The cab was waiting at the gates as Miss Gwilt approached the
Sanitarium. Mr. Bashwood got out and advanced to meet her. She took his
arm and led him aside a few steps, out of the cabman’s hearing.
“Think what you like of me,” she said, keeping her thick black veil down
over her face, “but don’t speak to me to-night. Drive back to your hotel
as if nothing had happened. Meet the tidal train to-morrow as usual, and
come to me afterward at the Sanitarium. Go without a word, and I shall
believe there is one man in the world who really loves me. Stay and ask
questions, and I shall bid you good-by at once and forever!”
She pointed to the cab. In a minute more it had left the Sanitarium and
was taking Mr. Bashwood back to his hotel.
She opened the iron gate and walked slowly up to the house door. A
shudder ran through her as she rang the bell. She laughed bitterly.
“Shivering again!” she said to herself. “Who would have thought I had so
much feeling left in me?”
For once in her life the doctor’s face told the truth, when the study
door opened between ten and eleven at night, and Miss Gwilt entered the
room.
“Mercy on me!” he exclaimed, with a look of the blankest bewilderment.
“What does this mean?”
“It means,” she answered, “that I have decided to-night instead of
deciding to-morrow. You, who know women so well, ought to know that they
act on impulse. I am here on an impulse. Take me or leave me, just as
you like.”
“Take you or leave you?” repeated the doctor, recovering his presence of
mind. “My dear lady, what a dreadful way of putting it! Your room shall
be got ready instantly! Where is your luggage? Will you let me send
for it? No? You can do without your luggage to-night? What admirable
fortitude! You will fetch it yourself to-morrow? What extraordinary
independence! Do take off your bonnet. Do draw in to the fire! What can
I offer you?”
“Offer me the strongest sleeping draught you ever made in your life,”
she replied. “And leave me alone till the time comes to take it. I
shall be your patient in earnest!” she added, fiercely, as the doctor
attempted to remonstrate. “I shall be the maddest of the mad if you
irritate me to-night!”
The Principal of the Sanitarium became gravely and briefly professional
in an instant.
“Sit down in that dark corner,” he said. “Not a soul shall disturb you.
In half an hour you will find your room ready, and your sleeping
draught on the table.”--“It’s been a harder struggle for her than
I anticipated,” he thought, as he left the room, and crossed to his
Dispensary on the opposite side of the hall. “Good heavens, what
business has she with a conscience, after such a life as hers has been!”
The Dispensary was elaborately fitted up with all the latest
improvements in medical furniture. But one of the four walls of the room
was unoccupied by shelves, and here the vacant space was filled by a
handsome antique cabinet of carved wood, curiously out of harmony, as an
object, with the unornamented utilitarian aspect of the place generally.
On either side of the cabinet two speaking-tubes were inserted in the
wall, communicating with the upper regions of the house, and labeled
respectively “Resident Dispenser” and “Head Nurse.” Into the second of
these tubes the doctor spoke, on entering the room. An elderly woman
appeared, took her orders for preparing Mrs. Armadale’s bed-chamber,
courtesied, and retired.
Left alone again in the Dispensary, the doctor unlocked the center
compartment of the cabinet, and disclosed a collection of bottles
inside, containing the various poisons used in medicine. After taking
out the laudanum wanted for the sleeping draught, and placing it on
the dispensary table, he went back to the cabinet, looked into it for a
little while, shook his head doubtfully, and crossed to the open shelves
on the opposite side of the room.
Here, after more consideration, he took down one out of the row of large
chemical bottles before him, filled with a yellow liquid; placing the
bottle on the table, he returned to the cabinet, and opened a side
compartment, containing some specimens of Bohemian glass-work. After
measuring it with his eye, he took from the specimens a handsome purple
flask, high and narrow in form, and closed by a glass stopper. This
he filled with the yellow liquid, leaving a small quantity only at the
bottom of the bottle, and locking up the flask again in the place from
which he had taken it. The bottle was next restored to its place, after
having been filled up with water from the cistern in the Dispensary,
mixed with certain chemical liquids in small quantities, which restored
it (so far as appearances went) to the condition in which it had
been when it was first removed from the shelf. Having completed these
mysterious proceedings, the doctor laughed softly, and went back to his
speaking-tubes to summon the Resident Dispenser next.
The Resident Dispenser made his appearance shrouded in the necessary
white apron from his waist to his feet. The doctor solemnly wrote a
prescription for a composing draught, and handed it to his assistant.
“Wanted immediately, Benjamin,” he said in a soft and melancholy voice.
“A lady patient--Mrs. Armadale, Room No. 1, second floor. Ah, dear,
dear!” groaned the doctor, absently; “an anxious case, Benjamin--an
anxious case.” He opened the brand-new ledger of the establishment,
and entered the Case at full length, with a brief abstract of the
prescription. “Have you done with the laudanum? Put it back, and lock
the cabinet, and give me the key. Is the draught ready? Label it, ‘To
be taken at bedtime,’ and give it to the nurse, Benjamin--give it to the
nurse.”
While the doctor’s lips were issuing these directions, the doctor’s
hands were occupied in opening a drawer under the desk on which the
ledger was placed. He took out some gayly printed cards of admission “to
view the Sanitarium, between the hours of two and four P.M.,” and filled
them up with the date of the next day, “December 10th.” When a dozen
of the cards had been wrapped up in a dozen lithographed letters of
invitation, and inclosed in a dozen envelopes, he next consulted a list
of the families resident in the neighborhood, and directed the envelopes
from the list. Ringing a bell this time, instead of speaking through
a tube, he summoned the man-servant, and gave him the letters, to be
delivered by hand the first thing the next morning. “I think it will
do,” said the doctor, taking a turn in the Dispensary when the servant
had gone out--“I think it will do.” While he was still absorbed in his
own reflections, the nurse re-appeared to announce that the lady’s room
was ready; and the doctor thereupon formally returned to the study to
communicate the information to Miss Gwilt.
She had not moved since he left her. She rose from her dark corner when
he made his announcement, and, without speaking or raising her veil,
glided out of the room like a ghost.
After a brief interval, the nurse came downstairs again, with a word for
her master’s private ear.
“The lady has ordered me to call her to-morrow at seven o’clock, sir,”
she said. “She means to fetch her luggage herself, and she wants to have
a cab at the door as soon as she is dressed. What am I to do?”
“Do what the lady tells you,” said the doctor. “She may be safely
trusted to return to the Sanitarium.”
The breakfast hour at the Sanitarium was half-past eight o’clock. By
that time Miss Gwilt had settled everything at her lodgings, and had
returned with her luggage in her own possession. The doctor was quite
amazed at the promptitude of his patient.
“Why waste so much energy?” he asked, when they met at the
breakfast-table. “Why be in such a hurry, my dear lady, when you had all
the morning before you?”
“Mere restlessness!” she said, briefly. “The longer I live, the more
impatient I get.”
The doctor, who had noticed before she spoke that her face looked
strangely pale and old that morning, observed, when she answered him,
that her expression--naturally mobile in no ordinary degree--remained
quite unaltered by the effort of speaking. There was none of the usual
animation on her lips, none of the usual temper in her eyes. He had
never seen her so impenetrably and coldly composed as he saw her now.
“She has made up her mind at last,” he thought. “I may say to her this
morning what I couldn’t say to her last night.”
He prefaced the coming remarks by a warning look at her widow’s dress.
“Now you have got your luggage,” he began, gravely, “permit me to
suggest putting that cap away, and wearing another gown.”
“Why?”
“Do you remember what you told me a day or two since?” asked the doctor.
“You said there was a chance of Mr. Armadale’s dying in my Sanitarium?”
“I will say it again, if you like.”
“A more unlikely chance,” pursued the doctor, deaf as ever to all
awkward interruptions, “it is hardly possible to imagine! But as long
as it is a chance at all, it is worth considering. Say, then, that he
dies--dies suddenly and unexpectedly, and makes a Coroner’s Inquest
necessary in the house. What is our course in that case? Our course is
to preserve the characters to which we have committed ourselves--you
as his widow, and I as the witness of your marriage--and, _in_ those
characters, to court the fullest inquiry. In the entirely improbable
event of his dying just when we want him to die, my idea--I might even
say, my resolution--is to admit that we knew of his resurrection from
the sea; and to acknowledge that we instructed Mr. Bashwood to entrap
him into this house, by means of a false statement about Miss Milroy.
When the inevitable questions follow, I propose to assert that he
exhibited symptoms of mental alienation shortly after your marriage;
that his delusion consisted in denying that you were his wife, and in
declaring that he was engaged to be married to Miss Milroy; that you
were in such terror of him on this account, when you heard he was alive
and coming back, as to be in a state of nervous agitation that required
my care; that at your request, and to calm that nervous agitation, I saw
him professionally, and got him quietly into the house by a humoring of
his delusion, perfectly justifiable in such a case; and, lastly, that I
can certify his brain to have been affected by one of those mysterious
disorders, eminently incurable, eminently fatal, in relation to which
medical science is still in the dark. Such a course as this (in the
remotely possible event which we are now supposing) would be, in your
interests and mine, unquestionably the right course to take; and such a
dress as _that_ is, just as certainly, under existing circumstances, the
wrong dress to wear.”
“Shall I take it off at once?” she asked, rising from the
breakfast-table, without a word of remark on what had just been said to
her.
“Anytime before two o’clock to-day will do,” said the doctor.
She looked at him with a languid curiosity--nothing more. “Why before
two?” she inquired.
“Because this is one of my ‘Visitors’ Days,’ And the visitors’ time is
from two to four.”
“What have I to do with your visitors?”
“Simply this. I think it important that perfectly respectable and
perfectly disinterested witnesses should see you, in my house, in the
character of a lady who has come to consult me.”
“Your motive seems rather far-fetched. Is it the only motive you have in
the matter?”
