguished the candle as he spoke, and let the first tenderness of
the daylight flow uninterruptedly into the room.
“I must once more ask your patience,” he resumed, “if I return for a
moment to myself and my circumstances. I have already told you that my
stepfather made an attempt to discover me some years after I had turned
my back on the Scotch school. He took that step out of no anxiety of his
own, but simply as the agent of my father’s trustees. In the exercise of
their discretion, they had sold the estates in Barbadoes (at the time
of the emancipation of the slaves, and the ruin of West Indian property)
for what the estates would fetch. Having invested the proceeds,
they were bound to set aside a sum for my yearly education. This
responsibility obliged them to make the attempt to trace me--a fruitless
attempt, as you already know. A little later (as I have been since
informed) I was publicly addressed by an advertisement in the
newspapers, which I never saw. Later still, when I was twenty-one, a
second advertisement appeared (which I did see) offering a reward for
evidence of my death. If I was alive, I had a right to my half share
of the proceeds of the estates on coming of age; if dead, the money
reverted to my mother. I went to the lawyers, and heard from them what
I have just told you. After some difficulty in proving my identity--and
after an interview with my stepfather, and a message from my mother,
which has hopelessly widened the old breach between us--my claim was
allowed; and my money is now invested for me in the funds, under the
name that is really my own.”
Mr. Brock drew eagerly nearer to the table. He saw the end now to which
the speaker was tending
“Twice a year,” Midwinter pursued, “I must sign my own name to get my
own income. At all other times, and under all other circumstances, I
may hide my identity under any name I please. As Ozias Midwinter, Mr.
Armadale first knew me; as Ozias Midwinter he shall know me to the end
of my days. Whatever may be the result of this interview--whether I win
your confidence or whether I lose it--of one thing you may feel sure:
your pupil shall never know the horrible secret which I have trusted
to your keeping. This is no extraordinary resolution; for, as you know
already, it costs me no sacrifice of feeling to keep my assumed name.
There is nothing in my conduct to praise; it comes naturally out of the
gratitude of a thankful man. Review the circumstances for yourself,
sir, and set my own horror of revealing them to Mr. Armadale out of
the question. If the story of the names is ever told, there can be no
limiting it to the disclosure of my father’s crime; it must go back to
the story of Mrs. Armadale’s marriage. I have heard her son talk of her;
I know how he loves her memory. As God is my witness, he shall never
love it less dearly through _me_!”
Simply as the words were spoken, they touched the deepest sympathies
in the rector’s nature: they took his thoughts back to Mrs. Armadale’s
deathbed. There sat the man against whom she had ignorantly warned him
in her son’s interests; and that man, of his own free-will, had laid on
himself the obligation of respecting her secret for her son’s sake! The
memory of his own past efforts to destroy the very friendship out of
which this resolution had sprung rose and reproached Mr. Brock. He held
out his hand to Midwinter for the first time. “In her name, and in her
son’s name,” he said, warmly, “I thank you.”
Without replying, Midwinter spread the confession open before him on the
table.
“I think I have said all that it was my duty to say,” he began, “before
we could approach the consideration of this letter. Whatever may have
appeared strange in my conduct toward you and toward Mr. Armadale may
be now trusted to explain itself. You can easily imagine the natural
curiosity and surprise that I must have felt (ignorant as I then was of
the truth) when the sound of Mr. Armadale’s name first startled me as
the echo of my own. You will readily understand that I only hesitated
to tell him I was his namesake, because I hesitated to damage my
position--in your estimation, if not in his--by confessing that I had
come among you under an assumed name. And, after all that you have just
heard of my vagabond life and my low associates, you will hardly wonder
at the obstinate silence I maintained about myself, at a time when I did
not feel the sense of responsibility which my father’s confession has
laid on me. We can return to these small personal explanations, if you
wish it, at another time; they cannot be suffered to keep us from the
greater interests which we must settle before you leave this place.
We may come now--” His voice faltered, and he suddenly turned his face
toward the window, so as to hide it from the rector’s view. “We may come
now,” he repeated, his hand trembling visibly as it held the page,
“to the murder on board the timber-ship, and to the warning that has
followed me from my father’s grave.”
Softly--as if he feared they might reach Allan, sleeping in the
neighboring room--he read the last terrible words which the Scotchman’s
pen had written at Wildbad, as they fell from his father’s lips:
“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!”
After reading those sentences, he pushed the manuscript from him,
without looking up. The fatal reserve which he had been in a fair way of
conquering but a few minutes since, possessed itself of him once more.
Again his eyes wandered; again his voice sank in tone. A stranger who
had heard his story, and who saw him now, would have said, “His look is
lurking, his manner is bad; he is, every inch of him, his father’s son.”
“I have a question to ask you,” said Mr. Brock, breaking the silence
between them, on his side. “Why have you just read that passage in your
father’s letter?”
