Noticing Mr. Bashwood’s confusion (after a moment’s glance at the change
in his personal appearance), Midwinter spoke first.
“I see I have surprised you,” he said. “You are looking, I suppose, for
somebody else? Have you heard from Allan? Is he on his way home again
already?”
The inquiry about Allan, though it would naturally have suggested
itself to any one in Midwinter’s position at that moment, added to Mr.
Bashwood’s confusion. Not knowing how else to extricate himself from
the critical position in which he was placed, he took refuge in simple
denial.
“I know nothing about Mr. Armadale--oh dear, no, sir, I know nothing
about Mr. Armadale,” he answered, with needless eagerness and hurry.
“Welcome back to England, sir,” he went on, changing the subject in his
nervously talkative manner. “I didn’t know you had been abroad. It’s so
long since we have had the pleasure--since I have had the pleasure. Have
you enjoyed yourself, sir, in foreign parts? Such different manners from
ours--yes, yes, yes--such different manners from ours! Do you make a
long stay in England, now you have come back?”
“I hardly know,” said Midwinter. “I have been obliged to alter my plans,
and to come to England unexpectedly.” He hesitated a little; his manner
changed, and he added, in lower tones: “A serious anxiety has brought
me back. I can’t say what my plans will be until that anxiety is set at
rest.”
The light of a lamp fell on his face while he spoke, and Mr. Bashwood
observed, for the first time, that he looked sadly worn and changed.
“I’m sorry, sir--I’m sure I’m very sorry. If I could be of any use--”
suggested Mr. Bashwood, speaking under the influence in some degree of
his nervous politeness, and in some degree of his remembrance of what
Midwinter had done for him at Thorpe Ambrose in the by-gone time.
Midwinter thanked him and turned away sadly. “I am afraid you can be of
no use, Mr. Bashwood--but I am obliged to you for your offer, all the
same.” He stopped, and considered a little, “Suppose she should _not_ be
ill? Suppose some misfortune should have happened?” he resumed, speaking
to himself, and turning again toward the steward. “If she has left
her mother, some trace of her _might_ be found by inquiring at Thorpe
Ambrose.”
Mr. Bashwood’s curiosity was instantly aroused. The whole sex was
interesting to him now, for the sake of Miss Gwilt.
“A lady, sir?” he inquired. “Are you looking for a lady?”
“I am looking,” said Midwinter, simply, “for my wife.”
“Married, sir!” exclaimed Mr. Bashwood. “Married since I last had the
pleasure of seeing you! Might I take the liberty of asking--?”
Midwinter’s eyes dropped uneasily to the ground.
“You knew the lady in former times,” he said. “I have married Miss
Gwilt.”
The steward started back as he might have started back from a loaded
pistol leveled at his head. His eyes glared as if he had suddenly lost
his senses, and the nervous trembling to which he was subject shook him
from head to foot.
“What’s the matter?” said Midwinter. There was no answer. “What is there
so very startling,” he went on, a little impatiently, “in Miss Gwilt’s
being my wife?”
“_Your_ wife?” repeated Mr. Bashwood, helplessly. “Mrs. Armadale--!” He
checked himself by a desperate effort, and said no more.
The stupor of astonishment which possessed the steward was instantly
reflected in Midwinter’s face. The name in which he had secretly married
his wife had passed the lips of the last man in the world whom he would
have dreamed of admitting into his confidence! He took Mr. Bashwood by
the arm, and led him away to a quieter part of the terminus than the
part of it in which they had hitherto spoken to each other.
“You referred to my wife just now,” he said; “and you spoke of _Mrs.
Armadale_ in the same breath. What do you mean by that?”
Again there was no answer. Utterly incapable of understanding more than
that he had involved himself in some serious complication which was a
complete mystery to him, Mr. Bashwood struggled to extricate himself
from the grasp that was laid on him, and struggled in vain.
Midwinter sternly repeated the question. “I ask you again,” he said,
“what do you mean by it?”