“My dear, dear lady!” remonstrated the doctor, “have I any concealments
from _you_? Surely, you ought to know me better than that?”
“Yes,” she said, with a weary contempt. “It’s dull enough of me not to
understand you by this time. Send word upstairs when I am wanted.” She
left him, and went back to her room.
Two o’clock came; and in a quarter of an hour afterward the visitors
had arrived. Short as the notice had been, cheerless as the Sanitarium
looked to spectators from without, the doctor’s invitation had been
largely accepted, nevertheless, by the female members of the families
whom he had addressed. In the miserable monotony of the lives led by a
large section of the middle classes of England, anything is welcome
to the women which offers them any sort of harmless refuge from the
established tyranny of the principle that all human happiness begins and
ends at home. While the imperious needs of a commercial country limited
the representatives of the male sex, among the doctor’s visitors, to one
feeble old man and one sleepy little boy, the women, poor souls, to the
number of no less than sixteen--old and young, married and single--had
seized the golden opportunity of a plunge into public life. Harmoniously
united by the two common objects which they all had in view--in the
first place, to look at each other, and, in the second place, to look at
the Sanitarium--they streamed in neatly dressed procession through the
doctor’s dreary iron gates, with a thin varnish over them of assumed
superiority to all unladylike excitement, most significant and most
pitiable to see!
The proprietor of the Sanitarium received his visitors in the hall with
Miss Gwilt on his arm. The hungry eyes of every woman in the company
overlooked the doctor as if no such person had existed; and, fixing on
the strange lady, devoured her from head to foot in an instant.
“My First Inmate,” said the doctor, presenting Miss Gwilt. “This lady
only arrived late last night; and she takes the present opportunity (the
only one my morning’s engagements have allowed me to give her) of going
over the Sanitarium.--Allow me, ma’am,” he went on, releasing Miss
Gwilt, and giving his arm to the eldest lady among the visitors.
“Shattered nerves--domestic anxiety,” he whispered, confidentially.
“Sweet woman! sad case!” He sighed softly, and led the old lady across
the hall.
The flock of visitors followed, Miss Gwilt accompanying them in silence,
and walking alone--among them, but not of them--the last of all.
“The grounds, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor, wheeling round,
and addressing his audience from the foot of the stairs, “are, as you
have seen, in a partially unfinished condition. Under any circumstances,
I should lay little stress on the grounds, having Hampstead Heath so
near at hand, and carriage exercise and horse exercise being parts of
my System. In a lesser degree, it is also necessary for me to ask
your indulgence for the basement floor, on which we now stand. The
waiting-room and study on that side, and the Dispensary on the other
(to which I shall presently ask your attention), are completed. But the
large drawing-room is still in the decorator’s hands. In that room (when
the walls are dry--not a moment before) my inmates will assemble for
cheerful society. Nothing will be spared that can improve, elevate, and
adorn life at these happy little gatherings. Every evening, for example,
there will be music for those who like it.”
At this point there was a faint stir among the visitors. A mother of a
family interrupted the doctor. She begged to know whether music “every
evening” included Sunday evening; and, if so, what music was performed?
“Sacred music, of course, ma’am,” said the doctor. “Handel on Sunday
evening--and Haydn occasionally, when not too cheerful. But, as I was
about to say, music is not the only entertainment offered to my nervous
inmates. Amusing reading is provided for those who prefer books.”
There was another stir among the visitors. Another mother of a family
wished to know whether amusing reading meant novels.
“Only such novels as I have selected and perused myself, in the first
instance,” said the doctor. “Nothing painful, ma’am! There may be plenty
that is painful in real life; but for that very reason, we don’t want it
in books. The English novelist who enters my house (no foreign novelist
will be admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English
reader understands it in our time. He must know that our purer modern
taste, our higher modern morality, limits him to doing exactly
two things for us, when he writes us a book. All we want of him
is--occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably to make us
comfortable.”
There was a third stir among the visitors--caused plainly this time by
approval of the sentiments which they had just heard. The doctor, wisely
cautious of disturbing the favorable impression that he had produced,
dropped the subject of the drawing-room, and led the way upstairs. As
before, the company followed; and, as before, Miss Gwilt walked silently
behind them, last of all. One after another the ladies looked at her
with the idea of speaking, and saw something in her face, utterly
unintelligible to them, which checked the well-meant words on their
lips. The prevalent impression was that the Principal of the Sanitarium
had been delicately concealing the truth, and that his first inmate was
mad.
The doctor led the way--with intervals of breathing-time accorded to the
old lady on his arm--straight to the top of the house. Having collected
his visitors in the corridor, and having waved his hand indicatively
at the numbered doors opening out of it on either side, he invited the
company to look into any or all of the rooms at their own pleasure.
“Numbers one to four, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor, “include
the dormitories of the attendants. Numbers four to eight are rooms
intended for the accommodation of the poorer class of patients, whom I
receive on terms which simply cover my expenditure--nothing more. In
the cases of these poorer persons among my suffering fellow creatures,
personal piety and the recommendation of two clergymen are indispensable
to admission. Those are the only conditions I make; but those I insist
on. Pray observe that the rooms are all ventilated, and the bedsteads
all iron and kindly notice, as we descend again to the second floor,
that there is a door shutting off all communication between the second
story and the top story when necessary. The rooms on the second floor,
which we have now reached, are (with the exception of my own room)
entirely devoted to the reception of lady-inmates--experience having
convinced me that the greater sensitiveness of the female constitution
necessitates the higher position of the sleeping apartment, with a view
to the greater purity and freer circulation of the air. Here the ladies
are established immediately under my care, while my assistant-physician
(whom I expect to arrive in a week’s time) looks after the gentlemen on
the floor beneath. Observe, again, as we descend to this lower, or first
floor, a second door, closing all communication at night between the
two stories to every one but the assistant physician and myself. And
now that we have reached the gentleman’s part of the house, and that
you have observed for yourselves the regulations of the establishment,
permit me to introduce you to a specimen of my system of treatment next.
I can exemplify it practically, by introducing you to a room fitted up,
under my own direction, for the accommodation of the most complicated
cases of nervous suffering and nervous delusion that can come under my
care.”
He threw open the door of a room at one extremity of the corridor,
numbered Four. “Look in, ladies and gentlemen,” he said; “and, if you
see anything remarkable, pray mention it.”
The room was not very large, but it was well lit by one broad window.
Comfortably furnished as a bedroom, it was only remarkable among other
rooms of the same sort in one way. It had no fireplace. The visitors
having noticed this, were informed that the room was warmed in winter by
means of hot water; and were then invited back again into the corridor,
to make the discoveries, under professional direction, which they were
unable to make for themselves.
“A word, ladies and gentlemen,” said the doctor; “literally a word, on
nervous derangement first. What is the process of treatment, when,
let us say, mental anxiety has broken you down, and you apply to your
doctor? He sees you, hears you, and gives you two prescriptions. One
is written on paper, and made up at the chemist’s. The other is
administered by word of mouth, at the propitious moment when the fee is
ready; and consists in a general recommendation to you to keep your
mind easy. That excellent advice given, your doctor leaves you to spare
yourself all earthly annoyances by your own unaided efforts, until he
calls again. Here my System steps in and helps you! When _I_ see the
necessity of keeping your mind easy, I take the bull by the horns and do
it for you. I place you in a sphere of action in which the ten thousand
trifles which must, and do, irritate nervous people at home are
expressly considered and provided against. I throw up impregnable moral
intrenchments between Worry and You. Find a door banging in _this_
house, if you can! Catch a servant in _this_ house rattling the
tea-things when he takes away the tray! Discover barking dogs, crowing
cocks, hammering workmen, screeching children _here_--and I engage to
close My Sanitarium to-morrow! Are these nuisances laughing matters to
nervous people? Ask them! Can they escape these nuisances at home? Ask
them! Will ten minutes’ irritation from a barking dog or a screeching
child undo every atom of good done to a nervous sufferer by a month’s
medical treatment? There isn’t a competent doctor in England who will
venture to deny it! On those plain grounds my System is based. I assert
the medical treatment of nervous suffering to be entirely subsidiary
to the moral treatment of it. That moral treatment of it you find here.
That moral treatment, sedulously pursued throughout the day, follows
the sufferer into his room at night; and soothes, helps and cures him,
without his own knowledge--you shall see how.”
The doctor paused to take breath and looked, for the first time since
the visitors had entered the house, at Miss Gwilt. For the first time,
on her side, she stepped forward among the audience, and looked at him
in return. After a momentary obstruction in the shape of a cough, the
doctor went on.
“Say, ladies and gentlemen,” he proceeded, “that my patient has just
come in. His mind is one mass of nervous fancies and caprices, which
his friends (with the best possible intentions) have been ignorantly
irritating at home. They have been afraid of him, for instance, at
night. They have forced him to have somebody to sleep in the room with
him, or they have forbidden him, in case of accidents, to lock his door.
He comes to me the first night, and says: ‘Mind, I won’t have anybody
in my room!’--‘Certainly not!’--‘I insist on locking my door.’--‘By all
means!’ In he goes, and locks his door; and there he is, soothed and
quieted, predisposed to confidence, predisposed to sleep, by having his
own way. ‘This is all very well,’ you may say; ‘but suppose something
happens, suppose he has a fit in the night, what then?’ You shall see!
Hallo, my young friend!” cried the doctor, suddenly addressing the
sleepy little boy. “Let’s have a game. You shall be the poor sick
man, and I’ll be the good doctor. Go into that room and lock the door.
There’s a brave boy! Have you locked it? Very good! Do you think I can’t
get at you if I like? I wait till you’re asleep--I press this little
white button, hidden here in the stencilled pattern of the outer
wall--the mortise of the lock inside falls back silently against the
door-post--and I walk into the room whenever I like. The same plan is
pursued with the window. My capricious patient won’t open it at night,
when he ought. I humor him again. ‘Shut it, dear sir, by all means!’ As
soon as he is asleep, I pull the black handle hidden here, in the corner
of the wall. The window of the room inside noiselessly opens, as you
see. Say the patient’s caprice is the other way--he persists in opening
the window when he ought to shut it. Let him! by all means, let him!
