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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Armadale, by Wilkie Collins***
+#20 in our series by Wilkie Collins
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+Armadale
+
+by Wilkie Collins
+
+September, 1999  [Etext #1895]
+
+
+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Armadale, by Wilkie Collins***
+******This file should be named armdl10.txt or armdl10.zip******
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+Prepared by James Rusk (jrusk@cyberramp.net)
+Italics are indicated by underscores.
+
+
+
+
+
+Armadale
+
+by Wilkie Collins
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+In acknowledgment of the services which he has rendered to the
+cause of literature by his "Life of Goldsmith;" and in
+affectionate remembrance of a friendship which is associated with
+some of the happiest years of my life.
+
+
+
+READERS in general--on whose friendly reception experience has
+given me some reason to rely--will, I venture to hope, appreciate
+whatever merit there may be in this story without any prefatory
+pleading for it on my part. They will, I think, see that it has
+not been hastily meditated or idly wrought out. They will judge
+it accordingly, and I ask no more.
+
+Readers in particular will, I have some reason to suppose, be
+here and there disturbed, perhaps even offended, by finding that
+"Armadale" oversteps, in more than one direction, the narrow
+limits within which they are disposed to restrict the development
+of modern fiction--if they can.
+
+Nothing that I could say to these persons here would help me with
+them as Time will help me if my work lasts. I am not afraid of my
+design being permanently misunderstood, provided the execution
+has done it any sort of justice. Estimated by the clap-trap
+morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book.
+Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only
+a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.
+
+LONDON, April, 1866.
+
+
+
+ARMADALE.
+
+PROLOGUE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE TRAVELERS.
+
+IT was the opening of the season of eighteen hundred and
+thirty-two, at the Baths of WILDBAD.
+
+The evening shadows were beginning to gather over the quiet
+little German town, and the diligence was expected every minute.
+Before the door of the principal inn, waiting the arrival of the
+first visitors of the year, were assembled the three notable
+personages of Wildbad, accompanied by their wives--the mayor,
+representing the inhabitants; the doctor, representing the
+waters; the landlord, representing his own establishment. Beyond
+this select circle, grouped snugly about the trim little square
+in front of the inn, appeared the towns-people in general, mixed
+here and there with the country people, in their quaint German
+costume, placidly expectant of the diligence--the men in short
+black jackets, tight black breeches, and three-cornered beaver
+hats; the women with their long light hair hanging in one thickly
+plaited tail behind them, and the waists of their short woolen
+gowns inserted modestly in the region of their shoulder-blades.
+Round the outer edge of the assemblage thus formed, flying
+detachments of plump white-headed children careered in perpetual
+motion; while, mysteriously apart from the rest of the
+inhabitants, the musicians of the Baths stood collected in one
+lost corner, waiting the appearance of the first visitors to play
+the first tune of the season in the form of a serenade. The light
+of a May evening was still bright on the tops of the great wooded
+hills watching high over the town on the right hand and the left;
+and the cool breeze that comes before sunset came keenly fragrant
+here with the balsamic odor of the first of the Black Forest.
+
+"Mr. Landlord," said the mayor's wife (giving the landlord his
+title), "have you any foreign guests coming on this first day of
+the season?"
+
+"Madame Mayoress," replied the landlord (returning the
+compliment), "I have two. They have written--the one by the hand
+of his servant, the other by his own hand apparently--to order
+their rooms; and they are from England, both, as I think by their
+names. If you ask me to pronounce those names, my tongue
+hesitates; if you ask me to spell them, here they are, letter by
+letter, first and second in their order as they come. First, a
+high-born stranger (by title Mister) who introduces himself in
+eight letters, A, r, m, a, d, a, l, e--and comes ill in his own
+carriage. Second, a high-born stranger (by title Mister also),
+who introduces himself in four letters--N, e, a, l--and comes ill
+in the diligence. His excellency of the eight letters writes to
+me (by his servant) in French; his excellency of the four letters
+writes to me in German. The rooms of both are ready. I know no
+more."
+
+"Perhaps," suggested the mayor's wife, "Mr. Doctor has heard from
+one or both of these illustrious strangers?"
+
+"From one only, Madam Mayoress; but not, strictly speaking, from
+the person himself. I have received a medical report of his
+excellency of the eight letters, and his case seems a bad one.
+God help him!"
+
+"The diligence!" cried a child from the outskirts of the crowd.
+
+The musicians seized their instruments, and silence fell on the
+whole community. From far away in the windings of the forest
+gorge, the ring of horses' bells came faintly clear through the
+evening stillness. Which carriage was approaching--the private
+carriage with Mr. Armadale, or the public carriage with Mr. Neal?
+
+"Play, my friends!" cried the mayor to the musicians. "Public or
+private, here are the first sick people of the season. Let them
+find us cheerful."
+
+The band played a lively dance tune, and the children in the
+square footed it merrily to the music. At the same moment, their
+elders near the inn door drew aside, and disclosed the first
+shadow of gloom that fell over the gayety and beauty of the
+scene. Through the opening made on either hand, a little
+procession of stout country girls advanced, each drawing after
+her an empty chair on wheels; each in waiting (and knitting while
+she waited) for the paralyzed wretches who came helpless by
+hundreds then--who come helpless by thousands now--to the waters
+of Wildbad for relief.
+
+While the band played, while the children danced, while the buzz
+of many talkers deepened, while the strong young nurses of the
+coming cripples knitted impenetrably, a woman's insatiable
+curiosity about other women asserted itself in the mayor's wife.
+She drew the landlady aside, and whispered a question to her on
+the spot.
+
+"A word more, ma'am," said the mayor's wife, "about the two
+strangers from England. Are their letters explicit? Have they got
+any ladies with them?"
+
+"The one by the diligence--no," replied the landlady. "But the
+one by the private carriage--yes. He comes with a child; he comes
+with a nurse; and," concluded the landlady, skillfully keeping
+the main point of interest till the last, "he comes with a Wife."
+
+The mayoress brightened; the doctoress (assisting at the
+conference) brightened; the landlady nodded significantly. In the
+minds of all three the same thought started into life at the same
+moment--"We shall see the Fashions! "
+
+In a minute more, there was a sudden movement in the crowd; and a
+chorus of voices proclaimed that the travelers were at hand.
+
+By this time the coming vehicle was in sight, and all further
+doubt was at an end. It was the diligence that now approached by
+the long street leading into the square--the diligence (in a
+dazzling new coat of yellow paint) that delivered the first
+visitors of the season at the inn door. Of the ten travelers
+released from the middle compartment and the back compartment of
+the carriage--all from various parts of Germany--three were
+lifted out helpless, and were placed in the chairs on wheels to
+be drawn to their lodgings in the town. The front compartment
+contained two passengers only--Mr. Neal and his traveling
+servant. With an arm on either side to assist him, the stranger
+(whose malady appeared to be locally confined to a lameness in
+one of his feet) succeeded in descending the steps of the
+carriage easily enough. While he steadied himself on the pavement
+by the help of his stick--looking not over-patiently toward the
+musicians who were serenading him with the waltz in "Der
+Freischutz"--his personal appearance rather damped the enthusiasm
+of the friendly little circle assembled to welcome him. He was a
+lean, tall, serious, middle-aged man, with a cold gray eye and a
+long upper lip, with overhanging eyebrows and high cheek-bones; a
+man who looked what he was--every inch a Scotchman.
+
+"Where is the proprietor of this hotel?" he asked, speaking in
+the German language, with a fluent readiness of expression, and
+an icy coldnes s of manner. "Fetch the doctor," he continued,
+when the landlord had presented himself, "I want to see him
+immediately."
+
+"I am here already, sir," said the doctor, advancing from the
+circle of friends, "and my services are entirely at your
+disposal."
+
+"Thank you," said Mr. Neal, looking at the doctor, as the rest of
+us look at a dog when we have whistled and the dog has come. "I
+shall be glad to consult you to-morrow morning, at ten o'clock,
+about my own case. I only want to trouble you now with a message
+which I have undertaken to deliver. We overtook a traveling
+carriage on the road here with a gentleman in it--an Englishman,
+I believe--who appeared to be seriously ill. A lady who was with
+him begged me to see you immediately on my arrival, and to secure
+your professional assistance in removing the patient from the
+carriage. Their courier has met with an accident, and has been
+left behind on the road, and they are obliged to travel very
+slowly. If you are here in an hour, you will be here in time to
+receive them. That is the message. Who is this gentleman who
+appears to be anxious to speak to me? The mayor? If you wish to
+see my passport, sir, my servant will show it to you. No? You
+wish to welcome me to the place, and to offer your services? I am
+infinitely flattered. If you have any authority to shorten the
+performances of your town band, you would be doing me a kindness
+to exert it. My nerves are irritable, and I dislike music. Where
+is the landlord? No; I want to see my rooms. I don't want your
+arm; I can get upstairs with the help of my stick. Mr. Mayor and
+Mr. Doctor, we need not detain one another any longer. I wish you
+good-night."
+
+Both mayor and doctor looked after the Scotchman as he limped
+upstairs, and shook their heads together in mute disapproval of
+him. The ladies, as usual, went a step further, and expressed
+their opinions openly in the plainest words. The case under
+consideration (so far as _they_ were concerned) was the
+scandalous case of a man who had passed them over entirely
+without notice. Mrs. Mayor could only attribute such an outrage
+to the native ferocity of a savage. Mrs. Doctor took a stronger
+view still, and considered it as proceeding from the inbred
+brutality of a hog.
+
+The hour of waiting for the traveling-carriage wore on, and the
+creeping night stole up the hillsides softly. One by one the
+stars appeared, and the first lights twinkled in the windows of
+the inn. As the darkness came, the last idlers deserted the
+square; as the darkness came, the mighty silence of the forest
+above flowed in on the valley, and strangely and suddenly hushed
+the lonely little town.
+
+The hour of waiting wore out, and the figure of the doctor,
+walking backward and forward anxiously, was still the only living
+figure left in the square. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty
+minutes, were counted out by the doctor's watch, before the first
+sound came through the night silence to warn him of the
+approaching carriage. Slowly it emerged into the square, at the
+walking pace of the horses, and drew up, as a hearse might have
+drawn up, at the door of the inn.