“To force me into telling you the truth,” was the answer. “You must
know how much there is of my father in me before you trust me to be Mr.
Armadale’s friend. I got my letter yesterday, in the morning. Some inner
warning troubled me, and I went down on the sea-shore by myself before I
broke the seal. Do you believe the dead can come back to the world they
once lived in? I believe my father came back in that bright morning
light, through the glare of that broad sunshine and the roar of that
joyful sea, and watched me while I read. When I got to the words that
you have just heard, and when I knew that the very end which he had died
dreading was the end that had really come, I felt the horror that had
crept over him in his last moments creeping over me. I struggled against
myself, as _he_ would have had me struggle. I tried to be all that was
most repellent to my own gentler nature; I tried to think pitilessly of
putting the mountains and the seas between me and the man who bore my
name. Hours passed before I could prevail on myself to go back and run
the risk of meeting Allan Armadale in this house. When I did get back,
and when he met me at night on the stairs, I thought I was looking him
in the face as _my_ father looked _his_ father in the face when the
cabin door closed between them. Draw your own conclusions, sir. Say, if
you like, that the inheritance of my father’s heathen belief in fate is
one of the inheritances he has left to me. I won’t dispute it; I
won’t deny that all through yesterday _his_ superstition was _my_
superstition. The night came before I could find my way to calmer and
brighter thoughts. But I did find my way. You may set it down in my
favor that I lifted myself at last above the influence of this horrible
letter. Do you know what helped me?”
“Did you reason with yourself?”
“I can’t reason about what I feel.”
“Did you quiet your mind by prayer?”
“I was not fit to pray.”
“And yet something guided you to the better feeling and the truer view?”
“Something did.”
“What was it?”
“My love for Allan Armadale.”
He cast a doubting, almost a timid look at Mr. Brock as he gave that
answer, and, suddenly leaving the table, went back to the window-seat.
“Have I no right to speak of him in that way?” he asked, keeping his
face hidden from the rector. “Have I not known him long enough; have I
not done enough for him yet? Remember what my experience of other men
had been when I first saw his hand held out to me--when I first heard
his voice speaking to me in my sick-room. What had I known of strangers’
hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to
threaten and to strike me. His hand put my pillow straight, and patted
me on the shoulder, and gave me my food and drink. What had I known of
other men’s voices, when I was growing up to be a man myself? I had
only known them as voices that jeered, voices that cursed, voices that
whispered in corners with a vile distrust. _His_ voice said to me,
‘Cheer up, Midwinter! we’ll soon bring you round again. You’ll be strong
enough in a week to go out for a drive with me in our Somersetshire
lanes.’ Think of the gypsy’s stick; think of the devils laughing at me
when I went by their windows with my little dead dog in my arms; think
of the master who cheated me of my month’s salary on his deathbed--and
ask your own heart if the miserable wretch whom Allan Armadale has
treated as his equal and his friend has said too much in saying that
he loves him? I do love him! It _will_ come out of me; I can’t keep it
back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life--yes,
the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a
happy one--I tell you I would give my life--”
The next words died away on his lips; the hysterical passion rose, and
conquered him. He stretched out one of his hands with a wild gesture
of entreaty to Mr. Brock; his head sank on the window-sill and he burst
into tears.
Even then the hard discipline of the man’s life asserted itself. He
expected no sympathy, he counted on no merciful human respect for human
weakness. The cruel necessity of self-suppression was present to his
mind, while the tears were pouring over his cheeks. “Give me a minute,”
he said, faintly. “I’ll fight it down in a minute; I won’t distress you
in this way again.”
True to his resolution, in a minute he had fought it down. In a minute
more he was able to speak calmly.
“We will get back, sir, to those better thoughts which have brought me
from my room to yours,” he resumed. “I can only repeat that I should
never have torn myself from the hold which this letter fastened on
me, if I had not loved Allan Armadale with all that I have in me of a
brother’s love. I said to myself, ‘If the thought of leaving him breaks
my heart, the thought of leaving him is wrong!’ That was some hours
since, and I am in the same mind still. I can’t believe--I won’t
believe--that a friendship which has grown out of nothing but kindness
on one side, and nothing but gratitude on the other, is destined to lead
to an evil end. Judge, you who are a clergyman, between the dead father,
whose word is in these pages, and the living son, whose word is now on
his lips! What is it appointed me to do, now that I am breathing the
same air, and living under the same roof with the son of the man whom my
father killed--to perpetuate my father’s crime by mortally injuring him,
or to atone for my father’s crime by giving him the devotion of my whole
life? The last of those two faiths is my faith, and shall be my faith,
happen what may. In the strength of that better conviction, I have come
here to trust you with my father’s secret, and to confess the wretched
story of my own life. In the strength of that better conviction, I can
face you resolutely with the one plain question, which marks the one
plain end of all that I have come here to say. Your pupil stands at the
starting-point of his new career, in a position singularly friendless;
his one great need is a companion of his own age on whom he can rely.