I pull a second handle when he is snug in his bed, and the window
noiselessly closes in a moment. Nothing to irritate him, ladies and
gentlemen--absolutely nothing to irritate him! But I haven’t done with
him yet. Epidemic disease, in spite of all my precautions, may
enter this Sanitarium, and may render the purifying of the sick-room
necessary. Or the patient’s case may be complicated by other than
nervous malady--say, for instance, asthmatic difficulty of breathing. In
the one case, fumigation is necessary; in the other, additional oxygen
in the air will give relief. The epidemic nervous patient says, ‘I won’t
be smoked under my own nose!’ The asthmatic nervous patient gasps with
terror at the idea of a chemical explosion in his room. I noiselessly
fumigate one of them; I noiselessly oxygenize the other, by means of a
simple Apparatus fixed outside in the corner here. It is protected by
this wooden casing; it is locked with my own key; and it communicates by
means of a tube with the interior of the room. Look at it!”
With a preliminary glance at Miss Gwilt, the doctor unlocked the lid of
the wooden casing, and disclosed inside nothing more remarkable than a
large stone jar, having a glass funnel, and a pipe communicating with
the wall, inserted in the cork which closed the mouth of it. With
another look at Miss Gwilt, the doctor locked the lid again, and asked,
in the blandest manner, whether his System was intelligible now?
“I might introduce you to all sorts of other contrivances of the same
kind,” he resumed, leading the way downstairs; “but it would be only the
same thing over and over again. A nervous patient who always has his own
way is a nervous patient who is never worried; and a nervous patient who
is never worried is a nervous patient cured. There it is in a nutshell!
Come and see the Dispensary, ladies; the Dispensary and the kitchen
next!”
Once more, Miss Gwilt dropped behind the visitors, and waited
alone--looking steadfastly at the Room which the doctor had opened, and
at the apparatus which the doctor had unlocked. Again, without a word
passing between them, she had understood him. She knew, as well as if he
had confessed it, that he was craftily putting the necessary temptation
in her way, before witnesses who could speak to the superficially
innocent acts which they had seen, if anything serious happened. The
apparatus, originally constructed to serve the purpose of the doctor’s
medical crotchets, was evidently to be put to some other use, of which
the doctor himself had probably never dreamed till now. And the chances
were that, before the day was over, that other use would be privately
revealed to her at the right moment, in the presence of the right
witness. “Armadale will die this time,” she said to herself, as she went
slowly down the stairs. “The doctor will kill him, by my hands.”
The visitors were in the Dispensary when she joined them. All the ladies
were admiring the beauty of the antique cabinet; and, as a necessary
consequence, all the ladies were desirous of seeing what was inside. The
doctor--after a preliminary look at Miss Gwilt--good-humoredly shook his
head. “There is nothing to interest you inside,” he said. “Nothing but
rows of little shabby bottles containing the poisons used in medicine
which I keep under lock and key. Come to the kitchen, ladies, and honor
me with your advice on domestic matters below stairs.” He glanced again
at Miss Gwilt as the company crossed the hall, with a look which said
plainly, “Wait here.”
In another quarter of an hour the doctor had expounded his views on
cookery and diet, and the visitors (duly furnished with prospectuses)
were taking leave of him at the door. “Quite an intellectual treat!”
they said to each other, as they streamed out again in neatly dressed
procession through the iron gates. “And what a very superior man!”
The doctor turned back to the Dispensary, humming absently to himself,
and failing entirely to observe the corner of the hall in which Miss
Gwilt stood retired. After an instant’s hesitation, she followed him.
The assistant was in the room when she entered it--summoned by his
employer the moment before.
“Doctor,” she said, coldly and mechanically, as if she was repeating a
lesson, “I am as curious as the other ladies about that pretty cabinet
of yours. Now they are all gone, won’t you show the inside of it to
_me_?”
The doctor laughed in his pleasantest manner.
“The old story,” he said. “Blue-Beard’s locked chamber, and female
curiosity! (Don’t go, Benjamin, don’t go.) My dear lady, what interest
can you possibly have in looking at a medical bottle, simply because it
happens to be a bottle of poison?”
She repeated her lesson for the second time.
“I have the interest of looking at it,” she said, “and of thinking, if
it got into some people’s hands, of the terrible things it might do.”
The doctor glanced at his assistant with a compassionate smile.
“Curious, Benjamin,” he said, “the romantic view taken of these drugs of
ours by the unscientific mind! My dear lady,” he added, turning to Miss
Gwilt, “if _that_ is the interest you attach to looking at poisons, you
needn’t ask me to unlock my cabinet--you need only look about you round
the shelves of this room. There are all sorts of medical liquids
and substances in those bottles--most innocent, most useful in
themselves--which, in combination with other substances and other
liquids, become poisons as terrible and as deadly as any that I have in
my cabinet under lock and key.”
She looked at him for a moment, and creased to the opposite side of the
room.
“Show me one,” she said,
Still smiling as good-humoredly as ever, the doctor humored his nervous
patient. He pointed to the bottle from which he had privately removed
the yellow liquid on the previous day, and which he had filled up again
with a carefully-colored imitation in the shape of a mixture of his own.
“Do you see that bottle,” he said--“that plump, round,
comfortable-looking bottle? Never mind the name of what is beside it;
let us stick to the bottle, and distinguish it, if you like, by giving
it a name of our own. Suppose we call it ‘our Stout Friend’? Very good.
Our Stout Friend, by himself, is a most harmless and useful medicine. He
is freely dispensed every day to tens of thousands of patients all over
the civilized world. He has made no romantic appearances in courts of
law; he has excited no breathless interest in novels; he has played
no terrifying part on the stage. There he is, an innocent, inoffensive
creature, who troubles nobody with the responsibility of locking him up!
_But_ bring him into contact with something else--introduce him to the
acquaintance of a certain common mineral substance, of a universally
accessible kind, broken into fragments; provide yourself with (say) six
doses of our Stout Friend, and pour those doses consecutively on the
fragments I have mentioned, at intervals of not less than five minutes.
Quantities of little bubbles will rise at every pouring; collect the gas
in those bubbles, and convey it into a closed chamber--and let Samson
himself be in that closed chamber; our stout Friend will kill him in
half an hour! Will kill him slowly, without his seeing anything, without
his smelling anything, without his feeling anything but sleepiness.
Will kill him, and tell the whole College of Surgeons nothing, if they
examine him after death, but that he died of apoplexy or congestion
of the lungs! What do you think of _that_, my dear lady, in the way of
mystery and romance? Is our harmless Stout Friend as interesting _now_
as if he rejoiced in the terrible popular fame of the Arsenic and
the Strychnine which I keep locked up there? Don’t suppose I am
exaggerating! Don’t suppose I’m inventing a story to put you off with,
as the children say. Ask Benjamin there,” said the doctor, appealing
to his assistant, with his eyes fixed on Miss Gwilt. “Ask Benjamin,” he
repeated, with the steadiest emphasis on the next words, “if six doses
from that bottle, at intervals of five minutes each, would not, under
the conditions I have stated, produce the results I have described?”
The Resident Dispenser, modestly admiring Miss Gwilt at a distance,
started and colored up. He was plainly gratified by the little attention
which had included him in the conversation.
“The doctor is quite right, ma’am,” he said, addressing Miss Gwilt, with
his best bow; “the production of the gas, extended over half an hour,
would be quite gradual enough. And,” added the Dispenser, silently
appealing to his employer to let him exhibit a little chemical knowledge
on his own account, “the volume of the gas would be sufficient at the
end of the time--if I am not mistaken, sir?--to be fatal to any person
entering the room in less than five minutes.”
“Unquestionably, Benjamin,” rejoined the doctor. “But I think we have
had enough of chemistry for the present,” he added, turning to Miss
Gwilt. “With every desire, my dear lady, to gratify every passing wish
you may form, I venture to propose trying a more cheerful subject.
Suppose we leave the Dispensary, before it suggests any more inquiries
to that active mind of yours? No? You want to see an experiment? You
want to see how the little bubbles are made? Well, well! there is no
harm in that. We will let Mrs. Armadale see the bubbles,” continued the
doctor, in the tone of a parent humoring a spoiled child. “Try if you
can find a few of those fragments that we want, Benjamin. I dare say the
workmen (slovenly fellows!) have left something of the sort about the
house or the grounds.”
The Resident Dispenser left the room.
As soon as his back was turned, the doctor began opening and shutting
drawers in various parts of the Dispensary, with the air of a man who
wants something in a hurry, and does not know where to find it. “Bless
my soul!” he exclaimed, suddenly stopping at the drawer from which he
had taken his cards of invitation on the previous day, “what’s this? A
key? A duplicate key, as I’m alive, of my fumigating apparatus upstairs!
Oh dear, dear, how careless I get,” said the doctor, turning round
briskly to Miss Gwilt. “I hadn’t the least idea that I possessed this
second key. I should never have missed it. I do assure you I should
never have missed it if anybody had taken it out of the drawer!” He
bustled away to the other end of the room--without closing the drawer,
and without taking away the duplicate key.
In silence, Miss Gwilt listened till he had done. In silence, she glided
to the drawer. In silence, she took the key and hid it in her apron
pocket.
The Dispenser came back, with the fragments required of him, collected
in a basin. “Thank you, Benjamin,” said the doctor. “Kindly cover them
with water, while I get the bottle down.”
As accidents sometimes happen in the most perfectly regulated families,
so clumsiness sometimes possesses itself of the most perfectly
disciplined hands. In the process of its transfer from the shelf to the
doctor, the bottle slipped and fell smashed to pieces on the floor.