“Nothing, sir! I give you my word of honor, I meant nothing!” He felt
the hand on his arm tightening its grasp; he saw, even in the obscurity
of the remote corner in which they stood, that Midwinter’s fiery temper
was rising, and was not to be trifled with. The extremity of his danger
inspired him with the one ready capacity that a timid man possesses when
he is compelled by main force to face an emergency--the capacity to lie.
“I only meant to say, sir,” he burst out, with a desperate effort to
look and speak confidently, “that Mr. Armadale would be surprised--”
“You said _Mrs._ Armadale!”
“No, sir--on my word of honor, on my sacred word of honor, you are
mistaken--you are, indeed! I said _Mr._ Armadale--how could I say
anything else? Please to let me go, sir--I’m pressed for time. I do
assure you I’m dreadfully pressed for time!”
For a moment longer Midwinter maintained his hold, and in that moment he
decided what to do.
He had accurately stated his motive for returning to England as
proceeding from anxiety about his wife--anxiety naturally caused (after
the regular receipt of a letter from her every other, or every third
day) by the sudden cessation of the correspondence between them on her
side for a whole week. The first vaguely terrible suspicion of some
other reason for her silence than the reason of accident or of illness,
to which he had hitherto attributed it, had struck through him like
a sudden chill the instant he heard the steward associate the name of
“Mrs. Armadale” with the idea of his wife. Little irregularities in her
correspondence with him, which he had thus far only thought strange,
now came back on his mind, and proclaimed themselves to be suspicions as
well. He had hitherto believed the reasons she had given for referring
him, when he answered her letters, to no more definite address than
an address at a post-office. _Now_ he suspected her reasons of being
excuses, for the first time. He had hitherto resolved, on reaching
London, to inquire at the only place he knew of at which a clew to her
could be found--the address she had given him as the address at which
“her mother” lived. _Now_ (with a motive which he was afraid to define
even to himself, but which was strong enough to overbear every other
consideration in his mind) he determined, before all things, to solve
the mystery of Mr. Bashwood’s familiarity with a secret, which was a
marriage secret between himself and his wife. Any direct appeal to a man
of the steward’s disposition, in the steward’s present state of mind,
would be evidently useless. The weapon of deception was, in this case,
a weapon literally forced into Midwinter’s hands. He let go of Mr.
Bashwood’s arm, and accepted Mr. Bashwood’s explanation.
“I beg your pardon,” he said; “I have no doubt you are right. Pray
attribute my rudeness to over-anxiety and over-fatigue. I wish you
good-evening.”
The station was by this time almost a solitude, the passengers by
the train being assembled at the examination of their luggage in the
custom-house waiting-room. It was no easy matter, ostensibly to take
leave of Mr. Bashwood, and really to keep him in view. But Midwinter’s
early life with the gypsy master had been of a nature to practice him in
such stratagems as he was now compelled to adopt. He walked away toward
the waiting-room by the line of empty carriages; opened the door of
one of them, as if to look after something that he had left behind, and
detected Mr. Bashwood making for the cab-rank on the opposite side
of the platform. In an instant Midwinter had crossed, and had passed
through the long row of vehicles, so as to skirt it on the side furthest
from the platform. He entered the second cab by the left-hand door the
moment after Mr. Bashwood had entered the first cab by the right-hand
door. “Double your fare, whatever it is,” he said to the driver, “if you
keep the cab before you in view, and follow it wherever it goes.” In a
minute more both vehicles were on their way out of the station.
The clerk sat in the sentry-box at the gate, taking down the
destinations of the cabs as they passed. Midwinter heard the man who was
driving him call out “Hampstead!” as he went by the clerk’s window.
“Why did you say ‘Hampstead’?” he asked, when they had left the station.
“Because the man before me said ‘Hampstead,’ sir,” answered the driver.
Over and over again, on the wearisome journey to the northwestern
suburb, Midwinter asked if the cab was still in sight. Over and over
again, the man answered, “Right in front of us.”
It was between nine and ten o’clock when the driver pulled up his horse
at last. Midwinter got out, and saw the cab before them waiting at a
house door. As soon as he had satisfied himself that the driver was
the man whom Mr. Bashwood had hired, he paid the promised reward, and
dismissed his own cab.