+
+"Is the doctor here?" asked a woman's voice, speaking, out of the
+darkness of the carriage, in the French language.
+
+"I am here, madam," replied the doctor, taking a light from the
+landlord's hand and opening the carriage door.
+
+The first face that the light fell on was the face of the lady
+who had just spoken--a young, darkly beautiful woman, with the
+tears standing thick and bright in her eager black eyes. The
+second face revealed was the face of a shriveled old negress,
+sitting opposite the lady on the back seat. The third was the
+face of a little sleeping child in the negress's lap. With a
+quick gesture of impatience, the lady signed to the nurse to
+leave the carriage first with the child. "Pray take them out of
+the way," she said to the landlady; "pray take them to their
+room." She got out herself when her request had been complied
+with. Then the light fell clear for the first time on the further
+side of the carriage, and the fourth traveler was disclosed to
+view.
+
+He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his
+hair, long and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide
+open, rolling to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his
+face as void of all expression of the character within him, and
+the thought within him, as if he had been dead. There was no
+looking at him now, and guessing what he might once have been.
+The leaden blank of his face met every question as to his age,
+his rank, his temper, and his looks which that face might once
+have answered, in impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him now
+but the shock that had struck him with the death-in-life of
+paralysis. The doctor's eye questioned his lower limbs, and
+Death-in-Life answered, _I am here._ The doctor's eye, rising
+attentively by way of his hands and arms, questioned upward and
+upward to the muscles round his mouth, and Death-in-Life
+answered, _I am coming._
+
+In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was
+nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that
+could be offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage
+door.
+
+As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel, his
+wandering eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested on
+her for a moment, and in that moment he spoke.
+
+"The child?" he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
+articulation.
+
+"The child is safe upstairs," she answered, faintly.
+
+"My desk?"
+
+"It is in my hands. Look! I won't trust it to anybody; I am
+taking care of it for you myself."
+
+He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said
+no more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs,
+with his wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously
+silent) on the other. The landlord and the servants following saw
+the door of his room open and close on him; heard the lady burst
+out crying hysterically as soon as she was alone with the doctor
+and the sick man; saw the doctor come out, half an hour later,
+with his ruddy face a shade paler than usual; pressed him eagerly
+for information, and received but one answer to all their
+inquiries--"Wait till I have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing
+to-night." They all knew the doctor's ways, and they augured ill
+when he left them hurriedly with that reply.
+
+So the two first English visitors of the year came to the Baths
+of Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE SOLID SIDE OF THE SCOTCH CHARACTER.
+
+AT ten o'clock the next morning, Mr. Neal--waiting for the
+medical visit which he had himself appointed for that
+hour--looked at his watch, and discovered, to his amazement, that
+he was waiting in vain. It was close on eleven when the door
+opened at last, and the doctor entered the room.
+
+"I appointed ten o'clock for your visit," said Mr. Neal. "In my
+country, a medical man is a punctual man."
+
+"In my country," returned the doctor, without the least
+ill-humor, "a medical man is exactly like other men--he is at the
+mercy of accidents. Pray grant me your pardon, sir, for being so
+long after my time; I have been detained by a very distressing
+case--the case of Mr. Armadale, whose traveling-carriage you
+passed on the road yesterday."
+
+Mr. Neal looked at his medical attendant with a sour surprise.
+There was a latent anxiety in the doctor's eye, a latent
+preoccupation in the doctor's manner, which he was at a loss to
+account for. For a moment the two faces confronted each other
+silently, in marked national contrast--the Scotchman's, long and
+lean, hard and regular; the German's, plump and florid, soft and
+shapeless. One face looked as if it had never been young; the
+other, as if it would never grow old.
+
+"Might I venture to remind you," said Mr. Neal, "that the case
+now under consideration is MY case, and not Mr. Armadale's?"
+
+"Certainly," replied the doctor, still vacillating between the
+case he had come to see and the case he had just left. "You
+appear to be suffering from lameness; let me look at your foot."
+
+Mr. Neal's malady, however serious it might be in his own
+estimation, was of no extraordinary importance in a medical poi
+nt of view. He was suffering from a rheumatic affection of the
+ankle-joint. The necessary questions were asked and answered and
+the necessary baths were prescribed. In ten minutes the
+consultation was at an end, and the patient was waiting in
+significant silence for the medical adviser to take his leave.
+
+"I cannot conceal from myself," said the doctor, rising, and
+hesitating a little, "that I am intruding on you. But I am
+compelled to beg your indulgence if I return to the subject of
+Mr. Armadale."
+
+"May I ask what compels you?"
+
+"The duty which I owe as a Christian," answered the doctor, "to a
+dying man."
+
+Mr. Neal started. Those who touched his sense of religious duty
+touched the quickest sense in his nature.
+
+"You have established your claim on my attention," he said,
+gravely. "My time is yours."
+
+"I will not abuse your kindness," replied the doctor, resuming
+his chair. "I will be as short as I can. Mr. Armadale's case is
+briefly this: He has passed the greater part of his life in the
+West Indies--a wild life, and a vicious life, by his own
+confession. Shortly after his marriage--now some three years
+since--the first symptoms of an approaching paralytic affection
+began to show themselves, and his medical advisers ordered him
+away to try the climate of Europe. Since leaving the West Indies
+he has lived principally in Italy, with no benefit to his health.
+From Italy, before the last seizure attacked him, he removed to
+Switzerland, and from Switzerland he has been sent to this place.
+So much I know from his doctor's report; the rest I can tell you
+from my own personal experience. Mr. Armadale has been sent to
+Wildbad too late: he is virtually a dead man. The paralysis is
+fast spreading upward, and disease of the lower part of the spine
+has already taken place. He can still move his hands a little,
+but he can hold nothing in his fingers. He can still articulate,
+but he may wake speechless to-morrow or next day. If I give him a
+week more to live, I give him what I honestly believe to be the
+utmost length of his span. At his own request I told him, as
+carefully and as tenderly as I could, what I have just told you.
+The result was very distressing; the violence of the patient's
+agitation was a violence which I despair of describing to you. I
+took the liberty of asking him whether his affairs were
+unsettled. Nothing of the sort. His will is in the hands of his
+executor in London, and he leaves his wife and child well
+provided for. My next question succeeded better; it hit the mark:
+'Have you something on your mind to do before you die which is
+not done yet?' He gave a great gasp of relief, which said, as no
+words could have said it, Yes. 'Can I help you?' 'Yes. I have
+something to write that I _must_ write; can you make me hold a
+pen?'
+
+"He might as well have asked me if I could perform a miracle. I
+could only say No. 'If I dictate the words,' he went on, 'can you
+write what I tell you to write?' Once more I could only say No. I
+understand a little English, but I can neither speak it nor write
+it. Mr. Armadale understands French when it is spoken (as I speak
+it to him) slowly, but he cannot express himself in that
+language; and of German he is totally ignorant. In this
+difficulty, I said, what any one else in my situation would have
+said: 'Why ask _me?_ there is Mrs. Armadale at your service in
+the next room.' Before I could get up from my chair to fetch her,
+he stopped me--not by words, but by a look of horror which fixed
+me, by main force of astonishment, in my place. 'Surely,' I said,
+'your wife is the fittest person to write for you as you desire?'
+'The last person under heaven!' he answered. 'What!' I said, 'you
+ask me, a foreigner and a stranger, to write words at your
+dictation which you keep a secret from your wife!' Conceive my
+astonishment when he answered me, without a moment's hesitation,
+'Yes!' I sat lost; I sat silent. 'If _you_ can't write English,'
+he said, 'find somebody who can.' I tried to remonstrate. He
+burst into a dreadful moaning cry--a dumb entreaty, like the
+entreaty of a dog. 'Hush! hush!' I said, 'I will find somebody.'
+'To-day!' he broke out, 'before my speech fails me, like my
+hand.' 'To-day, in an hour's time.' He shut his eyes; he quieted
+himself instantly. 'While I am waiting for you,' he said, 'let me
+see my little boy.' He had shown no tenderness when he spoke of
+his wife, but I saw the tears on his cheeks when he asked for his
+child. My profession, sir, has not made me so hard a man as you
+might think; and my doctor's heart was as heavy, when I went out
+to fetch the child, as if I had not been a doctor at all. I am
+afraid you think this rather weak on my part?"
+
+The doctor looked appealingly at Mr. Neal. He might as well have
+looked at a rock in the Black Forest. Mr. Neal entirely declined
+to be drawn by any doctor in Christendom out of the regions of
+plain fact.
+
+"Go on," he said. "I presume you have not told me all that you
+have to tell me, yet?"
+
+"Surely you understand my object in coming here, now?" returned
+the other
+
+"Your object is plain enough, at last. You invite me to connect
+myself blindfold with a matter which is in the last degree
+suspicious, so far. I decline giving you any answer until I know
+more than I know now. Did you think it necessary to inform this
+man's wife of what had passed between you, and to ask her for an
+explanation?"
+
+"Of course I thought it necessary!" said the doctor, indignant at
+the reflection on his humanity which the question seemed to
+imply. "If ever I saw a woman fond of her husband, and sorry for
+her husband, it is this unhappy Mrs. Armadale. As soon as we were
+left alone together, I sat down by her side, and I took her hand
+in mine. Why not? I am an ugly old man, and I may allow myself
+such liberties as these!"
+
+"Excuse me," said the impenetrable Scotchman. "I beg to suggest
+that you are losing the thread of the narrative."
+
+"Nothing more likely," returned the doctor, recovering his good
+humor. "It is in the habit of my nation to be perpetually losing
+the thread; and it is evidently in the habit of yours, sir, to be
+perpetually finding it. What an example here of the order of the
+universe, and the everlasting fitness of things!"
+
+"Will you oblige me, once for all, by confining yourself to the
+facts," persisted Mr. Neal, frowning impatiently. "May I inquire,
+for my own information, whether Mrs. Armadale could tell you what
+it is her husband wishes me to write, and why it is that he
+refuses to let her write for him?"