“Oh, my fingers and thumbs!” cried the doctor, with an air of comic
vexation, “what in the world do you mean by playing me such a wicked
trick as that? Well, well, well--it can’t be helped. Have we got any
more of it, Benjamin?”
“Not a drop, sir.”
“Not a drop!” echoed the doctor. “My dear madam, what excuses can I
offer you? My clumsiness has made our little experiment impossible for
to-day. Remind me to order some more to-morrow, Benjamin, and don’t
think of troubling yourself to put that mess to rights. I’ll send the
man here to mop it all up. Our Stout Friend is harmless enough now, my
dear lady--in combination with a boarded floor and a coming mop! I’m
so sorry; I really am so sorry to have disappointed you.” With those
soothing words, he offered his arm, and led Miss Gwilt out of the
Dispensary.
“Have you done with me for the present?” she asked, when they were in
the hall.
“Oh, dear, dear, what a way of putting it!” exclaimed the doctor.
“Dinner at six,” he added, with his politest emphasis, as she turned
from him in disdainful silence, and slowly mounted the stairs to her own
room.
A clock of the noiseless sort--incapable of offending irritable
nerves--was fixed in the wall, above the first-floor landing, at the
Sanitarium. At the moment when the hands pointed to a quarter before
six, the silence of the lonely upper regions was softly broken by the
rustling of Miss Gwilt’s dress. She advanced along the corridor of the
first floor--paused at the covered apparatus fixed outside the room
numbered Four--listened for a moment--and then unlocked the cover with
the duplicate key.
The open lid cast a shadow over the inside of the casing. All she saw
at first was what she had seen already--the jar, and the pipe and glass
funnel inserted in the cork. She removed the funnel; and, looking about
her, observed on the window-sill close by a wax-tipped wand used for
lighting the gas. She took the wand, and, introducing it through the
aperture occupied by the funnel, moved it to and fro in the jar. The
faint splash of some liquid, and the grating noise of certain hard
substances which she was stirring about, were the two sounds that caught
her ear. She drew out the wand, and cautiously touched the wet left on
it with the tip of her tongue. Caution was quite needless in this case.
The liquid was--water.
In putting the funnel back in its place, she noticed something faintly
shining in the obscurely lit vacant space at the side of the jar. She
drew it out, and produced a Purple Flask. The liquid with which it was
filled showed dark through the transparent coloring of the glass; and
fastened at regular intervals down one side of the Flask were six thin
strips of paper, which divided the contents into six equal parts.
There was no doubt now that the apparatus had been secretly prepared for
her--the apparatus of which she alone (besides the doctor) possessed the
key.
She put back the Flask, and locked the cover of the casing. For a moment
she stood looking at it, with the key in her hand. On a sudden, her lost
color came back. On a sudden, its natural animation returned, for the
first time that day, to her face. She turned and hurried breathlessly
upstairs to her room on the second floor. With eager hands she snatched
her cloak out of the wardrobe, and took her bonnet from the box. “I’m
not in prison!” she burst out, impetuously. “I’ve got the use of my
limbs! I can go--no matter where, as long as I am out of this house!”
With her cloak on her shoulders, with her bonnet in her hand, she
crossed the room to the door. A moment more--and she would have been out
in the passage. In that moment the remembrance flashed back on her of
the husband whom she had denied to his face. She stopped instantly, and
threw the cloak and bonnet from her on the bed. “No!” she said; “the
gulf is dug between us--the worst is done!”
There was a knock at the door. The doctor’s voice outside politely
reminded her that it was six o’clock.
She opened the door, and stopped him on his way downstairs.
“What time is the train due to-night?” she asked, in a whisper.
“At ten,” answered the doctor, in a voice which all the world might
hear, and welcome.
“What room is Mr. Armadale to have when he comes?”
“What room would you like him to have?”
“Number Four.”
The doctor kept up appearances to the very last.
“Number Four let it be,” he said, graciously. “Provided, of course, that
Number Four is unoccupied at the time.”
* * * * *
The evening wore on, and the night came.
At a few minutes before ten, Mr. Bashwood was again at his post, once
more on the watch for the coming of the tidal train.
The inspector on duty, who knew him by sight, and who had personally
ascertained that his regular attendance at the terminus implied no
designs on the purses and portmanteaus of the passengers, noticed two
new circumstances in connection with Mr. Bashwood that night. In the
first place, instead of exhibiting his customary cheerfulness, he looked
anxious and depressed. In the second place, while he was watching for
the train, he was to all appearance being watched in his turn, by a
slim, dark, undersized man, who had left his luggage (marked with the
name of Midwinter) at the custom-house department the evening before,
and who had returned to have it examined about half an hour since.
What had brought Midwinter to the terminus? And why was he, too, waiting
for the tidal train?
After straying as far as Hendon during his lonely walk of the previous
night, he had taken refuge at the village inn, and had fallen asleep
(from sheer exhaustion) toward those later hours of the morning which
were the hours that his wife’s foresight had turned to account. When
he returned to the lodging, the landlady could only inform him that
her tenant had settled everything with her, and had left (for what
destination neither she nor her servant could tell) more than two hours
since.
Having given some little time to inquiries, the result of which
convinced him that the clew was lost so far, Midwinter had quitted
the house, and had pursued his way mechanically to the busier and more
central parts of the metropolis. With the light now thrown on his wife’s
character, to call at the address she had given him as the address at
which her mother lived would be plainly useless. He went on through the
streets, resolute to discover her, and trying vainly to see the means
to his end, till the sense of fatigue forced itself on him once more.
Stopping to rest and recruit his strength at the first hotel he came
to, a chance dispute between the waiter and a stranger about a lost
portmanteau reminded him of his own luggage, left at the terminus, and
instantly took his mind back to the circumstances under which he and
Mr. Bashwood had met. In a moment more, the idea that he had been vainly
seeking on his way through the streets flashed on him. In a moment more,
he had determined to try the chance of finding the steward again on
the watch for the person whose arrival he had evidently expected by the
previous evening’s train.
Ignorant of the report of Allan’s death at sea; uninformed, at the
terrible interview with his wife, of the purpose which her assumption of
a widow’s dress really had in view, Midwinter’s first vague suspicions
of her fidelity had now inevitably developed into the conviction
that she was false. He could place but one interpretation on her open
disavowal of him, and on her taking the name under which he had secretly
married her. Her conduct forced the conclusion on him that she was
engaged in some infamous intrigue; and that she had basely secured
herself beforehand in the position of all others in which she knew it
would be most odious and most repellent to him to claim his authority
over her. With that conviction he was now watching Mr. Bashwood, firmly
persuaded that his wife’s hiding-place was known to the vile servant of
his wife’s vices; and darkly suspecting, as the time wore on, that the
unknown man who had wronged him, and the unknown traveler for whose
arrival the steward was waiting, were one and the same.
The train was late that night, and the carriages were more than usually
crowded when they arrived at last. Midwinter became involved in the
confusion on the platform, and in the effort to extricate himself he
lost sight of Mr. Bashwood for the first time.
A lapse of some few minutes had passed before he again discovered the
steward talking eagerly to a man in a loose shaggy coat, whose back was
turned toward him. Forgetful of all the cautions and restraints which
he had imposed on himself before the train appeared, Midwinter instantly
advanced on them. Mr. Bashwood saw his threatening face as he came on,
and fell back in silence. The man in the loose coat turned to look where
the steward was looking, and disclosed to Midwinter, in the full light
of the station-lamp, Allan’s face!
For the moment they both stood speechless, hand in hand, looking at each
other. Allan was the first to recover himself.
“Thank God for this!” he said, fervently. “I don’t ask how you came
here: it’s enough for me that you have come. Miserable news has met me
already, Midwinter. Nobody but you can comfort me, and help me to bear
it.” His voice faltered over those last words, and he said no more.
The tone in which he had spoken roused Midwinter to meet the
circumstances as they were, by appealing to the old grateful interest
in his friend which had once been the foremost interest of his life. He
mastered his personal misery for the first time since it had fallen on
him, and gently taking Allan aside, asked what had happened.
The answer--after informing him of his friend’s reported death at
sea--announced (on Mr. Bashwood’s authority) that the news had reached
Miss Milroy, and that the deplorable result of the shock thus inflicted
had obliged the major to place his daughter in the neighborhood of
London, under medical care.
Before saying a word on his side, Midwinter looked distrustfully behind
him. Mr. Bashwood had followed them. Mr. Bashwood was watching to see
what they did next.
“Was he waiting your arrival here to tell you this about Miss Milroy?”
asked Midwinter, looking again from the steward to Allan.
“Yes,” said Allan. “He has been kindly waiting here, night after night,
to meet me, and break the news to me.”
Midwinter paused once more. The attempt to reconcile the conclusion he
had drawn from his wife’s conduct with the discovery that Allan was the
man for whose arrival Mr. Bashwood had been waiting was hopeless. The
one present chance of discovering a truer solution of the mystery was
to press the steward on the one available point in which he had laid
himself open to attack. He had positively denied on the previous evening
that he knew anything of Allan’s movements, or that he had any interest
in Allan’s return to England. Having detected Mr. Bashwood in one lie
told to himself. Midwinter instantly suspected him of telling another
to Allan. He seized the opportunity of sifting the statement about Miss
Milroy on the spot.
“How have you become acquainted with this sad news?” he inquired,
turning suddenly on Mr. Bashwood.
“Through the major, of course,” said Allan, before the steward could
answer.
“Who is the doctor who has the care of Miss Milroy?” persisted
Midwinter, still addressing Mr. Bashwood.
For the second time the steward made no reply. For the second time,
Allan answered for him.
“He is a man with a foreign name,” said Allan. “He keeps a Sanitarium
near Hampstead. What did you say the place was called, Mr. Bashwood?”