He took a turn backward and forward before the door. The vaguely
terrible suspicion which had risen in his mind at the terminus had
forced itself by this time into a definite form which was abhorrent to
him. Without the shadow of an assignable reason for it, he found himself
blindly distrusting his wife’s fidelity, and blindly suspecting Mr.
Bashwood of serving her in the capacity of go-between. In sheer horror
of his own morbid fancy, he determined to take down the number of
the house, and the name of the street in which it stood; and then, in
justice to his wife, to return at once to the address which she had
given him as the address at which her mother lived. He had taken out
his pocket-book, and was on his way to the corner of the street, when
he observed the man who had driven Mr. Bashwood looking at him with
an expression of inquisitive surprise. The idea of questioning the
cab-driver, while he had the opportunity, instantly occurred to him. He
took a half-crown from his pocket and put it into the man’s ready hand.
“Has the gentleman whom you drove from the station gone into that
house?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you hear him inquire for anybody when the door was opened?”
“He asked for a lady, sir. Mrs.--” The man hesitated. “It wasn’t a
common name, sir; I should know it again if I heard it.”
“Was it ‘Midwinter’?”
“No, sir.
“Armadale?”
“That’s it, sir. Mrs. Armadale.”
“Are you sure it was ‘Mrs.’ and not ‘Mr.’?”
“I’m as sure as a man can be who hasn’t taken any particular notice,
sir.”
The doubt implied in that last answer decided Midwinter to investigate
the matter on the spot. He ascended the house steps. As he raised his
hand to the bell at the side of the door, the violence of his agitation
mastered him physically for the moment. A strange sensation, as of
something leaping up from his heart to his brain, turned his head wildly
giddy. He held by the house railings and kept his face to the air, and
resolutely waited till he was steady again. Then he rang the bell.
“Is?”--he tried to ask for “Mrs. Armadale,” when the maid-servant had
opened the door, but not even his resolution could force the name to
pass his lips--“is your mistress at home?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
The girl showed him into a back parlor, and presented him to a little
old lady, with an obliging manner and a bright pair of eyes.
“There is some mistake,” said Midwinter. “I wished to see--” Once more
he tried to utter the name, and once more he failed to force it to his
lips.
“Mrs. Armadale?” suggested the little old lady, with a smile.
“Yes.”
“Show the gentleman upstairs, Jenny.”
The girl led the way to the drawing-room floor.
“Any name, sir?”
“No name.”
Mr. Bashwood had barely completed his report of what had happened at the
terminus; Mr. Bashwood’s imperious mistress was still sitting speechless
under the shock of the discovery that had burst on her--when the door
of the room opened; and, without a word of warning to proceed him,
Midwinter appeared on the threshold. He took one step into the room, and
mechanically pushed the door to behind him. He stood in dead silence,
and confronted his wife, with a scrutiny that was terrible in its
unnatural self-possession, and that enveloped her steadily in one
comprehensive look from head to foot.
In dead silence on her side, she rose from her chair. In dead silence
she stood erect on the hearth-rug, and faced her husband in widow’s
weeds.
He took one step nearer to her, and stopped again. He lifted his
hand, and pointed with his lean brown finger at her dress.
“What does that mean?” he asked, without losing his terrible
self-possession, and without moving his outstretched hand.
At the sound of his voice, the quick rise and fall of her bosom--which
had been the one outward betrayal thus far of the inner agony that
tortured her--suddenly stopped. She stood impenetrably silent,
breathlessly still--as if his question had struck her dead, and his
pointing hand had petrified her.
He advanced one step nearer, and reiterated his words in a voice even
lower and quieter than the voice in which he had spoken first.
One moment more of silence, one moment more of inaction, might have been
the salvation of her. But the fatal force of her character triumphed
at the crisis of her destiny, and his. White and still, and haggard and
old, she met the dreadful emergency with a dreadful courage, and spoke
the irrevocable words which renounced him to his face.