+
+"There is my thread found--and thank you for finding it!" said
+the doctor. "You shall hear what Mrs. Armadale had to tell me, in
+Mrs. Armadale's own words. 'The cause that now shuts me out of
+his confidence,' she said, 'is, I firmly believe, the same cause
+that has always shut me out of his heart. I am the wife he has
+wedded, but I am not the woman he loves. I knew when he married
+me that another man had won from him the woman he loved. I
+thought I could make him forget her. I hoped when I married him;
+I hoped again when I bore him a son. Need I tell you the end of
+my hopes--you have seen it for yourself.' (Wait, sir, I entreat
+you! I have not lost the thread again; I am following it inch by
+inch.) 'Is this all you know?' I asked. 'All I knew,' she said,
+'till a short time since. It was when we were in Switzerland, and
+when his illness was nearly at its worst, that news came to him
+by accident of that other woman who has been the shadow and the
+poison of my life--news that she (like me) had borne her husband
+a son. On the instant of his making that discovery--a trifling
+discovery, if ever there was one yet--a mortal fear seized on
+him: not for me, not for himself; a fear for his own child. The
+same day (without a word to me) he sent for the doctor. I was
+mean, wicked, what you please--I listened at the door. I heard
+him say: _I have something to tell my son, when my son grows old
+enough to understand me. Shall I live to tell it?_ The doctor
+would say nothing certain. The same night (still without a word
+to me) he locked himself into his room. What would any woman,
+treated as I was, have done in my place? She would have done as I
+did--she would have list ened again. I heard him say to himself:
+_I shall not live to tell it: I must; write it before I die._ I
+heard his pen scrape, scrape, scrape over the paper; I heard him
+groaning and sobbing as he wrote; I implored him for God's sake
+to let me in. The cruel pen went scrape, scrape, scrape; the
+cruel pen was all the answer he gave me. I waited at the
+door--hours--I don't know how long. On a sudden, the pen stopped;
+and I heard no more. I whispered through the keyhole softly; I
+said I was cold and weary with waiting; I said, Oh, my love, let
+me in! Not even the cruel pen answered me now: silence answered
+me. With all the strength of my miserable hands I beat at the
+door. The servants came up and broke it in. We were too late; the
+harm was done. Over that fatal letter, the stroke had struck
+him--over that fatal letter, we found him paralyzed as you see
+him now. Those words which he wants you to write are the words he
+would have written himself if the stroke had spared him till the
+morning From that time to this there has been a blank place left
+in the letter; and it is that blank place which he has just asked
+you to fill up.'--In those words Mrs. Armadale spoke to me; in
+those words you have the sum and substance of all the information
+I can give. Say, if you please, sir, have I kept the thread at
+last? Have I shown you the necessity which brings me here from
+your countryman's death-bed?"
+
+"Thus far," said Mr. Neal, "you merely show me that you are
+exciting yourself. This is too serious a matter to be treated as
+you are treating it now. You have involved Me in the business,
+and I insist on seeing my way plainly. Don't raise your hands;
+your hands are not a part of the question. If I am to be
+concerned in the completion of this mysterious letter, it is only
+an act of justifiable prudence on my part to inquire what the
+letter is about. Mrs. Armadale appears to have favored you with
+an infinite number of domestic particulars--in return, I presume,
+for your polite attention in taking her by the hand. May I ask
+what she could tell you about her husband's letter, so far as her
+husband has written it?"
+
+"Mrs. Armadale could tell me nothing," replied the doctor, with a
+sudden formality in his manner, which showed that his forbearance
+was at last failing him. "Before she was composed enough to think
+of the letter, her husband had asked for it, and had caused it to
+be locked up in his desk. She knows that he has since, time after
+time, tried to finish it, and that, time after time, the pen has
+dropped from his fingers. She knows, when all other hope of his
+restoration was at an end, that his medical advisers encouraged
+him to hope in the famous waters of this place. And last, she
+knows how that hope has ended; for she knows what I told her
+husband this morning."
+
+The frown which had been gathering latterly on Mr. Neal's face
+deepened and darkened. He looked at the doctor as if the doctor
+had personally offended him.
+
+"The more I think of the position you are asking me to take," he
+said, "the less I like it. Can you undertake to say positively
+that Mr. Armadale is in his right mind?"
+
+"Yes; as positively as words can say it."
+
+"Does his wife sanction your coming here to request my
+interference?"
+
+"His wife sends me to you--the only Englishman in Wildbad--to
+write for your dying countryman what he cannot write for himself;
+and what no one else in this place but you can write for him."
+
+That answer drove Mr. Neal back to the last inch of ground left
+him to stand on. Even on that inch the Scotchman resisted still.
+
+"Wait a little!" he said. "You put it strongly; let us be quite
+sure you put it correctly as well. Let us be quite sure there is
+nobody to take this responsibility but myself. There is a mayor
+in Wildbad, to begin with--a man who possesses an official
+character to justify his interference."
+
+"A man of a thousand," said the doctor. "With one fault--he knows
+no language but his own."
+
+"There is an English legation at Stuttgart," persisted Mr. Neal.
+
+"And there are miles on miles of the forest between this and
+Stuttgart," rejoined the doctor. "If we sent this moment, we
+could get no help from the legation before to-morrow; and it is
+as likely as not, in the state of this dying man's articulation,
+that to-morrow may find him speechless. I don't know whether his
+last wishes are wishes harmless to his child and to others,
+wishes hurtful to his child and to others; but I _do_ know that
+they must be fulfilled at once or never, and that you are the
+only man that can help him."
+
+That open declaration brought the discussion to a close. It fixed
+Mr. Neal fast between the two alternatives of saying Yes, and
+committing an act of imprudence, or of saying No, and committing
+an act of inhumanity. There was a silence of some minutes. The
+Scotchman steadily reflected; and the German steadily watched
+him.
+
+The responsibility of saying the next words rested on Mr. Neal,
+and in course of time Mr. Neal took it. He rose from his chair
+with a sullen sense of injury lowering on his heavy eyebrows, and
+working sourly in the lines at the corners of his mouth.
+
+"My position is forced on me," he said. "I have no choice but to
+accept it."
+
+The doctor's impulsive nature rose in revolt against the
+merciless brevity and gracelessness of that reply. "I wish to
+God," he broke out fervently, "I knew English enough to take your
+place at Mr. Armadale's bedside!"
+
+"Bating your taking the name of the Almighty in vain," answered
+the Scotchman, "I entirely agree with you. I wish you did."
+
+Without another word on either side, they left the room
+together--the doctor leading the way.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WRECK OF THE TIMBER SHIP.
+
+NO one answered the doctor's knock when he and his companion
+reached the antechamber door of Mr. Armadale's apartments. They
+entered unannounced; and when they looked into the sitting-room,
+the sitting-room was empty.
+
+"I must see Mrs. Armadale," said Mr. Neal. "I decline acting in
+the matter unless Mrs. Armadale authorizes my interference with
+her own lips."
+
+"Mrs. Armadale is probably with her husband," replied the doctor.
+He approached a door at the inner end of the sitting-room while
+he spoke--hesitated--and, turning round again, looked at his sour
+companion anxiously. "I am afraid I spoke a little harshly, sir,
+when we were leaving your room," he said. "I beg your pardon for
+it, with all my heart. Before this poor afflicted lady comes in,
+will you--will you excuse my asking your utmost gentleness and
+consideration for her?"
+
+"No, sir," retorted the other harshly; "I won't excuse you. What
+right have I given you to think me wanting in gentleness and
+consideration toward anybody?"
+
+The doctor saw it was useless. "I beg your pardon again," he
+said, resignedly, and left the unapproachable stranger to
+himself.
+
+Mr. Neal walked to the window, and stood there, with his eyes
+mechanically fixed on the prospect, composing his mind for the
+coming interview.
+
+It was midday; the sun shone bright and warm; and all the little
+world of Wildbad was alive and merry in the genial springtime.
+Now and again heavy wagons, with black-faced carters in charge,
+rolled by the window, bearing their precious lading of charcoal
+from the forest. Now and again, hurled over the headlong current
+of the stream that runs through the town, great lengths of
+timber, loosely strung together in interminable series--with the
+booted raftsmen, pole in hand, poised watchful at either
+end--shot swift and serpent-like past the houses on their course
+to the distant Rhine. High and steep above the gabled wooden
+buildings on the river-bank, the great hillsides, crested black
+with firs, shone to the shining heavens in a glory of lustrous
+green. In and out, where the forest foot-paths wound from the
+grass through the trees, from the trees over the grass, the
+bright spring dresses of women and children, on the search for
+wild flowers, traveled to and fro in the lofty distance like
+spots of moving light. Below, on the walk by the stream side, the
+booths of the little bazar that had opened punctually with the
+opening season showed all their glittering trinkets, and
+fluttered in the balmy air their splendor of m any-colored flags.
+Longingly, here the children looked at the show; patiently the
+sunburned lasses plied their knitting as they paced the walk;
+courteously the passing townspeople, by fours and fives, and the
+passing visitors, by ones and twos, greeted each other, hat in
+hand; and slowly, slowly, the cripple and the helpless in their
+chairs on wheels came out in the cheerful noontide with the rest,
+and took their share of the blessed light that cheers, of the
+blessed sun that shines for all.
+
+On this scene the Scotchman looked, with eyes that never noted
+its beauty, with a mind far away from every lesson that it
+taught. One by one he meditated the words he should say when the
+wife came in. One by one he pondered over the conditions he might
+impose before he took the pen in hand at the husband's bedside.
+
+"Mrs. Armadale is here," said the doctor's voice, interposing
+suddenly between his reflections and himself.
+
+He turned on the instant, and saw before him, with the pure
+midday light shining full on her, a woman of the mixed blood of
+the European and the African race, with the Northern delicacy in
+the shape of her face, and the Southern richness in its color--a
+woman in the prime of her beauty, who moved with an inbred grace,
+who looked with an inbred fascination, whose large, languid black
+eyes rested on him gratefully, whose little dusky hand offered
+itself to him in mute expression of her thanks, with the welcome
+that is given to the coming of a friend. For the first time in
+his life the Scotchman was taken by surprise. Every
+self-preservative word that he had been meditating but an instant
+since dropped out of his memory. His thrice impenetrable armor of
+habitual suspicion, habitual self-discipline, and habitual
+reserve, which had never fallen from him in a woman's presence
+before, fell from him in this woman's presence, and brought him
+to his knees, a conquered man. He took the hand she offered him,
+and bowed over it his first honest homage to the sex, in silence.