“Fairweather Vale, sir,” said the steward, answering his employer, as a
matter of necessity, but answering very unwillingly.
The address of the Sanitarium instantly reminded Midwinter that he had
traced his wife to Fairweather Vale Villas the previous night. He
began to see light through the darkness, dimly, for the first time. The
instinct which comes with emergency, before the slower process of reason
can assert itself, brought him at a leap to the conclusion that Mr.
Bashwood--who had been certainly acting under his wife’s influence the
previous day--might be acting again under his wife’s influence now.
He persisted in sifting the steward’s statement, with the conviction
growing firmer and firmer in his mind that the statement was a lie, and
that his wife was concerned in it.
“Is the major in Norfolk?” he asked, “or is he near his daughter in
London?”
“In Norfolk,” said Mr. Bashwood. Having answered Allan’s look of
inquiry, instead of Midwinter’s spoken question, in those words, he
hesitated, looked Midwinter in the face for the first time, and added,
suddenly: “I object, if you please, to be cross-examined, sir. I know
what I have told Mr. Armadale, and I know no more.”
The words, and the voice in which they were spoken, were alike at
variance with Mr. Bashwood’s usual language and Mr. Bashwood’s usual
tone. There was a sullen depression in his face--there was a furtive
distrust and dislike in his eyes when they looked at Midwinter, which
Midwinter himself now noticed for the first time. Before he could answer
the steward’s extraordinary outbreak, Allan interfered.
“Don’t think me impatient,” he said; “but it’s getting late; it’s a long
way to Hampstead. I’m afraid the Sanitarium will be shut up.”
Midwinter started. “You are not going to the Sanitarium to-night!” he
exclaimed.
Allan took his friend’s hand and wrung it hard. “If you were as fond of
her as I am,” he whispered, “you would take no rest, you could get no
sleep, till you had seen the doctor, and heard the best and the worst he
had to tell you. Poor dear little soul! who knows, if she could only see
me alive and well--” The tears came into his eyes, and he turned away
his head in silence.
Midwinter looked at the steward. “Stand back,” he said. “I want to speak
to Mr. Armadale.” There was something in his eye which it was not safe
to trifle with. Mr. Bashwood drew back out of hearing, but not out of
sight. Midwinter laid his hand fondly on his friend’s shoulder.
“Allan,” he said, “I have reasons--” He stopped. Could the reasons be
given before he had fairly realized them himself; at that time, too,
and under those circumstances? Impossible! “I have reasons,” he resumed,
“for advising you not to believe too readily what Mr. Bashwood may say.
Don’t tell him this, but take the warning.”
Allan looked at his friend in astonishment. “It was you who always liked
Mr. Bashwood!” he exclaimed. “It was you who trusted him, when he first
came to the great house!”
“Perhaps I was wrong, Allan, and perhaps you were right. Will you only
wait till we can telegraph to Major Milroy and get his answer? Will you
only wait over the night?”
“I shall go mad if I wait over the night,” said Allan. “You have made
me more anxious than I was before. If I am not to speak about it to
Bashwood, I must and will go to the Sanitarium, and find out whether she
is or is not there, from the doctor himself.”
Midwinter saw that it was useless. In Allan’s interests there was only
one other course left to take. “Will you let me go with you?” he asked.
Allan’s face brightened for the first time. “You dear, good fellow!” he
exclaimed. “It was the very thing I was going to beg of you myself.”
Midwinter beckoned to the steward. “Mr. Armadale is going to the
Sanitarium,” he said, “and I mean to accompany him. Get a cab and come
with us.”
He waited, to see whether Mr. Bashwood would comply. Having been
strictly ordered, when Allan did arrive, not to lose sight of him,
and having, in his own interests, Midwinter’s unexpected appearance
to explain to Miss Gwilt, the steward had no choice but to comply.
In sullen submission he did as he had been told. The keys of Allan’s
baggage was given to the foreign traveling servant whom he had brought
with him, and the man was instructed to wait his master’s orders at
the terminus hotel. In a minute more the cab was on its way out of the
station--with Midwinter and Allan inside, and Mr. Bashwood by the driver
on the box.
* * * * *
Between eleven and twelve o’clock that night, Miss Gwilt, standing alone
at the window which lit the corridor of the Sanitarium on the second
floor, heard the roll of wheels coming toward her. The sound, gathering
rapidly in volume through the silence of the lonely neighborhood,
stopped at the iron gates. In another minute she saw the cab draw up
beneath her, at the house door.
The earlier night had been cloudy, but the sky was clearing now and the
moon was out. She opened the window to see and hear more clearly. By the
light of the moon she saw Allan get out of the cab, and turn round to
speak to some other person inside. The answering voice told her, before
he appeared in his turn, that Armadale’s companion was her husband.
The same petrifying influence that had fallen on her at the interview
with him of the previous day fell on her now. She stood by the window,
white and still, and haggard and old--as she had stood when she first
faced him in her widow’s weeds.
Mr. Bashwood, stealing up alone to the second floor to make his report,
knew, the instant he set eyes on her, that the report was needless.
“It’s not my fault,” was all he said, as she slowly turned her head and
looked at him. “They met together, and there was no parting them.”
She drew a long breath, and motioned him to be silent. “Wait a little,”
she said; “I know all about it.”
Turning from him at those words, she slowly paced the corridor to its
furthest end; turned, and slowly came back to him with frowning brow
and drooping head--with all the grace and beauty gone from her, but the
inbred grace and beauty in the movement of her limbs.
“Do you wish to speak to me?” she asked; her mind far away from him, and
her eyes looking at him vacantly as she put the question.
He roused his courage as he had never roused it in her presence yet.
“Don’t drive me to despair!” he cried, with a startling abruptness.
“Don’t look at me in that way, now I have found it out!”
“What have you found out?” she asked, with a momentary surprise on her
face, which faded from it again before he could gather breath enough to
go on.
“Mr. Armadale is not the man who took you away from me,” he answered.
“Mr. Midwinter is the man. I found it out in your face yesterday. I
see it in your face now. Why did you sign your name ‘Armadale’ when you
wrote to me? Why do you call yourself ‘Mrs. Armadale’ still?”
He spoke those bold words at long intervals, with an effort to resist
her influence over him, pitiable and terrible to see.
She looked at him for the first time with softened eyes. “I wish I had
pitied you when we first met,” she said, gently, “as I pity you now.”
He struggled desperately to go on and say the words to her which he had
strung himself to the pitch of saying on the drive from the terminus.
They were words which hinted darkly at his knowledge of her past life;
words which warned her--do what else she might, commit what crimes she
pleased--to think twice before she deceived and deserted him again. In
those terms he had vowed to himself to address her. He had the phrases
picked and chosen; he had the sentences ranged and ordered in his mind;
nothing was wanting but to make the one crowning effort of speaking
them--and, even now, after all he had said and all he had dared, the
effort was more than he could compass! In helpless gratitude, even for
so little as her pity, he stood looking at her, and wept the silent,
womanish tears that fall from old men’s eyes.
She took his hand and spoke to him--with marked forbearance, but without
the slightest sign of emotion on her side.
“You have waited already at my request,” she said. “Wait till to-morrow,
and you will know all. If you trust nothing else that I have told you,
you may trust what I tell you now. _It will end to-night_.”
As she said the words, the doctor’s step was heard on the stairs. Mr.
Bashwood drew back from her, with his heart beating fast in unutterable
expectation. “It will end to-night!” he repeated to himself, under his
breath, as he moved away toward the far end of the corridor.
“Don’t let me disturb you, sir,” said the doctor, cheerfully, as they
met. “I have nothing to say to Mrs. Armadale but what you or anybody may
hear.”
Mr. Bashwood went on, without answering, to the far end of the corridor,
still repeating to himself: “It will end to-night!” The doctor, passing
him in the opposite direction, joined Miss Gwilt.
“You have heard, no doubt,” he began, in his blandest manner and his
roundest tones, “that Mr. Armadale has arrived. Permit me to add, my
dear lady, that there is not the least reason for any nervous agitation
on your part. He has been carefully humored, and he is as quiet and
manageable as his best friends could wish. I have informed him that it
is impossible to allow him an interview with the young lady to-night;
but that he may count on seeing her (with the proper precautions) at the
earliest propitious hour, after she is awake to-morrow morning. As there
is no hotel near, and as the propitious hour may occur at a
moment’s notice, it was clearly incumbent on me, under the peculiar
circumstances, to offer him the hospitality of the Sanitarium. He has
accepted it with the utmost gratitude; and has thanked me in a most
gentlemanly and touching manner for the pains I have taken to set his
mind at ease. Perfectly gratifying, perfectly satisfactory, so far! But
there has been a little hitch--now happily got over--which I think it
right to mention to you before we all retire for the night.”
Having paved the way in those words (and in Mr. Bashwood’s hearing) for
the statement which he had previously announced his intention of making,
in the event of Allan’s dying in the Sanitarium, the doctor was about
to proceed, when his attention was attracted by a sound below like the
trying of a door.
He instantly descended the stairs, and unlocked the door of
communication between the first and second floors, which he had locked
behind him on his way up. But the person who had tried the door--if such
a person there really had been--was too quick for him. He looked along
the corridor, and over the staircase into the hall, and, discovering
nothing, returned to Miss Gwilt, after securing the door of
communication behind him once more.
“Pardon me,” he resumed, “I thought I heard something downstairs. With
regard to the little hitch that I adverted to just now, permit me to
inform you that Mr. Armadale has brought a friend here with him, who
bears the strange name of Midwinter. Do you know the gentleman at all?”
asked the doctor, with a suspicious anxiety in his eyes, which strangely
belied the elaborate indifference of his tone.
“I know him to be an old friend of Mr. Armadale’s,” she said. “Does
he--?” Her voice failed her, and her eyes fell before the doctor’s
steady scrutiny. She mastered the momentary weakness, and finished her
question. “Does he, too, stay here to-night?”