The time has come, sir, to decide whether I am to be that companion or
not. After all you have heard of Ozias Midwinter, tell me plainly, will
you trust him to be Allan Armadale’s friend?”
Mr. Brock met that fearlessly frank question by a fearless frankness on
his side.
“I believe you love Allan,” he said, “and I believe you have spoken the
truth. A man who has produced that impression on me is a man whom I am
bound to trust. I trust you.”
Midwinter started to his feet, his dark face flushing deep; his eyes
fixed brightly and steadily, at last, on the rector’s face. “A light!”
he exclaimed, tearing the pages of his father’s letter, one by one, from
the fastening that held them. “Let us destroy the last link that holds
us to the horrible past! Let us see this confession a heap of ashes
before we part!”
“Wait!” said Mr. Brock. “Before you burn it, there is a reason for
looking at it once more.”
The parted leaves of the manuscript dropped from Midwinter’s hands. Mr.
Brock took them up, and sorted them carefully until he found the last
page.
“I view your father’s superstition as you view it,” said the rector.
“But there is a warning given you here, which you will do well (for
Allan’s sake and for your own sake) not to neglect. The last link with
the past will not be destroyed when you have burned these pages. One of
the actors in this story of treachery and murder is not dead yet. Read
those words.”
He pushed the page across the table, with his finger on one sentence.
Midwinter’s agitation misled him. He mistook the indication, and read,
“Avoid the widow of the man I killed, if the widow still lives.”
“Not that sentence,” said the rector. “The next.”
Midwinter read it: “Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to
the marriage, if the maid is still in her service.”
“The maid and the mistress parted,” said Mr. Brock, “at the time of
the mistress’s marriage. The maid and the mistress met again at Mrs.
Armadale’s residence in Somersetshire last year. I myself met the
woman in the village, and I myself know that her visit hastened Mrs.
Armadale’s death. Wait a little, and compose yourself; I see I have
startled you.”
He waited as he was bid, his color fading away to a gray paleness and
the light in his clear brown eyes dying out slowly. What the rector had
said had produced no transient impression on him; there was more than
doubt, there was alarm in his face, as he sat lost in his own thought.
Was the struggle of the past night renewing itself already? Did he feel
the horror of his hereditary superstition creeping over him again?
“Can you put me on my guard against her?” he asked, after a long
interval of silence. “Can you tell me her name?”
“I can only tell you what Mrs. Armadale told me,” answered Mr. Brock.
“The woman acknowledged having been married in the long interval since
she and her mistress had last met. But not a word more escaped her about
her past life. She came to Mrs. Armadale to ask for money, under a
plea of distress. She got the money, and she left the house, positively
refusing, when the question was put to her, to mention her married
name.”
“You saw her yourself in the village. What was she like?”
“She kept her veil down. I can’t tell you.”
“You can tell me what you _did_ see?”
“Certainly. I saw, as she approached me, that she moved very gracefully,
that she had a beautiful figure, and that she was a little over the
middle height. I noticed, when she asked me the way to Mrs. Armadale’s
house, that her manner was the manner of a lady, and that the tone
of her voice was remarkably soft and winning. Lastly, I remembered
afterward that she wore a thick black veil, a black bonnet, a black
silk dress, and a red Paisley shawl. I feel all the importance of your
possessing some better means of identifying her than I can give you. But
unhappily--”
He stopped. Midwinter was leaning eagerly across the table, and
Midwinter’s hand was laid suddenly on his arm.
“Is it possible that you know the woman?” asked Mr. Brock, surprised at
the sudden change in his manner.
“No.”
“What have I said, then, that has startled you so?”
“Do you remember the woman who threw herself from the river steamer?”
asked the other--“the woman who caused that succession of deaths which
opened Allan Armadale’s way to the Thorpe Ambrose estate?”
“I remember the description of her in the police report,” answered the
rector.
“_That_ woman,” pursued Midwinter, “moved gracefully, and had a
beautiful figure. _That_ woman wore a black veil, a black bonnet, a
black silk gown, and a red Paisley shawl--” He stopped, released his
hold of Mr. Brock’s arm, and abruptly resumed his chair. “Can it be
the same?” he said to himself in a whisper. “_Is_ there a fatality
that follows men in the dark? And is it following _us_ in that woman’s
footsteps?”
If the conjecture was right, the one event in the past which had
appeared to be entirely disconnected with the events that had preceded
it was, on the contrary, the one missing link which made the chain
complete. Mr. Brock’s comfortable common sense instinctively denied that
startling conclusion. He looked at Midwinter with a compassionate smile.