+
+She hesitated on her side. The quick feminine perception which,
+in happier circumstances, would have pounced on the secret of his
+embarrassment in an instant, failed her now. She attributed his
+strange reception of her to pride, to reluctance--to any cause
+but the unexpected revelation of her own beauty. "I have no words
+to thank you," she said, faintly, trying to propitiate him. "I
+should only distress you if I tried to speak." Her lip began to
+tremble, she drew back a little, and turned away her head in
+silence.
+
+The doctor, who had been standing apart, quietly observant in a
+corner, advanced before Mr. Neal could interfere, and led Mrs.
+Armadale to a chair. "Don't be afraid of him," whispered the good
+man, patting her gently on the shoulder. "He was hard as iron in
+my hands, but I think, by the look of him, he will be soft as wax
+in yours. Say the words I told you to say, and let us take him to
+your husband's room, before those sharp wits of his have time to
+recover themselves."
+
+She roused her sinking resolution, and advanced half-way to the
+window to meet Mr. Neal. "My kind friend, the doctor, has told
+me, sir, that your only hesitation in coming here is a hesitation
+on my account," she said, her head drooping a little, and her
+rich color fading away while she spoke. "I am deeply grateful,
+but I entreat you not to think of _me._ What my husband wishes--"
+Her voice faltered; she waited resolutely, and recovered herself.
+"What my husband wishes in his last moments, I wish too."
+
+This time Mr. Neal was composed enough to answer her. In low,
+earnest tones, he entreated her to say no more. "I was only
+anxious to show you every consideration," he said. "I am only
+anxious now to spare you every distress." As he spoke, something
+like a glow of color rose slowly on his sallow face. Her eyes
+were looking at him, softly attentive; and he thought guiltily of
+his meditations at the window before she came in.
+
+The doctor saw his opportunity. He opened the door that led into
+Mr. Armadale's room, and stood by it, waiting silently. Mrs.
+Armadale entered first. In a minute more the door was closed
+again; and Mr. Neal stood committed to the responsibility that
+had been forced on him--committed beyond recall.
+
+The room was decorated in the gaudy continental fashion, and the
+warm sunlight was shining in joyously. Cupids and flowers were
+painted on the ceiling; bright ribbons looped up the white
+window-curtains; a smart gilt clock ticked on a velvet-covered
+mantelpiece; mirrors gleamed on the walls, and flowers in all the
+colors of the rainbow speckled the carpet. In the midst of the
+finery, and the glitter, and the light, lay the paralyzed man,
+with his wandering eyes, and his lifeless lower face--his head
+propped high with many pillows; his helpless hands laid out over
+the bed-clothes like the hands of a corpse. By the bed head
+stood, grim, and old, and silent, the shriveled black nurse; and
+on the counter-pane, between his father's outspread hands, lay
+the child, in his little white frock, absorbed in the enjoyment
+of a new toy. When the door opened, and Mrs. Armadale led the way
+in, the boy was tossing his plaything--a soldier on
+horseback--backward and forward over the helpless hands on either
+side of him; and the father's wandering eyes were following the
+toy to and fro, with a stealthy and ceaseless vigilance--a
+vigilance as of a wild animal, terrible to see.
+
+The moment Mr. Neal appeared in the doorway, those restless eyes
+stopped, looked up, and fastened on the stranger with a fierce
+eagerness of inquiry. Slowly the motionless lips struggled into
+movement. With thick, hesitating articulation, they put the
+question which the eyes asked mutely, into words: "Are you the
+man?"
+
+Mr. Neal advanced to the bedside, Mrs. Armadale drawing back from
+it as he approached, and waiting with the doctor at the further
+end of the room. The child looked up, toy in hand, as the
+stranger came near, opened his bright brown eyes in momentary
+astonishment, and then went on with his game.
+
+"I have been made acquainted with your sad situation, sir," said
+Mr. Neal; "and I have come here to place my services at your
+disposal--services which no one but myself, as your medical
+attendant informs me, is in a position to render you in this
+strange place. My name is Neal. I am a writer to the signet in
+Edinburgh; and I may presume to say for myself that any
+confidence you wish to place in me will be confidence not
+improperly bestowed."
+
+The eyes of the beautiful wife were not confusing him now. He
+spoke to the helpless husband quietly and seriously, without his
+customary harshness, and with a grave compassion in his manner
+which presented him at his best. The sight of the death-bed had
+steadied him.
+
+"You wish me to write something for you?" he resumed, after
+waiting for a reply, and waiting in vain.
+
+"Yes!" said the dying man, with the all-mastering impatience
+which his tongue was powerless to express, glittering angrily in
+his eye. "My hand is gone, and my speech is going. Write!"
+
+Before there was time to speak again, Mr. Neal heard the rustling
+of a woman's dress, and the quick creaking of casters on the
+carpet behind him. Mrs. Armadale was moving the writing-table
+across the room to the foot of the bed. If he was to set up those
+safeguards of his own devising that were to bear him harmless
+through all results to come, now was the time, or never. He, kept
+his back turned on Mrs. Armadale, and put his precautionary
+question at once in the plainest terms.
+
+"May I ask, sir, before I take the pen in hand, what it is you
+wish me to write?"
+
+The angry eyes of the paralyzed man glittered brighter and
+brighter. His lips opened and closed again. He made no reply.
+
+Mr. Neal tried another precautionary question, in a new
+direction.
+
+"When I have written what you wish me to write," he asked, "what
+is to be done with it?"
+
+This time the answer came:
+
+"Seal it up in my presence, and post it to my ex--"
+
+His laboring articulation suddenly stopped and he looked
+piteously in the questioner's face for the next word.
+
+"Do you mean your executor?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?" There was no
+answer. "May
+ I ask if it is a letter altering your will?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort."
+
+Mr. Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one
+way out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that
+strange story of the unfinished letter which the doctor had
+repeated to him in Mrs. Armadale's words. The nearer he
+approached his unknown responsibility, the more ominous it seemed
+of something serious to come. Should he risk another question
+before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt crossed his
+mind, he felt Mrs. Armadale's silk dress touch him on the side
+furthest from her husband. Her delicate dark hand was laid gently
+on his arm; her full deep African eyes looked at him in
+submissive entreaty. "My husband is very anxious," she whispered.
+"Will you quiet his anxiety, sir, by taking your place at the
+writing-table?"
+
+It was from _her_ lips that the request came--from the lips of
+the person who had the best right to hesitate, the wife who was
+excluded from the secret! Most men in Mr. Neal's position would
+have given up all their safeguards on the spot. The Scotchman
+gave them all up but one.
+
+"I will write what you wish me to write," he said, addressing Mr.
+Armadale. "I will seal it in your presence; and I will post it to
+your executor myself. But, in engaging to do this, I must beg you
+to remember that I am acting entirely in the dark; and I must ask
+you to excuse me, if I reserve my own entire freedom of action,
+when your wishes in relation to the writing and the posting of
+the letter have been fulfilled."
+
+"Do you give me your promise?"
+
+"It you want my promise, sir, I will give it--subject to the
+condition I have just named."
+
+"Take your condition, and keep your promise. My desk," he added,
+looking at his wife for the first time.
+
+She crossed the room eagerly to fetch the desk from a chair in a
+corner. Returning with it, she made a passing sign to the
+negress, who still stood, grim and silent, in the place that she
+had occupied from the first. The woman advanced, obedient to the
+sign, to take the child from the bed. At the instant when she
+touched him, the father's eyes--fixed previously on the
+desk--turned on her with the stealthy quickness of a cat. "No!"
+he said. "No!" echoed the fresh voice of the boy, still charmed
+with his plaything, and still liking his place on the bed. The
+negress left the room, and the child, in high triumph, trotted
+his toy soldier up and down on the bedclothes that lay rumpled
+over his father's breast. His mother's lovely face contracted
+with a pang of jealousy as she looked at him.
+
+"Shall I open your desk?" she asked, pushing back the child's
+plaything sharply while she spoke. An answering look from her
+husband guided her hand to the place under his pillow where the
+key was hidden. She opened the desk, and disclosed inside some
+small sheets of manuscript pinned together. "These?" she
+inquired, producing them.
+
+"Yes," he said. "You can go now."
+
+The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring a
+stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an
+anxiety in both their faces which they could neither of them
+control. The words that banished the wife from the room were
+spoken. The moment had come.
+
+"You can go now," said Mr. Armadale, for the second time.
+
+She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and
+an ashy paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the
+fatal letter which was a sealed secret to her, and a torture of
+jealous suspicion--suspicion of that other woman who had been the
+shadow and the poison of her life--wrung her to the heart. After
+moving a few steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back
+again. Armed with the double courage of her love and her despair,
+she pressed her lips on her dying husband's cheek, and pleaded
+with him for the last time. Her burning tears dropped on his face
+as she whispered to him: "Oh, Allan, think how I have loved you!
+think how hard I have tried to make you happy! think how soon I
+shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don't, don't send me away!"
+
+The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the
+recollection of the love that had been given to him, and never
+returned, touched the heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing
+had touched it since the day of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke
+from him. He looked at her, and hesitated.
+
+"Let me stay," she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.
+
+"It will only distress you," he whispered back.
+
+"Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from _you!_"
+
+He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.
+
+"If I let you stay a little--?"
+
+"Yes! yes!"
+
+"Will you go when I tell you?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"On your oath?"
+
+The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for a
+moment in the great outburst of anxiety which forced that
+question to his lips. He spoke those startling words as he had
+spoken no words yet.
+
+"On my oath!" she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the
+bedside, passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the
+room turned their heads away by common consent. In the silence
+that followed, the one sound stirring was the small sound of the
+child's toy, as he moved it hither and thither on the bed.
+
+The doctor was the first who broke the spell of stillness which
+had fallen on all the persons present. He approached the patient,
+and examined him anxiously. Mrs. Armadale rose from her knees;
+and, first waiting for her husband's permission, carried the
+sheets of manuscript which she had taken out of the desk to the
+table at which Mr. Neal was waiting. Flushed and eager, more
+beautiful than ever in the vehement agitation which still
+possessed her, she stooped over him as she put the letter into
+his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a woman's
+headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to him,
+"Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!" Her
+eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on his
+cheek. Before he could answer, before he could think, she was
+back with her husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that
+instant her beauty had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning
+in reluctant acknowledgment of his own inability to resist her,
+he turned over the leaves of the letter; looked at the blank
+place where the pen had dropped from the writer's hand and had
+left a blot on the paper; turned back again to the beginning, and
+said the words, in the wife's interest, which the wife herself
+had put into his lips.