“Mr. Midwinter is a person of coarse manners and suspicious temper,”
rejoined the doctor, steadily watching her. “He was rude enough
to insist on staying here as soon as Mr. Armadale had accepted my
invitation.”
He paused to note the effect of those words on her. Left utterly in the
dark by the caution with which she had avoided mentioning her husband’s
assumed name to him at their first interview, the doctor’s distrust of
her was necessarily of the vaguest kind. He had heard her voice
fail her--he had seen her color change. He suspected her of a mental
reservation on the subject of Midwinter--and of nothing more.
“Did you permit him to have his way?” she asked. “In your place, I
should have shown him the door.”
The impenetrable composure of her tone warned the doctor that her
self-command was not to be further shaken that night. He resumed the
character of Mrs. Armadale’s medical referee on the subject of Mr.
Armadale’s mental health.
“If I had only had my own feelings to consult,” he said, “I don’t
disguise from you that I should (as you say) have shown Mr. Midwinter
the door. But on appealing to Mr. Armadale, I found he was himself
anxious not to be parted from his friend. Under those circumstances,
but one alternative was left--the alternative of humoring him again.
The responsibility of thwarting him--to say nothing,” added the doctor,
drifting for a moment toward the truth, “of my natural apprehension,
with such a temper as his friend’s, of a scandal and disturbance in the
house--was not to be thought of for a moment. Mr. Midwinter accordingly
remains here for the night; and occupies (I ought to say, insists on
occupying) the next room to Mr. Armadale. Advise me, my dear madam, in
this emergency,” concluded the doctor, with his loudest emphasis. “What
rooms shall we put them in, on the first floor?”
“Put Mr. Armadale in Number Four.”
“And his friend next to him, in Number Three?” said the doctor. “Well!
well! well! perhaps they _are_ the most comfortable rooms. I’ll give
my orders immediately. Don’t hurry away, Mr. Bashwood,” he called out,
cheerfully, as he reached the top of the staircase. “I have left the
assistant physician’s key on the window-sill yonder, and Mrs. Armadale
can let you out at the staircase door whenever she pleases. Don’t sit up
late, Mrs. Armadale! Yours is a nervous system that requires plenty of
sleep. ‘Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.’ Grand line! God
bless you--good-night!”
Mr. Bashwood came back from the far end of the corridor--still
pondering, in unutterable expectation, on what was to come with the
night.
“Am I to go now?” he asked.
“No. You are to stay. I said you should know all if you waited till the
morning. Wait here.”
He hesitated, and looked about him. “The doctor,” he faltered. “I
thought the doctor said--”
“The doctor will interfere with nothing that I do in this house
to-night. I tell you to stay. There are empty rooms on the floor above
this. Take one of them.”
Mr. Bashwood felt the trembling fit coming on him again as he looked at
her. “May I ask--?” he began.
“Ask nothing. I want you.”
“Will you please to tell me--?”
“I will tell you nothing till the night is over and the morning has
come.”
His curiosity conquered his fear. He persisted.
“Is it something dreadful?” he whispered. “Too dreadful to tell me?”
She stamped her foot with a sudden outbreak of impatience. “Go!” she
said, snatching the key of the staircase door from the window-sill.
“You do quite right to distrust me--you do quite right to follow me no
further in the dark. Go before the house is shut up. I can do without
you.” She led the way to the stairs, with the key in one hand, and the
candle in the other.
Mr. Bashwood followed her in silence. No one, knowing what he knew of
her earlier life, could have failed to perceive that she was a woman
driven to the last extremity, and standing consciously on the brink of a
Crime. In the first terror of the discovery, he broke free from the hold
she had on him: he thought and acted like a man who had a will of his
own again.
She put the key in the door, and turned to him before she opened it,
with the light of the candle on her face. “Forget me, and forgive me,”
she said. “We meet no more.”
She opened the door, and, standing inside it, after he had passed her,
gave him her hand. He had resisted her look, he had resisted her words,
but the magnetic fascination of her touch conquered him at the final
moment. “I can’t leave you!” he said, holding helplessly by the hand she
had given him. “What must I do?”
“Come and see,” she answered, without allowing him an instant to
reflect.
Closing her hand firmly on his, she led him along the first floor
corridor to the room numbered Four. “Notice that room,” she whispered.
After a look over the stairs to see that they were alone, she retraced
her steps with him to the opposite extremity of the corridor. Here,
facing the window which lit the place at the other end, was one little
room, with a narrow grating in the higher part of the door, intended for
the sleeping apartment of the doctor’s deputy. From the position of this
room, the grating commanded a view of the bed-chambers down each side of
the corridor, and so enabled the deputy-physician to inform himself of
any irregular proceedings on the part of the patients under his care,
with little or no chance of being detected in watching them. Miss Gwilt
opened the door and led the way into the empty room.
“Wait here,” she said, “while I go back upstairs; and lock yourself in,
if you like. You will be in the dark, but the gas will be burning in the
corridor. Keep at the grating, and make sure that Mr. Armadale goes into
the room I have just pointed out to you, and that he doesn’t leave it
afterward. If you lose sight of the room for a single moment before I
come back, you will repent it to the end of your life. If you do as I
tell you, you shall see me to-morrow, and claim your own reward. Quick
with your answer! Is it Yes or No?”
He could make no reply in words. He raised her hand to his lips, and
kissed it rapturously. She left him in the room. From his place at the
grating he saw her glide down the corridor to the staircase door. She
passed through it, and locked it. Then there was silence.
The next sound was the sound of the women-servants’ voices. Two of them
came up to put the sheets on the beds in Number Three and Number Four.
The women were in high good-humor, laughing and talking to each other
through the open doors of the rooms. The master’s customers were coming
in at last, they said, with a vengeance; the house would soon begin to
look cheerful, if things went on like this.
After a little, the beds were got ready and the women returned to the
kitchen floor, on which the sleeping-rooms of the domestic servants were
all situated. Then there was silence again.
The next sound was the sound of the doctor’s voice. He appeared at the
end of the corridor, showing Allan and Midwinter the way to their rooms.
They all went together into Number Four. After a little, the doctor
came out first. He waited till Midwinter joined him, and pointed with
a formal bow to the door of Number Three. Midwinter entered the room
without speaking, and shut himself in. The doctor, left alone, withdrew
to the staircase door and unlocked it, then waited in the corridor,
whistling to himself softly, under his breath.
Voices pitched cautiously low became audible in a minute more in the
hall. The Resident Dispenser and the Head Nurse appeared, on their way
to the dormitories of the attendants at the top of the house. The man
bowed silently, and passed the doctor; the woman courtesied silently,
and followed the man. The doctor acknowledged their salutations by a
courteous wave of his hand; and, once more left alone, paused a moment,
still whistling softly to himself, then walked to the door of Number
Four, and opened the case of the fumigating apparatus fixed near it
in the corner of the wall. As he lifted the lid and looked in, his
whistling ceased. He took a long purple bottle out, examined it by the
gas-light, put it back, and closed the case. This done, he advanced on
tiptoe to the open staircase door, passed through it, and secured it on
the inner side as usual.
Mr. Bashwood had seen him at the apparatus; Mr. Bashwood had noticed the
manner of his withdrawal through the staircase door. Again the sense of
an unutterable expectation throbbed at his heart. A terror that was slow
and cold and deadly crept into his hands, and guided them in the dark
to the key that had been left for him in the inner side of the door. He
turned it in vague distrust of what might happen next, and waited.
The slow minutes passed, and nothing happened. The silence was horrible;
the solitude of the lonely corridor was a solitude of invisible
treacheries. He began to count to keep his mind employed--to keep his
own growing dread away from him. The numbers, as he whispered them,
followed each other slowly up to a hundred, and still nothing happened.
He had begun the second hundred; he had got on to twenty--when, without
a sound to betray that he had been moving in his room, Midwinter
suddenly appeared in the corridor.
He stood for a moment and listened; he went to the stairs and looked
over into the hall beneath. Then, for the second time that night, he
tried the staircase door, and for the second time found it fast. After
a moment’s reflection, he tried the doors of the bedrooms on his right
hand next, looked into one after the other, and saw that they were
empty, then came to the door of the end room in which the steward was
concealed. Here, again, the lock resisted him. He listened, and looked
up at the grating. No sound was to be heard, no light was to be seen
inside. “Shall I break the door in,” he said to himself, “and make sure?
No; it would be giving the doctor an excuse for turning me out of the
house.” He moved away, and looked into the two empty rooms in the
row occupied by Allan and himself, then walked to the window at the
staircase end of the corridor. Here the case of the fumigating apparatus
attracted his attention. After trying vainly to open it, his suspicion
seemed to be aroused. He searched back along the corridor, and observed
that no object of a similar kind appeared outside any of the other
bed-chambers. Again at the window, he looked again at the apparatus, and
turned away from it with a gesture which plainly indicated that he had
tried, and failed, to guess what it might be.
Baffled at all points, he still showed no sign of returning to his
bed-chamber. He stood at the window, with his eyes fixed on the door of
Allan’s room, thinking. If Mr. Bashwood, furtively watching him through
the grating, could have seen him at that moment in the mind as well as
in the body, Mr. Bashwood’s heart might have throbbed even faster than
it was throbbing now, in expectation of the next event which Midwinter’s
decision of the next minute was to bring forth.
On what was his mind occupied as he stood alone, at the dead of night,
in the strange house?