“Mr. Midwinter,” she said, in tones unnaturally hard and unnaturally
clear, “our acquaintance hardly entitles you to speak to me in that
manner.” Those were her words. She never lifted her eyes from the ground
while she spoke them. When she had done, the last faint vestige of color
in her cheeks faded out.
There was a pause. Still steadily looking at her, he set himself to
fix the language she had used to him in his mind. “She calls me
‘Mr. Midwinter,’” he said, slowly, in a whisper. “She speaks of ‘our
acquaintance.’” He waited a little and looked round the room. His
wandering eyes encountered Mr. Bashwood for the first time. He saw the
steward standing near the fireplace, trembling, and watching him.
“I once did you a service,” he said; “and you once told me you were not
an ungrateful man. Are you grateful enough to answer me if I ask you
something?”
He waited a little again. Mr. Bashwood still stood trembling at the
fireplace, silently watching him.
“I see you looking at me,” he went on. “Is there some change in me that
I am not conscious of myself? Am I seeing things that you don’t see? Am
I hearing words that you don’t hear? Am I looking or speaking like a man
out of his senses?”
Again he waited, and again the silence was unbroken. His eyes began to
glitter; and the savage blood that he had inherited from his mother rose
dark and slow in his ashy cheeks.
“Is that woman,” he asked, “the woman whom you once knew, whose name was
Miss Gwilt?”
Once more his wife collected her fatal courage. Once more his wife spoke
her fatal words.
“You compel me to repeat,” she said, “that you are presuming on our
acquaintance, and that you are forgetting what is due to me.”
He turned upon her, with a savage suddenness which forced a cry of alarm
from Mr. Bashwood’s lips.
“Are you, or are you not, My Wife?” he asked, through his set teeth.
She raised her eyes to his for the first time. Her lost spirit looked at
him, steadily defiant, out of the hell of its own despair.
“I am _not_ your wife,” she said.
He staggered back, with his hands groping for something to hold by, like
the hands of a man in the dark. He leaned heavily against the wall of
the room, and looked at the woman who had slept on his bosom, and who
had denied him to his face.
Mr. Bashwood stole panic-stricken to her side. “Go in there!” he
whispered, trying to draw her toward the folding-doors which led into
the next room. “For God’s sake, be quick! He’ll kill you!”
She put the old man back with her hand. She looked at him with a sudden
irradiation of her blank face. She answered him with lips that struggled
slowly into a frightful smile.
“_Let_ him kill me,” she said.
As the words passed her lips, he sprang forward from the wall, with a
cry that rang through the house. The frenzy of a maddened man flashed at
her from his glassy eyes, and clutched at her in his threatening hands.
He came on till he was within arms-length of her--and suddenly stood
still. The black flush died out of his face in the instant when he
stopped. His eyelids fell, his outstretched hands wavered and sank
helpless. He dropped, as the dead drop. He lay as the dead lie, in the
arms of the wife who had denied him.
She knelt on the floor, and rested his head on her knee. She caught the
arm of the steward hurrying to help her, with a hand that closed round
it like a vise. “Go for a doctor,” she said, “and keep the people of the
house away till he comes.” There was that in her eye, there was that
in her voice, which would have warned any man living to obey her in
silence. In silence Mr. Bashwood submitted, and hurried out of the room.
The instant she was alone she raised him from her knee. With both arms
clasped round him, the miserable woman lifted his lifeless face to hers
and rocked him on her bosom in an agony of tenderness beyond all relief
in tears, in a passion of remorse beyond all expression in words.
In silence she held him to her breast, in silence she devoured his
forehead, his cheeks, his lips, with kisses. Not a sound escaped her
till she heard the trampling footsteps outside, hurrying up the stairs.
Then a low moan burst from her lips, as she looked her last at him, and
lowered his head again to her knee, before the strangers came in.
The landlady and the steward were the first persons whom she saw when
the door was opened. The medical man (a surgeon living in the street)
followed. The horror and the beauty of her face as she looked up at him
absorbed the surgeon’s attention for the moment, to the exclusion of
everything else. She had to beckon to him, she had to point to the
senseless man, before she could claim his attention for his patient and
divert it from herself.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
The surgeon carried Midwinter to the sofa, and ordered the windows to be
opened. “It is a fainting fit,” he said; “nothing more.”