+
+"Perhaps, sir, you may wish to make some corrections," he began,
+with all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with
+every outward appearance of letting his sour temper again get the
+better of him. "Shall I read over to you what you have already
+written?"
+
+Mrs. Armadale, sitting at the bed head on one side, and the
+doctor, with his fingers on the patient's pulse, sitting on the
+other, waited with widely different anxieties for the answer to
+Mr. Neal's question. Mr. Armadale's eyes turned searchingly from
+his child to his wife.
+
+"You _will_ hear it?" he said. Her breath came and went quickly;
+her hand stole up and took his; she bowed her head in silence.
+Her husband paused, taking secret counsel with his thoughts, and
+keeping his eyes fixed on his wife. At last he decided, and gave
+the answer. "Read it," he said, "and stop when I tell you."
+
+It was close on one o'clock, and the bell was ringing which
+summoned the visitors to their early dinner at the inn. The quick
+beat of footsteps, and the gathering hum of voices outside,
+penetrated gayly into the room, as Mr. Neal spread the manuscript
+before him on the table, and read the opening sentences in these
+words:
+
+
+"I address this letter to my son, when my son is of an age to
+understand it. Having lost all hope of living to see my boy grow
+up to manhood, I have no choice but to write here what I would
+fain have said to him at a future time with my own lips.
+
+"I have three objects in writing. First, to reveal the
+circumstances which attended the marriage of an English lady of
+my acquaintance, in the island of Madeira. Secondly, to throw the
+true light on the death of her husband a short time afterward, on
+board the French
+ timber ship _La Grace de Dieu._ Thirdly, to warn my son of a
+danger that lies in wait for him--a danger that will rise from
+his father's grave when the earth has closed over his father's
+ashes.
+
+"The story of the English lady's marriage begins with my
+inheriting the great Armadale property, and my taking the fatal
+Armadale name.
+
+"I am the only surviving son of the late Mathew Wrentmore, of
+Barbadoes. I was born on our family estate in that island, and I
+lost my father when I was still a child. My mother was blindly
+fond of me; she denied me nothing, she let me live as I pleased.
+My boyhood and youth were passed in idleness and self-indulgence,
+among people--slaves and half-castes mostly--to whom my will was
+law. I doubt if there is a gentleman of my birth and station in
+all England as ignorant as I am at this moment. I doubt if there
+was ever a young man in this world whose passions were left so
+entirely without control of any kind as mine were in those early
+days.
+
+"My mother had a woman's romantic objection to my father's homely
+Christian name. I was christened Allan, after the name of a
+wealthy cousin of my father's--the late Allan Armadale--who
+possessed estates in our neighborhood, the largest and most
+productive in the island, and who consented to be my godfather by
+proxy. Mr. Armadale had never seen his West Indian property. He
+lived in England; and, after sending me the customary godfather's
+present, he held no further communication with my parents for
+years afterward. I was just twenty-one before we heard again from
+Mr. Armadale. On that occasion my mother received a letter from
+him asking if I was still alive, and offering no less (if I was)
+than to make me the heir to his West Indian property.
+
+"This piece of good fortune fell to me entirely through the
+misconduct of Mr. Armadale's son, an only child. The young man
+had disgraced himself beyond all redemption; had left his home an
+outlaw; and had been thereupon renounced by his father at once
+and forever. Having no other near male relative to succeed him,
+Mr. Armadale thought of his cousin's son and his own godson; and
+he offered the West Indian estate to me, and my heirs after me,
+on one condition--that I and my heirs should take his name. The
+proposal was gratefully accepted, and the proper legal measures
+were adopted for changing my name in the colony and in the mother
+country. By the next mail information reached Mr. Armadale that
+his condition had been complied with. The return mail brought
+news from the lawyers. The will had been altered in my favor, and
+in a week afterward the death of my benefactor had made me the
+largest proprietor and the richest man in Barbadoes.
+
+"This was the first event in the chain. The second event followed
+it six weeks afterward.
+
+"At that time there happened to be a vacancy in the clerk's
+office on the estate, and there came to fill it a young man about
+my own age who had recently arrived in the island. He announced
+himself by the name of Fergus Ingleby. My impulses governed me in
+everything; I knew no law but the law of my own caprice, and I
+took a fancy to the stranger the moment I set eyes on him. He had
+the manners of a gentleman, and he possessed the most attractive
+social qualities which, in my small experience, I had ever met
+with. When I heard that the written references to character which
+he had brought with him were pronounced to be unsatisfactory, I
+interfered, and insisted that he should have the place. My will
+was law, and he had it.
+
+"My mother disliked and distrusted Ingleby from the first. When
+she found the intimacy between us rapidly ripening; when she
+found me admitting this inferior to the closest companionship and
+confidence (I had lived with my inferiors all my life, and I
+liked it), she made effort after effort to part us, and failed in
+one and all. Driven to her last resources, she resolved to try
+the one chance left--the chance of persuading me to take a voyage
+which I had often thought of--a voyage to England.
+
+"Before she spoke to me on the subject, she resolved to interest
+me in the idea of seeing England, as I had never been interested
+yet. She wrote to an old friend and an old admirer of hers, the
+late Stephen Blanchard, of Thorpe Ambrose, in Norfolk--a
+gentleman of landed estate, and a widower with a grown-up family.
+After-discoveries informed me that she must have alluded to their
+former attachment (which was checked, I believe, by the parents
+on either side); and that, in asking Mr. Blanchard's welcome for
+her son when he came to England, she made inquiries about his
+daughter, which hinted at the chance of a marriage uniting the
+two families, if the young lady and I met and liked one another.
+We were equally matched in every respect, and my mother's
+recollection of her girlish attachment to Mr. Blanchard made the
+prospect of my marrying her old admirer's daughter the brightest
+and happiest prospect that her eyes could see. Of all this I knew
+nothing until Mr. Blanchard's answer arrived at Barbadoes. Then
+my mother showed me the letter, and put the temptation which was
+to separate me from Fergus Ingleby openly in my way.
+
+"Mr. Blanchard's letter was dated from the Island of Madeira. He
+was out of health, and he had been ordered there by the doctors
+to try the climate. His daughter was with him. After heartily
+reciprocating all my mother's hopes and wishes, he proposed (if I
+intended leaving Barbadoes shortly) that I should take Madeira on
+my way to England, and pay him a visit at his temporary residence
+in the island. If this could not be, he mentioned the time at
+which he expected to be back in England, when I might be sure of
+finding a welcome at his own house of Thorpe Ambrose. In
+conclusion, he apologized for not writing at greater length;
+explaining that his sight was affected, and that he had disobeyed
+the doctor's orders by yielding to the temptation of writing to
+his old friend with his own hand.
+
+"Kindly as it was expressed, the letter itself might have had
+little influence on me. But there was something else besides the
+letter; there was inclosed in it a miniature portrait of Miss
+Blanchard. At the back of the portrait, her father had written,
+half-jestingly, half-tenderly, 'I can't ask my daughter to spare
+my eyes as usual, without telling her of your inquiries, and
+putting a young lady's diffidence to the blush. So I send her in
+effigy (without her knowledge) to answer for herself. It is a
+good likeness of a good girl. If she likes your son--and if I
+like him, which I am sure I shall--we may yet live, my good
+friend, to see our children what we might once have been
+ourselves--man and wife.' My mother gave me the miniature with
+the letter. The portrait at once struck me--I can't say why, I
+can't say how--as nothing of the kind had ever struck me before.
+
+"Harder intellects than mine might have attributed the
+extraordinary impression produced on me to the disordered
+condition of my mind at that time; to the weariness of my own
+base pleasures which had been gaining on me for months past, to
+the undefined longing which that weariness implied for newer
+interests and fresher hopes than any that had possessed me yet. I
+attempted no such sober self-examination as this: I believed in
+destiny then, I believe in destiny now. It was enough for me to
+know--as I did know--that the first sense I had ever felt of
+something better in my nature than my animal self was roused by
+that girl's face looking at me from her picture as no woman's
+face had ever looked at me yet. In those tender eyes--in the
+chance of making that gentle creature my wife--I saw my destiny
+written. The portrait which had come into my hands so strangely
+and so unexpectedly was the silent messenger of happiness close
+at hand, sent to warn, to encourage, to rouse me before it was
+too late. I put the miniature under my pillow at night; I looked
+at it again the next morning. My conviction of the day before
+remained as strong as ever; my superstition (if you please to
+call it so) pointed out to me irresistibly the way on which I
+should go. There was a ship in port which was to sail for England
+in a fortnight, touching at Madeira. In that ship I took
+ my passage."
+
+
+Thus far the reader had advanced with no interruption to disturb
+him. But at the last words the tones of another voice, low and
+broken, mingled with his own.
+
+"Was she a fair woman," asked the voice, "or dark, like me?"
+
+Mr. Neal paused, and looked up. The doctor was still at the bed
+head, with his fingers mechanically on the patient's pulse. The
+child, missing his midday sleep, was beginning to play languidly
+with his new toy. The father's eyes were watching him with a rapt
+and ceaseless attention. But one great change was visible in the
+listeners since the narrative had begun. Mrs. Armadale had
+dropped her hold of her husband's hand, and sat with her face
+steadily turned away from him The hot African blood burned red in
+her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question: "Was
+she a fair woman, or dark, like me?"
+
+"Fair," said her husband, without looking at her.
+
+Her hands, lying clasped together in her lap, wrung each other
+hard--she said no more. Mr. Neal's overhanging eyebrows lowered
+ominously as he returned to the narrative. He had incurred his
+own severe displeasure--he had caught himself in the act of
+secretly pitying her.
+
+
+"I have said"--the letter proceeded--"that Ingleby was admitted
+to my closest confidence. I was sorry to leave him; and I was
+distressed by his evident surprise and mortification when he
+heard that I was going away. In my own justification, I showed
+him the letter and the likeness, and told him the truth. His
+interest in the portrait seemed to be hardly inferior to my own.