His mind was occupied in drawing its disconnected impressions together,
little by little, to one point. Convinced from the first that some
hidden danger threatened Allan in the Sanitarium, his distrust--vaguely
associated, thus far, with the place itself; with his wife (whom he
firmly believed to be now under the same roof with him); with
the doctor, who was as plainly in her confidence as Mr. Bashwood
himself--now narrowed its range, and centered itself obstinately in
Allan’s room. Resigning all further effort to connect his suspicion of a
conspiracy against his friend with the outrage which had the day before
been offered to himself--an effort which would have led him, if he could
have maintained it, to a discovery of the fraud really contemplated
by his wife--his mind, clouded and confused by disturbing influences,
instinctively took refuge in its impressions of facts as they had
shown themselves since he had entered the house. Everything that he had
noticed below stairs suggested that there was some secret purpose to be
answered by getting Allan to sleep in the Sanitarium. Everything that
he had noticed above stairs associated the lurking-place in which the
danger lay hid with Allan’s room. To reach this conclusion, and to
decide on baffling the conspiracy, whatever it might be, by taking
Allan’s place, was with Midwinter the work of an instant. Confronted by
actual peril, the great nature of the man intuitively freed itself from
the weaknesses that had beset it in happier and safer times. Not even
the shadow of the old superstition rested on his mind now--no fatalist
suspicion of himself disturbed the steady resolution that was in
him. The one last doubt that troubled him, as he stood at the window
thinking, was the doubt whether he could persuade Allan to change rooms
with him, without involving himself in an explanation which might lead
Allan to suspect the truth.
In the minute that elapsed, while he waited with his eyes on the room,
the doubt was resolved--he found the trivial, yet sufficient, excuse of
which he was in search. Mr. Bashwood saw him rouse himself and go to the
door. Mr. Bashwood heard him knock softly, and whisper, “Allan, are you
in bed?”
“No,” answered the voice inside; “come in.”
He appeared to be on the point of entering the room, when he checked
himself as if he had suddenly remembered something. “Wait a minute,”
he said, through the door, and, turning away, went straight to the end
room. “If there is anybody watching us in there,” he said aloud, “let
him watch us through this!” He took out his handkerchief, and stuffed it
into the wires of the grating, so as completely to close the aperture.
Having thus forced the spy inside (if there was one) either to betray
himself by moving the handkerchief, or to remain blinded to all view of
what might happen next, Midwinter presented himself in Allan’s room.
“You know what poor nerves I have,” he said, “and what a wretched
sleeper I am at the best of times. I can’t sleep to-night. The window in
my room rattles every time the wind blows. I wish it was as fast as your
window here.”
“My dear fellow!” cried Allan, “I don’t mind a rattling window. Let’s
change rooms. Nonsense! Why should you make excuses to _me_? Don’t I
know how easily trifles upset those excitable nerves of yours? Now the
doctor has quieted my mind about my poor little Neelie, I begin to
feel the journey; and I’ll answer for sleeping anywhere till to-morrow
comes.” He took up his traveling-bag. “We must be quick about it,” he
added, pointing to his candle. “They haven’t left me much candle to go
to bed by.”
“Be very quiet, Allan,” said Midwinter, opening the door for him. “We
mustn’t disturb the house at this time of night.”
“Yes, yes,” returned Allan, in a whisper. “Good-night; I hope you’ll
sleep as well as I shall.”
Midwinter saw him into Number Three, and noticed that his own candle
(which he had left there) was as short as Allan’s. “Good-night,” he
said, and came out again into the corridor.
He went straight to the grating, and looked and listened once more. The
handkerchief remained exactly as he had left it, and still there was
no sound to be heard within. He returned slowly along the corridor, and
thought of the precautions he had taken, for the last time. Was there
no other way than the way he was trying now? There was none. Any openly
avowed posture of defense--while the nature of the danger, and the
quarter from which it might come, were alike unknown--would be useless
in itself, and worse than useless in the consequences which it might
produce by putting the people of the house on their guard. Without a
fact that could justify to other minds his distrust of what might happen
with the night, incapable of shaking Allan’s ready faith in the fair
outside which the doctor had presented to him, the one safeguard in
his friend’s interests that Midwinter could set up was the safeguard of
changing the rooms--the one policy he could follow, come what might of
it, was the policy of waiting for events. “I can trust to one thing,”
he said to himself, as he looked for the last time up and down the
corridor--“I can trust myself to keep awake.”
After a glance at the clock on the wall opposite, he went into Number
Four. The sound of the closing door was heard, the sound of the turning
lock followed it. Then the dead silence fell over the house once more.
Little by little, the steward’s horror of the stillness and the darkness
overcame his dread of moving the handkerchief. He cautiously drew aside
one corner of it, waited, looked, and took courage at last to draw the
whole handkerchief through the wires of the grating. After first hiding
it in his pocket, he thought of the consequences if it was found on him,
and threw it down in a corner of the room. He trembled when he had cast
it from him, as he looked at his watch and placed himself again at the
grating to wait for Miss Gwilt.
It was a quarter to one. The moon had come round from the side to the
front of the Sanitarium. From time to time her light gleamed on the
window of the corridor when the gaps in the flying clouds let it
through. The wind had risen, and sung its mournful song faintly, as it
swept at intervals over the desert ground in front of the house.
The minute hand of the clock traveled on halfway round the circle of the
dial. As it touched the quarter-past one, Miss Gwilt stepped noiselessly
into the corridor. “Let yourself out,” she whispered through the
grating, “and follow me.” She returned to the stairs by which she
had just descended, pushed the door to softly after Mr. Bashwood had
followed her and led the way up to the landing of the second floor.
There she put the question to him which she had not ventured to put
below stairs.
“Was Mr. Armadale shown into Number Four?” she asked.
He bowed his head without speaking.
“Answer me in words. Has Mr. Armadale left the room since?”
He answered, “No.”
“Have you never lost sight of Number Four since I left you?”
He answered, “_Never_!”
Something strange in his manner, something unfamiliar in his voice, as
he made that last reply, attracted her attention. She took her candle
from a table near, on which she had left it, and threw its light on
him. His eyes were staring, his teeth chattered. There was everything to
betray him to her as a terrified man; there was nothing to tell her that
the terror was caused by his consciousness of deceiving her, for the
first time in his life, to her face. If she had threatened him less
openly when she placed him on the watch; if she had spoken less
unreservedly of the interview which was to reward him in the morning,
he might have owned the truth. As it was, his strongest fears and his
dearest hopes were alike interested in telling her the fatal lie that
he had now told--the fatal lie which he reiterated when she put her
question for the second time.
She looked at him, deceived by the last man on earth whom she would have
suspected of deception--the man whom she had deceived herself.
“You seem to be overexcited,” she said quietly. “The night has been too
much for you. Go upstairs, and rest. You will find the door of one of
the rooms left open. That is the room you are to occupy. Good-night.”
She put the candle (which she had left burning for him) on the table,
and gave him her hand. He held her back by it desperately as she turned
to leave him. His horror of what might happen when she was left by
herself forced the words to his lips which he would have feared to speak
to her at any other time.
“Don’t,” he pleaded, in a whisper; “oh, don’t, don’t, don’t go
downstairs to-night!”
She released her hand, and signed to him to take the candle. “You shall
see me to-morrow,” she said. “Not a word more now!”
Her stronger will conquered him at that last moment, as it had conquered
him throughout. He took the candle and waited, following her eagerly
with his eyes as she descended the stairs. The cold of the December
night seemed to have found its way to her through the warmth of the
house. She had put on a long, heavy black shawl, and had fastened it
close over her breast. The plaited coronet in which she wore her hair
seemed to have weighed too heavily on her head. She had untwisted it,
and thrown it back over her shoulders. The old man looked at her flowing
hair, as it lay red over the black shawl--at her supple, long-fingered
hand, as it slid down the banisters--at the smooth, seductive grace of
every movement that took her further and further away from him. “The
night will go quickly,” he said to himself, as she passed from his view;
“I shall dream of her till the morning comes!”
She secured the staircase door, after she had passed through
it--listened, and satisfied herself that nothing was stirring--then went
on slowly along the corridor to the window. Leaning on the window-sill,
she looked out at the night. The clouds were over the moon at that
moment; nothing was to be seen through the darkness but the scattered
gas-lights in the suburb. Turning from the window, she looked at the
clock. It was twenty minutes past one.
For the last time, the resolution that had come to her in the earlier
night, with the knowledge that her husband was in the house, forced
itself uppermost in her mind. For the last time, the voice within her
said, “Think if there is no other way!”
She pondered over it till the minute-hand of the clock pointed to the
half-hour. “No!” she said, still thinking of her husband. “The one
chance left is to go through with it to the end. He will leave the thing
undone which he has come here to do; he will leave the words unspoken
which he has come here to say--when he knows that the act may make me
a public scandal, and that the words may send me to the scaffold!” Her
color rose, and she smiled with a terrible irony as she looked for the
first time at the door of the Room. “I shall be your widow,” she said,
“in half an hour!”
She opened the case of the apparatus and took the Purple Flask in her
hand. After marking the time by a glance at the clock, she dropped
into the glass funnel the first of the six separate Pourings that were
measured for her by the paper slips.
When she had put the Flask back, she listened at the mouth of the
funnel. Not a sound reached her ear: the deadly process did its work in
the silence of death itself. When she rose and looked up the moon was
shining in at the window, and the moaning wind was quiet.
Oh, the time! the time! If it could only have been begun and ended with
the first Pouring!
She went downstairs into the hall; she walked to and fro, and listened
at the open door that led to the kitchen stairs. She came up again; she
went down again. The first of the intervals of five minutes was endless.
The time stood still. The suspense was maddening.
The interval passed. As she took the Flask for the second time, and
dropped in the second Pouring, the clouds floated over the moon, and the
night view through the window slowly darkened.
The restlessness that had driven her up and down the stairs, and
backward and forward in the hall, left her as suddenly as it had come.
She waited through the second interval, leaning on the window-sill, and
staring, without conscious thought of any kind, into the black night.
The howling of a belated dog was borne toward her on the wind, at
intervals, from some distant part of the suburb. She found herself
following the faint sound as it died away into silence with a dull
attention, and listening for its coming again with an expectation
that was duller still. Her arms lay like lead on the window-sill; her
forehead rested against the glass without feeling the cold. It was not
till the moon struggled out again that she was startled into sudden
self-remembrance. She turned quickly, and looked at the clock; seven
minutes had passed since the second Pouring.