“My young friend,” he said, kindly, “have you cleared your mind of all
superstition as completely as you think? Is what you have just said
worthy of the better resolution at which you arrived last night?”
Midwinter’s head drooped on his breast; the color rushed back over his
face; he sighed bitterly.
“You are beginning to doubt my sincerity,” he said. “I can’t blame you.”
“I believe in your sincerity as firmly as ever,” answered Mr. Brock. “I
only doubt whether you have fortified the weak places in your nature as
strongly as you yourself suppose. Many a man has lost the battle against
himself far oftener than you have lost it yet, and has nevertheless won
his victory in the end. I don’t blame you, I don’t distrust you. I only
notice what has happened, to put you on your guard against yourself.
Come! come! Let your own better sense help you; and you will agree with
me that there is really no evidence to justify the suspicion that the
woman whom I met in Somersetshire, and the woman who attempted suicide
in London, are one and the same. Need an old man like me remind a young
man like you that there are thousands of women in England with beautiful
figures--thousands of women who are quietly dressed in black silk gowns
and red Paisley shawls?”
Midwinter caught eagerly at the suggestion; too eagerly, as it might
have occurred to a harder critic on humanity than Mr. Brock.
“You are quite right, sir,” he said, “and I am quite wrong. Tens of
thousands of women answer the description, as you say. I have been
wasting time on my own idle fancies, when I ought to have been carefully
gathering up facts. If this woman ever attempts to find her way to
Allan, I must be prepared to stop her.” He began searching restlessly
among the manuscript leaves scattered about the table, paused over one
of the pages, and examined it attentively. “This helps me to something
positive,” he went on; “this helps me to a knowledge of her age. She was
twelve at the time of Mrs. Armadale’s marriage; add a year, and bring
her to thirteen; add Allan’s age (twenty-two), and we make her a woman
of five-and-thirty at the present time. I know her age; and I know that
she has her own reasons for being silent about her married life. This is
something gained at the outset, and it may lead, in time, to something
more.” He looked up brightly again at Mr. Brock. “Am I in the right way
now, sir? Am I doing my best to profit by the caution which you have
kindly given me?”
“You are vindicating your own better sense,” answered the rector,
encouraging him to trample down his own imagination, with an
Englishman’s ready distrust of the noblest of the human faculties. “You
are paving the way for your own happier life.”
“Am I?” said the other, thoughtfully.
He searched among the papers once more, and stopped at another of the
scattered pages.
“The ship!” he exclaimed, suddenly, his color changing again, and his
manner altering on the instant.
“What ship?” asked the rector.
“The ship in which the deed was done,” Midwinter answered, with the
first signs of impatience that he had shown yet. “The ship in which my
father’s murderous hand turned the lock of the cabin door.”
“What of it?” said Mr. Brock.
He appeared not to hear the question; his eyes remained fixed intently
on the page that he was reading.
“A French vessel, employed in the timber trade,” he said, still speaking
to himself--“a French vessel, named _La Grace de Dieu_. If my father’s
belief had been the right belief--if the fatality had been following me,
step by step, from my father’s grave, in one or other of my voyages, I
should have fallen in with that ship.” He looked up again at Mr. Brock.
“I am quite sure about it now,” he said. “Those women are two, and not
one.”
Mr. Brock shook his head.
“I am glad you have come to that conclusion,” he said. “But I wish you
had reached it in some other way.”
Midwinter started passionately to his feet, and, seizing on the pages of
the manuscript with both hands, flung them into the empty fireplace.
“For God’s sake let me burn it!” he exclaimed. “As long as there is a
page left, I shall read it. And, as long as I read it, my father gets
the better of me, in spite of myself!”
Mr. Brock pointed to the match-box. In another moment the confession
was in flames. When the fire had consumed the last morsel of paper,
Midwinter drew a deep breath of relief.
“I may say, like Macbeth: ‘Why, so, being gone, I am a man again!’”
he broke out with a feverish gayety. “You look fatigued, sir; and no
wonder,” he added, in a lower tone. “I have kept you too long from your
rest--I will keep you no longer. Depend on my remembering what you
have told me; depend on my standing between Allan and any enemy, man
or woman, who comes near him. Thank you, Mr. Brock; a thousand thousand
times, thank you! I came into this room the most wretched of living men;
I can leave it now as happy as the birds that are singing outside!”
As he turned to the door, the rays of the rising sun streamed through
the window, and touched the heap of ashes lying black in the black
fireplace. The sensitive imagination of Midwinter kindled instantly at
the sight.
“Look!” he said, joyously. “The promise of the Future shining over the
ashes of the Past!”
An inexplicable pity for the man, at the moment of his life when he
needed pity least, stole over the rector’s heart when the door had
closed, and he was left by himself again.
“Poor fellow!” he said, with an uneasy surprise at his own compassionate
impulse. “Poor fellow!”