+He asked me about Miss Blanchard's family and Miss Blanchard's
+fortune with the sympathy of a true friend; and he strengthened
+my regard for him, and my belief in him, by putting himself out
+of the question, and by generously encouraging me to persist in
+my new purpose. When we parted, I was in high health and spirits.
+Before we met again the next day, I was suddenly struck by an
+illness which threatened both my reason and my life.
+
+"I have no proof against Ingleby. There was more than one woman
+on the island whom I had wronged beyond all forgiveness, and
+whose vengeance might well have reached me at that time. I can
+accuse nobody. I can only say that my life was saved by my old
+black nurse; and that the woman afterward acknowledged having
+used the known negro antidote to a known negro poison in those
+parts. When my first days of convalescence came, the ship in
+which my passage had been taken had long since sailed. When I
+asked for Ingleby, he was gone. Proofs of his unpardonable
+misconduct in his situation were placed before me, which not even
+my partiality for him could resist. He had been turned out of the
+office in the first days of my illness, and nothing more was
+known of him but that he had left the island.
+
+"All through my sufferings the portrait had been under my pillow.
+All through my convalescence it was my one consolation when I
+remembered the past, and my one encouragement when I thought of
+the future. No words can describe the hold that first fancy had
+now taken of me--with time and solitude and suffering to help it.
+My mother, with all her interest in the match, was startled by
+the unexpected success of her own project. She had written to
+tell Mr. Blanchard of my illness, but had received no reply. She
+now offered to write again, if I would promise not to leave her
+before my recovery was complete. My impatience acknowledged no
+restraint. Another ship in port gave me another chance of leaving
+for Madeira. Another examination of Mr. Blanchard's letter of
+invitation assured me that I should find him still in the island,
+if I seized my opportunity on the spot. In defiance of my
+mother's entreaties, I insisted on taking my passage in the
+second ship--and this time, when the ship sailed, I was on board.
+
+"The change did me good; the sea-air made a man of me again.
+After an unusually rapid voyage, I found myself at the end of my
+pilgrimage. On a fine, still evening which I can never forget, I
+stood alone on the shore, with her likeness in my bosom, and saw
+the white walls of the house where I knew that she lived.
+
+"I strolled round the outer limits of the grounds to compose
+myself before I went in. Venturing through a gate and a
+shrubbery, I looked into the garden, and saw a lady there,
+loitering alone on the lawn. She turned her face toward me--and I
+beheld the original of my portrait, the fulfillment of my dream!
+It is useless, and worse than useless, to write of it now. Let me
+only say that every promise which the likeness had made to my
+fancy the living woman kept to my eyes in the moment when they
+first looked on her. Let me say this--and no more.
+
+"I was too violently agitated to trust myself in her presence. I
+drew back undiscovered, and, making my way to the front door of
+the house, asked for her father first. Mr. Blanchard had retired
+to his room, and could see nobody. Upon that I took courage, and
+asked for Miss Blanchard. The servant smiled. 'My young lady is
+not Miss Blanchard any longer, sir,' he said. 'She is married.'
+Those words would have struck some men, in my position, to the
+earth. They fired my hot blood, and I seized the servant by the
+throat, in a frenzy of rage 'It's a lie!' I broke out, speaking
+to him as if he had been one of the slaves on my own estate.
+'It's the truth,' said the man, struggling with me; 'her husband
+is in the house at this moment.' 'Who is he, you scoundrel?' The
+servant answered by repeating my own name, to my own face:
+'_Allan Armadale._'
+
+"You can now guess the truth. Fergus Ingleby was the outlawed son
+whose name and whose inheritance I had taken. And Fergus Ingleby
+was even with me for depriving him of his birthright.
+
+"Some account of the manner in which the deception had been
+carried out is necessary to explain--I don't say to justify--the
+share I took in the events that followed my arrival at Madeira.
+
+"By Ingleby's own confession, he had come to Barbadoes--knowing
+of his father's death and of my succession to the estates--with
+the settled purpose of plundering and injuring me. My rash
+confidence put such an opportunity into his hands as he could
+never have hoped for. He had waited to possess himself of the
+letter which my mother wrote to Mr. Blanchard at the outset of my
+illness--had then caused his own dismissal from his
+situation--and had sailed for Madeira in the very ship that was
+to have sailed with me. Arrived at the island, he had waited
+again till the vessel was away once more on her voyage, and had
+then presented himself at Mr. Blanchard's--not in the assumed
+name by which I shall continue to speak of him here, but in the
+name which was as certainly his as mine, 'Allan Armadale.' The
+fraud at the outset presented few difficulties. He had only an
+ailing old man (who had not seen my mother for half a lifetime)
+and an innocent, unsuspicious girl (who had never seen her at
+all) to deal with; and he had learned enough in my service to
+answer the few questions that were put to him as readily as I
+might have answered them myself. His looks and manners, his
+winning ways with women, his quickness and cunning, did the rest.
+While I was still on my sickbed, he had won Miss Blanchard's
+affections. While I was dreaming over the likeness in the first
+days of my convalescence, he had secured Mr. Blanchard's consent
+to the celebration of the marriage before he and his daughter
+left the island.
+
+"Thus far Mr. Blanchard's infirmity of sight had helped the
+deception. He had been content to send messages to my mother, and
+to receive the messages which were duly invented in return. But
+when the suitor was accepted, and the wedding-day was appointed,
+he felt it due to his old friend to write to her, asking her
+formal consent and inviting her to the marriage. He could only
+complete part of the letter himself; the rest was finished, under
+his dictation, by Miss Blanchard. There was no chance of being
+beforehand with the post-office this time; and Ingleby, sure of
+his place in the heart of his victim, waylaid her as she came out
+of her father's room with the letter, and privately told her the
+truth. She was still under age, and the position was a serious
+one. If the lett er was posted, no resource would be left but to
+wait and be parted forever, or to elope under circumstances which
+made detection almost a certainty. The destination of any ship
+which took them away would be known beforehand; and the
+fast-sailing yacht in which Mr. Blanchard had come to Madeira was
+waiting in the harbor to take him back to England. The only other
+alternative was to continue the deception by suppressing the
+letter, and to confess the truth when they were securely married.
+What arts of persuasion Ingleby used--what base advantage he
+might previously have taken of her love and her trust in him to
+degrade Miss Blanchard to his own level--I cannot say. He did
+degrade her. The letter never went to its destination; and, with
+the daughter's privity and consent, the father's confidence was
+abused to the very last.
+
+"The one precaution now left to take was to fabricate the answer
+from my mother which Mr. Blanchard expected, and which would
+arrive in due course of post before the day appointed for the
+marriage. Ingleby had my mother's stolen letter with him; but he
+was without the imitative dexterity which would have enabled him
+to make use of it for a forgery of her handwriting. Miss
+Blanchard, who had consented passively to the deception, refused
+to take any active share in the fraud practiced on her father. In
+this difficulty, Ingleby found an instrument ready to his hand in
+an orphan girl of barely twelve years old, a marvel of precocious
+ability, whom Miss Blanchard had taken a romantic fancy to
+befriend and whom she had brought away with her from England to
+be trained as her maid. That girl's wicked dexterity removed the
+one serious obstacle left to the success of the fraud. I saw the
+imitation of my mother's writing which she had produced under
+Ingleby's instructions and (if the shameful truth must be told)
+with her young mistress's knowledge--and I believe I should have
+been deceived by it myself. I saw the girl afterward--and my
+blood curdled at the sight of her. If she is alive now, woe to
+the people who trust her! No creature more innately deceitful and
+more innately pitiless ever walked this earth.
+
+"The forged letter paved the way securely for the marriage; and
+when I reached the house, they were (as the servant had truly
+told me) man and wife. My arrival on the scene simply
+precipitated the confession which they had both agreed to make.
+Ingleby's own lips shamelessly acknowledged the truth. He had
+nothing to lose by speaking out--he was married, and his wife's
+fortune was beyond her father's control. I pass over all that
+followed--my interview with the daughter, and my interview with
+the father--to come to results. For two days the efforts of the
+wife, and the efforts of the clergyman who had celebrated the
+marriage, were successful in keeping Ingleby and myself apart. On
+the third day I set my trap more successfully, and I and the man
+who had mortally injured me met together alone, face to face.
+
+"Remember how my confidence had been abused; remember how the one
+good purpose of my life had been thwarted; remember the violent
+passions rooted deep in my nature, and never yet controlled--and
+then imagine for yourself what passed between us. All I need tell
+here is the end. He was a taller and a stronger man than I, and
+he took his brute's advantage with a brute's ferocity. He struck
+me.
+
+"Think of the injuries I had received at that man's hands, and
+then think of his setting his mark on my face by a blow!
+
+"I went to an English officer who had been my fellow-passenger on
+the voyage from Barbadoes. I told him the truth, and he agreed
+with me that a meeting was inevitable. Dueling had its received
+formalities and its established laws in those days; and he began
+to speak of them. I stopped him. 'I will take a pistol in my
+right hand,' I said, 'and he shall take a pistol in his: I will
+take one end of a handkerchief in my left hand, and he shall take
+the other end in his; and across that handkerchief the duel shall
+be fought.' The officer got up, and looked at me as if I had
+personally insulted him. 'You are asking me to be present at a
+murder and a suicide,' he said; 'I decline to serve you.' He left
+the room. As soon as he was gone I wrote down the words I had
+said to the officer and sent them by a messenger to Ingleby.
+While I was waiting for an answer, I sat down before the glass,
+and looked at his mark on my face. 'Many a man has had blood on
+his hands and blood on his conscience,' I thought, 'for less than
+this.'
+
+"The messenger came back with Ingleby's answer. It appointed a
+meeting for three o'clock the next day, at a lonely place in the
+interior of the island. I had resolved what to do if he refused;
+his letter released me from the horror of my own resolution. I
+felt grateful to him--yes, absolutely grateful to him--for
+writing it.
+
+"The next day I went to the place. He was not there. I waited two
+hours, and he never came. At last the truth dawned on me. 'Once a
+coward, always a coward,' I thought. I went back to Mr.