As she snatched up the Flask, and fed the funnel for the third time,
the full consciousness of her position came back to her. The fever-heat
throbbed again in her blood, and flushed fiercely in her cheeks. Swift,
smooth, and noiseless, she paced from end to end of the corridor, with
her arms folded in her shawl and her eye moment after moment on the
clock.
Three out of the next five minutes passed, and again the suspense began
to madden her. The space in the corridor grew too confined for the
illimitable restlessness that possessed her limbs. She went down into
the hall again, and circled round and round it like a wild creature in
a cage. At the third turn, she felt something moving softly against her
dress. The house-cat had come up through the open kitchen door--a large,
tawny, companionable cat that purred in high good temper, and followed
her for company. She took the animal up in her arms--it rubbed its
sleek head luxuriously against her chin as she bent her face over it.
“Armadale hates cats,” she whispered in the creature’s ear. “Come up and
see Armadale killed!” The next moment her own frightful fancy horrified
her. She dropped the cat with a shudder; she drove it below again with
threatening hands. For a moment after, she stood still, then in headlong
haste suddenly mounted the stairs. Her husband had forced his way back
again into her thoughts; her husband threatened her with a danger which
had never entered her mind till now. What if he were not asleep? What if
he came out upon her, and found her with the Purple Flask in her hand?
She stole to the door of Number Three and listened. The slow, regular
breathing of a sleeping man was just audible. After waiting a moment to
let the feeling of relief quiet her, she took a step toward Number
Four, and checked herself. It was needless to listen at _that_ door.
The doctor had told her that Sleep came first, as certainly as Death
afterward, in the poisoned air. She looked aside at the clock. The time
had come for the fourth Pouring.
Her hand began to tremble violently as she fed the funnel for the fourth
time. The fear of her husband was back again in her heart. What if
some noise disturbed him before the sixth Pouring? What if he woke on
a sudden (as she had often seen him wake) without any noise at all? She
looked up and down the corridor. The end room, in which Mr. Bashwood had
been concealed, offered itself to her as a place of refuge. “I might go
in there!” she thought. “Has he left the key?” She opened the door to
look, and saw the handkerchief thrown down on the floor. Was it Mr.
Bashwood’s handkerchief, left there by accident? She examined it at the
corners. In the second corner she found her husband’s name!
Her first impulse hurried her to the staircase door, to rouse the
steward and insist on an explanation. The next moment she remembered the
Purple Flask, and the danger of leaving the corridor. She turned, and
looked at the door of Number Three. Her husband, on the evidence of the
handkerchief had unquestionably been out of his room--and Mr. Bashwood
had not told her. Was he in his room now? In the violence of her
agitation, as the question passed through her mind, she forgot the
discovery which she had herself made not a minute before. Again she
listened at the door; again she heard the slow, regular breathing of the
sleeping man. The first time the evidence of her ears had been enough to
quiet her; _this_ time, in the tenfold aggravation of her suspicion and
her alarm, she was determined to have the evidence of her eyes as well.
“All the doors open softly in this house,” she said to herself; “there’s
no fear of my waking him.” Noiselessly, by an inch at a time, she
opened the unlocked door, and looked in the moment the aperture was wide
enough. In the little light she had let into the room, the sleeper’s
head was just visible on the pillow. Was it quite as dark against the
white pillow as her husband’s head looked when he was in bed? Was the
breathing as light as her husband’s breathing when he was asleep?
She opened the door more widely, and looked in by the clearer light.
There lay the man whose life she had attempted for the third time,
peacefully sleeping in the room that had been given to her husband, and
in the air that could harm nobody!
The inevitable conclusion overwhelmed her on the instant. With a frantic
upward action of her hands she staggered back into the passage. The door
of Allan’s room fell to, but not noisily enough to wake him. She turned
as she heard it close. For one moment she stood staring at it like a
woman stupefied. The next, her instinct rushed into action, before her
reason recovered itself. In two steps she was at the door of Number
Four.
The door was locked.
She felt over the wall with both hands, wildly and clumsily, for the
button which she had seen the doctor press when he was showing the room
to the visitors. Twice she missed it. The third time her eyes helped her
hands; she found the button and pressed on it. The mortise of the lock
inside fell back, and the door yielded to her.
Without an instant’s hesitation she entered the room. Though the door
was open--though so short a time had elapsed since the fourth Pouring
that but little more than half the contemplated volume of gas had been
produced as yet--the poisoned air seized her, like the grasp of a hand
at her throat, like the twisting of a wire round her head. She found him
on the floor at the foot of the bed: his head and one arm were toward
the door, as if he had risen under the first feeling of drowsiness,
and had sunk in the effort to leave the room. With the desperate
concentration of strength of which women are capable in emergencies, she
lifted him and dragged him out into the corridor. Her brain reeled as
she laid him down, and crawled back on her knees to the room to shut out
the poisoned air from pursuing them into the passage. After closing the
door, she waited, without daring to look at him the while, for strength
enough to rise and get to the window over the stairs. When the window
was opened, when the keen air of the early winter morning blew steadily
in, she ventured back to him and raised his head, and looked for the
first time closely at his face.
Was it death that spread the livid pallor over his forehead and his
cheeks, and the dull leaden hue on his eyelids and his lips?
She loosened his cravat and opened his waistcoat, and bared his throat
and breast to the air. With her hand on his heart, with her bosom
supporting his head, so that he fronted the window, she waited the
event. A time passed: a time short enough to be reckoned by minutes
on the clock; and yet long enough to take her memory back over all her
married life with him--long enough to mature the resolution that now
rose in her mind as the one result that could come of the retrospect. As
her eyes rested on him, a strange composure settled slowly on her face.
She bore the look of a woman who was equally resigned to welcome the
chance of his recovery, or to accept the certainty of his death.
Not a cry or a tear had escaped her yet. Not a cry or a tear escaped her
when the interval had passed, and she felt the first faint fluttering of
his heart, and heard the first faint catching of the breath of his lips.
She silently bent over him and kissed his forehead. When she looked up
again, the hard despair had melted from her face. There was something
softly radiant in her eyes, which lit her whole countenance as with an
inner light, and made her womanly and lovely once more.
She laid him down, and, taking off her shawl, made a pillow of it to
support his head. “It might have been hard, love,” she said, as she felt
the faint pulsation strengthening at his heart. “You have made it easy
now.”
She rose, and, turning from him, noticed the Purple Flask in the place
where she had left it since the fourth Pouring. “Ah,” she thought,
quietly, “I had forgotten my best friend--I had forgotten that there is
more to pour in yet.”
With a steady hand, with a calm, attentive face, she fed the funnel
for the fifth time. “Five minutes more,” she said, when she had put the
Flask back, after a look at the clock.
She fell into thought--thought that only deepened the grave and gentle
composure of her face. “Shall I write him a farewell word?” she asked
herself. “Shall I tell him the truth before I leave him forever?”
Her little gold pencil-case hung with the other toys at her watch-chain.
After looking about her for a moment, she knelt over her husband and put
her hand into the breast-pocket of his coat.
His pocket-book was there. Some papers fell from it as she unfastened
the clasp. One of them was the letter which had come to him from Mr.
Brock’s death-bed. She turned over the two sheets of note-paper on which
the rector had written the words that had now come true, and found the
last page of the last sheet a blank. On that page she wrote her farewell
words, kneeling at her husband’s side.
“I am worse than the worst you can think of me. You have saved Armadale
by changing rooms with him to-night; and you have saved him from me. You
can guess now whose widow I should have claimed to be, if you had not
preserved his life; and you will know what a wretch you married when
you married the woman who writes these lines. Still, I had some innocent
moments, and then I loved you dearly. Forget me, my darling, in the love
of a better woman than I am. I might, perhaps, have been that better
woman myself, if I had not lived a miserable life before you met with
me. It matters little now. The one atonement I can make for all the
wrong I have done you is the atonement of my death. It is not hard
for me to die, now I know you will live. Even my wickedness has one
merit--it has not prospered. I have never been a happy woman.”
She folded the letter again, and put it into his hand, to attract his
attention in that way when he came to himself. As she gently closed his
fingers on the paper and looked up, the last minute of the last interval
faced her, recorded on the clock.
She bent over him, and gave him her farewell kiss.
“Live, my angel, live!” she murmured, tenderly, with her lips just
touching his. “All your life is before you--a happy life, and an honored
life, if you are freed from _me_!”
With a last, lingering tenderness, she parted the hair back from his
forehead. “It is no merit to have loved you,” she said. “You are one of
the men whom women all like.” She sighed and left him. It was her last
weakness. She bent her head affirmatively to the clock, as if it had
been a living creature speaking to her; and fed the funnel for the last
time, to the last drop left in the Flask.
The waning moon shone in faintly at the window. With her hand on the
door of the room, she turned and looked at the light that was slowly
fading out of the murky sky.
“Oh, God, forgive me!” she said. “Oh, Christ, bear witness that I have
suffered!”
One moment more she lingered on the threshold; lingered for her last
look in this world--and turned that look on _him_.
“Good-by!” she said, softly.
The door of the room opened, and closed on her. There was an interval of
silence.
Then a sound came dull and sudden, like the sound of a fall.
Then there was silence again.
* * * * *
The hands of the clock, following their steady course, reckoned the
minutes of the morning as one by one they lapsed away. It was the
tenth minute since the door of the room had opened and closed, before
Midwinter stirred on his pillow, and, struggling to raise himself, felt
the letter in his hand.
At the same moment a key was turned in the staircase door. And the
doctor, looking expectantly toward the fatal room, saw the Purple Flask
on the window-sill, and the prostrate man trying to raise himself from
the floor.