At that answer her strength failed her for the first time. She drew a
deep breath of relief, and leaned on the chimney-piece for support. Mr.
Bashwood was the only person present who noticed that she was overcome.
He led her to the opposite end of the room, where there was an
easy-chair, leaving the landlady to hand the restoratives to the surgeon
as they were wanted.
“Are you going to wait here till he recovers?” whispered the steward,
looking toward the sofa, and trembling as he looked.
The question forced her to a sense of her position--to a knowledge
of the merciless necessities which that position now forced her to
confront. With a heavy sigh she looked toward the sofa, considered with
herself for a moment, and answered Mr. Bashwood’s inquiry by a question
on her side.
“Is the cab that brought you here from the railway still at the door?”
“Yes.”
“Drive at once to the gates of the Sanitarium, and wait there till I
join you.”
Mr. Bashwood hesitated. She lifted her eyes to his, and, with a look,
sent him out of the room.
“The gentleman is coming to, ma’am,” said the landlady, as the steward
closed the door. “He has just breathed again.”
She bowed in mute reply, rose, and considered with herself once
more--looked toward the sofa for the second time--then passed through
the folding-doors into her own room.
After a short lapse of time the surgeon drew back from the sofa and
motioned to the landlady to stand aside. The bodily recovery of the
patient was assured. There was nothing to be done now but to wait, and
let his mind slowly recall its sense of what had happened.
“Where is she?” were the first words he said to the surgeon, and the
landlady anxiously watching him.
The landlady knocked at the folding-doors, and received no answer. She
went in, and found the room empty. A sheet of note-paper was on the
dressing-table, with the doctor’s fee placed on it. The paper contained
these lines, evidently written in great agitation or in great haste: “It
is impossible for me to remain here to-night, after what has happened.
I will return to-morrow to take away my luggage, and to pay what I owe
you.”
“Where is she?” Midwinter asked again, when the landlady returned alone
to the drawing-room.
“Gone, sir.”
“I don’t believe it!”
The old lady’s color rose. “If you know her handwriting, sir,” she
answered, handing him the sheet of note-paper, “perhaps you may believe
_that_?”
He looked at the paper. “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” he said, as he
handed it back--“I beg your pardon, with all my heart.”
There was something in his face as he spoke those words which more than
soothed the old lady’s irritation: it touched her with a sudden pity
for the man who had offended her. “I am afraid there is some dreadful
trouble, sir, at the bottom of all this,” she said, simply. “Do you wish
me to give any message to the lady when she comes back?”
Midwinter rose and steadied himself for a moment against the sofa. “I
will bring my own message to-morrow,” he said. “I must see her before
she leaves your house.”
The surgeon accompanied his patient into the street. “Can I see you
home?” he said, kindly. “You had better not walk, if it is far. You
mustn’t overexert yourself; you mustn’t catch a chill this cold night.”
Midwinter took his hand and thanked him. “I have been used to hard
walking and cold nights, sir,” he said; “and I am not easily worn out,
even when I look so broken as I do now. If you will tell me the nearest
way out of these streets, I think the quiet of the country and the quiet
of the night will help me. I have something serious to do to-morrow,” he
added, in a lower tone; “and I can’t rest or sleep till I have thought
over it to-night.”
The surgeon understood that he had no common man to deal with. He gave
the necessary directions without any further remark, and parted with his
patient at his own door.
Left by himself, Midwinter paused, and looked up at the heavens in
silence. The night had cleared, and the stars were out--the stars which
he had first learned to know from his gypsy master on the hillside. For
the first time his mind went back regretfully to his boyish days. “Oh,
for the old life!” he thought, longingly. “I never knew till now how
happy the old life was!”
He roused himself, and went on toward the open country. His face
darkened as he left the streets behind him and advanced into the
solitude and obscurity that lay beyond.
“She has denied her husband to-night,” he said. “She shall know her
master to-morrow.”