+Blanchard's house. Before I got there, a sudden misgiving seized
+me, and I turned aside to the harbor. I was right; the harbor was
+the place to go to. A ship sailing for Lisbon that afternoon had
+offered him the opportunity of taking a passage for himself and
+his wife, and escaping me. His answer to my challenge had served
+its purpose of sending me out of the way into the interior of the
+island. Once more I had trusted in Fergus Ingleby, and once more
+those sharp wits of his had been too much for me.
+
+"I asked my informant if Mr. Blanchard was aware as yet of his
+daughter's departure. He had discovered it, but not until the
+ship had sailed. This time I took a lesson in cunning from
+Ingleby. Instead of showing myself at Mr. Blanchard's house, I
+went first and looked at Mr. Blanchard's yacht.
+
+"The vessel told me what the vessel's master might have
+concealed--the truth. I found her in the confusion of a sudden
+preparation for sea. All the crew were on board, with the
+exception of some few who had been allowed their leave on shore,
+and who were away in the interior of the island, nobody knew
+where. When I discovered that the sailing-master was trying in,
+to supply their places with the best men he could pick up at a
+moment's notice, my resolution was instantly taken. I knew the
+duties on board a yacht well enough, having had a vessel of my
+own, and having sailed her myself. Hurrying into the town, I
+changed my dress for a sailor's coat and hat, and, returning to
+the harbor, I offered myself as one of the volunteer crew. I
+don't know what the sailing-master saw in my face. My answers to
+his questions satisfied him, and yet he looked at me and
+hesitated. But hands were scarce, and it ended in my being taken
+on board. An hour later Mr. Blanchard joined us, and was assisted
+into the cabin, suffering pitiably in mind and body both. An hour
+after that we were at sea, with a starless night overhead, and a
+fresh breeze behind us.
+
+"As I had surmised, we were in pursuit of the vessel in which
+Ingleby and his wife had left the island that afternoon. The ship
+was French, and was employed in the timber trade: her name was
+_La Grace de Dieu._ Nothing more was known of her than that she
+was bound for Lisbon; that she had been driven out of her course;
+and that she had touched at Madeira, short of men and short of
+provisions. The last want had been supplied, but not the first.
+Sailors distrusted the sea-worthiness of the ship, and disliked
+the look of the vagabond crew. When those two serious facts had
+been communicated to Mr. Blanchard, the hard words he had spoken
+to his child in the first shock of discovering that she had
+helped to deceive him smote him to the heart. He instantly
+determined to give his daughter a refuge on board his own vessel,
+and to quiet her by keeping her villain of a husband out of the
+way of all harm at my hands. The yacht sailed three feet and more
+to the ship's one. There was no doubt of our overtaking _La Grace
+de Dieu_; the only fear was that we might pass her in the
+darkness.
+
+"After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly
+dropped, and there fell on us an airless, sultry  calm. W hen the
+order came to get the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large
+sails, we all knew what to expect. In little better than an hour
+more, the storm was upon us, the thunder was pealing over our
+heads, and the yacht was running for it. She was a powerful
+schooner-rigged vessel of three hundred tons, as strong as wood
+and iron could make her; she was handled by a sailing-master who
+thoroughly understood his work, and she behaved nobly. As the new
+morning came, the fury of the wind, blowing still from the
+southwest quarter, subsided a little, and the sea was less heavy.
+Just before daybreak we heard faintly, through the howling of the
+gale, the report of a gun. The men collected anxiously on deck,
+looked at each other, and said: 'There she is!'
+
+"With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber-ship it was.
+She lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her
+mainmast both gone--a water-logged wreck. The yacht carried three
+boats; one amidships, and two slung to davits on the quarters;
+and the sailing-master, seeing signs of the storm renewing its
+fury before long, determined on lowering the quarter-boats while
+the lull lasted. Few as the people were on board the wreck, they
+were too many for one boat, and the risk of trying two boats at
+once was thought less, in the critical state of the weather, than
+the risk of making two separate trips from the yacht to the ship.
+There might be time to make one trip in safety, but no man could
+look at the heavens and say there would be time enough for two.
+
+"The boats were manned by volunteers from the crew, I being in
+the second of the two. When the first boat was got alongside of
+the timber-ship--a service of difficulty and danger which no
+words can describe--all the men on board made a rash to leave the
+wreck together. If the boat had not been pulled off again before
+the whole of them had crowded in, the lives of all must have been
+sacrificed. As our boat approached the vessel in its turn, we
+arranged that four of us should get on board--two (I being one of
+them) to see to the safety of Mr. Blanchard's daughter, and two
+to beat back the cowardly remnant of the crew if they tried to
+crowd in first. The other three--the coxswain and two
+oarsmen--were left in the boat to keep her from being crushed by
+the ship. What the others saw when they first boarded _La Grace
+de Dieu_ I don't know; what I saw was the woman whom I had lost,
+the woman vilely stolen from me, lying in a swoon on the deck. We
+lowered her, insensible, into the boat. The remnant of the
+crew--five in number--were compelled by main force to follow her
+in an orderly manner, one by one, and minute by minute, as the
+chance offered for safely taking them in. I was the last who
+left; and, at the next roll of the ship toward us, the empty
+length of the deck, without a living creature on it from stem to
+stern, told the boat's crew that their work was done. With the
+louder and louder howling of the fast-rising tempest to warn
+them, they rowed for their lives back to the yacht.
+
+"A succession of heavy squalls had brought round the course of
+the new storm that was coming, from the south to the north; and
+the sailing-master, watching his opportunity, had wore the yacht
+to be ready for it. Before the last of our men had got on board
+again, it burst on us with the fury of a hurricane. Our boat was
+swamped, but not a life was lost. Once more we ran before it, due
+south, at the mercy of the wind. I was on deck with the rest,
+watching the one rag of sail we could venture to set, and waiting
+to supply its place with another, if it blew out of the
+bolt-ropes, when the mate came close to me, and shouted in my ear
+through the thunder of the storm: 'She has come to her senses in
+the cabin, and has asked for her husband. Where is he?' Not a man
+on board knew. The yacht was searched from one end to another
+without finding him. The men were mustered in defiance of the
+weather--he was not among them. The crews of the two boats were
+questioned. All the first crew could say was that they had pulled
+away from the wreck when the rush into their boat took place, and
+that they knew nothing of whom they let in or whom they kept out.
+All the second crew could say was that they had brought back to
+the yacht every living soul left by the first boat on the deck of
+the timber-ship. There was no blaming anybody; but, at the same
+time, there was no resisting the fact that the man was missing.
+
+"All through that day the storm, raging unabatedly, never gave us
+even the shadow of a chance of returning and searching the wreck.
+The one hope for the yacht was to scud. Toward evening the gale,
+after having carried us to the southward of Madeira, began at
+last to break--the wind shifted again--and allowed us to bear up
+for the island. Early the next morning we got back into port. Mr.
+Blanchard and his daughter were taken ashore, the sailing-master
+accompanying them, and warning us that he should have something
+to say on his return which would nearly concern the whole crew.
+
+"We were mustered on deck, and addressed by the sailing-master as
+soon as he came on board again. He had Mr. Blanchard's orders to
+go back at once to the timber-ship and to search for the missing
+man. We were bound to do this for his sake, and for the sake of
+his wife, whose reason was despaired of by the doctors if
+something was not done to quiet her. We might be almost sure of
+finding the vessel still afloat, for her ladling of timber would
+keep her above water as long as her hull held together. If the
+man was on board--living or dead--he must be found and brought
+back. And if the weather continued to be moderate, there was no
+reason why the men, with proper assistance, should not bring the
+ship back, too, and (their master being quite willing) earn their
+share of the salvage with the officers of the yacht.
+
+"Upon this the crew gave three cheers, and set to work forthwith
+to get the schooner to sea again. I was the only one of them who
+drew back from the enterprise. I told them the storm had upset
+me--I was ill, and wanted rest. They all looked me in the face as
+I passed through them on my way out of the yacht, but not a man
+of them spoke to me.
+
+"I waited through that day at a tavern on the port for the first
+news from the wreck. It was brought toward night-fall by one of
+the pilot-boats which had taken part in the enterprise--a
+successful enterprise, as the event proved--for saving the
+abandoned ship. _La Grace de Dieu_ had been discovered still
+floating, and the body of Ingleby had been found on board,
+drowned in the cabin. At dawn the next morning the dead man was
+brought back by the yacht; and on the same day the funeral took
+place in the Protestant cemetery."
+
+
+"Stop!" said the voice from the bed, before the reader could turn
+to a new leaf and begin the next paragraph.
+
+There was a change in the room, and there were changes in the
+audience, since Mr. Neal had last looked up from the narrative. A
+ray of sunshine was crossing the death-bed; and the child,
+overcome by drowsiness, lay peacefully asleep in the golden
+light. The father's countenance had altered visibly. Forced into
+action by the tortured mind, the muscles of the lower face, which
+had never moved yet, were moving distortedly now. Warned by the
+damps gathering heavily on his forehead, the doctor had risen to
+revive the sinking man. On the other side of the bed the wife's
+chair stood empty. At the moment when her husband had interrupted
+the reading, she had drawn back behind the bed head, out of his
+sight. Supporting herself against the wall, she stood there in
+hiding, her eyes fastened in hungering suspense on the manuscript
+in Mr. Neal's hand.
+
+In a minute more the silence was broken again by Mr. Armadale.
+
+"Where is she?" he asked, looking angrily at his wife's empty
+chair. The doctor pointed to the place. She had no choice but to
+come forward. She came slowly and stood before him.
+
+"You promised to go when I told you," he said. "Go now."
+
+Mr. Neal tried hard to control his hand as it kept his place
+between the leaves of the manuscripts but it trembled in spite of
+him. A suspicion which had been slowly forcing itself on  his mind
+, while he was reading, became a certainty when he heard those
+words. From one revelation to another the letter had gone on,
+until it had now reached the brink of a last disclosure to come.
+At that brink the dying man had predetermined to silence the
+reader's voice, before he had permitted his wife to hear the
+narrative read. There was the secret which the son was to know in
+after years, and which the mother was never to approach. From
+that resolution, his wife's tenderest pleadings had never moved
+him an inch--and now, from his own lips, his wife knew it.
+
+She made him no answer. She stood there and looked at him; looked
+her last entreaty--perhaps her last farewell. His eyes gave her
+back no answering glance: they wandered from her mercilessly to
+the sleeping boy. She turned speechless from the bed. Without a
+look at the child--without a word to the two strangers
+breathlessly watching her--she kept the promise she had given,
+and in dead silence left the room.
+
+There was something in the manner of her departure which shook
+the self-possession of both the men who witnessed it. When the
+door closed on her, they recoiled instinctively from advancing
+further in the dark. The doctor's reluctance was the first to
+express itself. He attempted to obtain the patient's permission
+to withdraw until the letter was completed. The patient refused.
+
+Mr. Neal spoke next at greater length and to more serious
+purpose.
+
+"The doctor is accustomed in his profession," he began, "and I am
+accustomed in mine, to have the secrets of others placed in our
+keeping. But it is my duty, before we go further, to ask if you
+really understand the extraordinary position which we now occupy
+toward one another. You have just excluded Mrs. Armadale, before
+our own eyes, from a place in your confidence. And you are now
+offering that same place to two men who are total strangers to
+you."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Armadale, "_because_ you are strangers."
+
+Few as the words were, the inference to be drawn from them was
+not of a nature to set distrust at rest. Mr. Neal put it plainly
+into words.
+
+"You are in urgent need of my help and of the doctor's help," he
+said. "Am I to understand (so long as you secure our assistance)
+that the impression which the closing passages of this letter may
+produce on us is a matter of indifference to you?"
+
+"Yes. I don't spare you. I don't spare myself. I _do_ spare my
+wife."
+
+"You force me to a conclusion, sir, which is a very serious one,"
+said Mr. Neal. "If I am to finish this letter under your
+dictation, I must claim permission--having read aloud the greater
+part of it already--to read aloud what remains, in the hearing of
+this gentleman, as a witness."
+
+"Read it."
+
+Gravely doubting, the doctor resumed his chair. Gravely doubting,
+Mr. Neal turned the leaf, and read the next words:
+
+
+"There is more to tell before I can leave the dead man to his
+rest. I have described the finding of his body. But I have not
+described the circumstances under which he met his death.
+
+"He was known to have been on deck when the yacht's boats were
+seen approaching the wreck; and he was afterward missed in the
+confusion caused by the panic of the crew. At that time the water
+was five feet deep in the cabin, and was rising fast. There was
+little doubt of his having gone down into that water of his own
+accord. The discovery of his wife's jewel box, close under him,
+on the floor, explained his presence in the cabin. He was known
+to have seen help approaching, and it was quite likely that he
+had thereupon gone below to make an effort at saving the box. It
+was less probable--though it might still have been inferred--that
+his death was the result of some accident in diving, which had
+for the moment deprived him of his senses. But a discovery made
+by the yacht's crew pointed straight to a conclusion which struck
+the men, one and all, with the same horror. When the course of
+their search brought them to the cabin, they found the scuttle
+bolted, and the door locked on the outside. Had some one closed
+the cabin, not knowing he was there? Setting the panic-stricken
+condition of the crew out of the question, there was no motive
+for closing the cabin before leaving the wreck. But one other
+conclusion remained. Had some murderous hand purposely locked the
+man in, and left him to drown as the water rose over him?
+
+"Yes. A murderous hand had locked him in, and left him to drown.
+That hand was mine. "
+
+
+The Scotchman started up from the table; the doctor shrank from
+the bedside. The two looked at the dying wretch, mastered by the
+same loathing, chilled by the same dread. He lay there, with his
+child's head on his breast; abandoned by the sympathies of man,
+accursed by the justice of God--he lay there, in the isolation of
+Cain, and looked back at them.
+
+At the moment when the two men rose to their feet, the door
+leading into the next room was shaken heavily on the outer side,
+and a sound like the sound of a fall, striking dull on their
+ears, silenced them both. Standing nearest to the door, the
+doctor opened it, passed through, and closed it instantly. Mr.
+Neal turned his back on the bed, and waited the event in silence.
+The sound, which had failed to awaken the child, had failed also
+to attract the father's notice. His own words had taken him far
+from all that was passing at his deathbed. His helpless body was
+back on the wreck, and the ghost of his lifeless hand was turning
+the lock of the cabin door.
+
+A bell rang in the next room--eager voices talked; hurried
+footsteps moved in it--an interval passed, and the doctor
+returned. "Was she listening?" whispered Mr. Neal, in German.
+"The women are restoring her," the doctor whispered back. "She
+has heard it all. In God's name, what are we to do next?" Before
+it was possible to reply, Mr. Armadale spoke. The doctor's return
+had roused him to a sense of present things.
+
+"Go on," he said, as if nothing had happened.
+
+"I refuse to meddle further with your infamous secret," returned
+Mr. Neal. "You are a murderer on your own confession. If that
+letter is to be finished, don't ask _me_ to hold the pen for
+you."
+
+"You gave me your promise," was the reply, spoken with the same
+immovable self-possession. "You must write for me, or break your
+word."
+
+For the moment, Mr. Neal was silenced. There the man
+lay--sheltered from the execration of his fellow-creatures, under
+the shadow of Death--beyond the reach of all human condemnation,
+beyond the dread of all mortal laws; sensitive to nothing but his
+one last resolution to finish the letter addressed to his son.
+
+Mr. Neal drew the doctor aside. "A word with you," he said, in
+German. "Do you persist in asserting that he may be speechless
+before we can send to Stuttgart?"
+
+"Look at his lips," said the doctor, "and judge for yourself."
+
+His lips answered for him: the reading of the narrative had left
+its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his
+mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the
+room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation labored more
+and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was
+emphatically a terrible one. After a moment more of hesitation,
+Mr. Neal made a last attempt to withdraw from it.
+
+"Now my eyes are open," he said, sternly, "do you dare hold me to
+an engagement which you forced on me blindfold?"
+
+"No," answered Mr. Armadale. "I leave you to break your word."
+
+The look which accompanied that reply stung the Scotchman's pride
+to the quick. When he spoke next, he spoke seated in his former
+place at the table.
+
+"No man ever yet said of me that I broke my word," he retorted,
+angrily; "and not even you shall say it of me now. Mind this! If
+you hold me to my promise, I hold you to my condition. I have
+reserved my freedom of action, and I warn you I will use it at my
+own sole discretion, as soon as I am released from the sight of
+you."
+
+"Remember he is dying," pleaded the doctor, gently.
+
+"Take your place, sir," said Mr. Neal, pointing to the empty
+chair. "What remains to be read, I will only read in your
+hearing. What remains to be written, I will only write in your
+presence. _You_ brought me here. I have a right to insist--and I
+do insist --on your remaining as a witness to the last."
+
+The doctor accepted his position without remonstrance. Mr. Neal
+returned to the manuscript, and read what remained of it
+uninterruptedly to the end:
+
+
+"Without a word in my own defense, I have acknowledged my guilt.
+Without a word in my own defense, I will reveal how the crime was
+committed.
+
+"No thought of him was in my mind, when I saw his wife insensible
+on the deck of the timber-ship. I did my part in lowering her
+safely into the boat. Then, and not till then, I felt the thought
+of him coming back. In the confusion that prevailed while the men
+of the yacht were forcing the men of the ship to wait their time,
+I had an opportunity of searching for him unobserved. I stepped
+back from the bulwark, not knowing whether he was away in the
+first boat, or whether he was still on board--I stepped back, and
+saw him mount the cabin stairs empty-handed, with the water
+dripping from him. After looking eagerly toward the boat (without
+noticing me), he saw there was time to spare before the crew were
+taken. 'Once more!' he said to himself--and disappeared again, to
+make a last effort at recovering the jewel box. The devil at my
+elbow whispered, 'Don't shoot him like a man: drown him like a
+dog!' He was under water when I bolted the scuttle. But his head
+rose to the surface before I could close the cabin door. I looked
+at him, and he looked at me--and I locked the door in his face.
+The next minute, I was back among the last men left on deck. The
+minute after, it was too late to repent. The storm was
+threatening us with destruction, and the boat's crew were pulling
+for their lives from the ship.
+
+"My son! I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which
+my love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why.
+
+"I will say nothing of my sufferings; I will plead for no mercy
+to my memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange
+trembling in my hand, while I write these lines, which warns me
+to hasten to the end. I left the island without daring to look
+for the last time at the woman whom I had lost so miserably, whom
+I had injured so vilely. When I left, the whole weight of the
+suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby's death rested on the
+crew of the French vessel. No motive for the supposed murder
+could be brought home to any of them; but they were known to be,
+for the most part, outlawed ruffians capable of any crime, and
+they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till
+afterward that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting
+round at last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague
+description given of the strange man who had made one of the
+yacht's crew, and who had disappeared the day afterward. The
+widow alone knew, from that time forth, why her husband had been
+murdered, and who had done the deed. When she made that
+discovery, a false report of my death had been previously
+circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the report
+for my immunity from all legal proceedings; perhaps (no eye but
+Ingleby's having seen me lock the cabin door) there was not
+evidence enough to justify an inquiry; perhaps the widow shrank
+from the disclosures which must have followed a public charge
+against me, based on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However
+it might be, the crime which I had committed unseen has remained
+a crime unpunished from that time to this.
+
+"I left Madeira for the West Indies in disguise. The first news
+that met me when the ship touched at Barbadoes was the news of my
+mother's death. I had no heart to return to the old scenes. The
+prospect of living at home in solitude, with the torment of my
+own guilty remembrances gnawing at me day and night, was more
+than I had the courage to confront. Without landing, or
+discovering myself to any one on shore, I went on as far as the
+ship would take me--to the island of Trinidad.
+
+"At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell
+her the truth--and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty
+to spare her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her
+happiness to such an existence as mine--and I did her the injury
+of marrying her. If she is alive when you read this, grant her
+the mercy of still concealing the truth. The one atonement I can
+make to her is to keep her unsuspicious to the last of the man
+she has married. Pity her, as I have pitied her. Let this letter
+be a sacred confidence between father and son.
+
+"The time when you were born was the time when my health began to
+give way. Some months afterward, in the first days of my
+recovery, you were brought to me; and I was told that you had
+been christened during my illness. Your mother had done as other
+loving mothers do--she had christened her first-born by his
+father's name. You, too, were Allan Armadale. Even in that early
+time--even while I was happily ignorant of what I have discovered
+since--my mind misgave me when I looked at you, and thought of
+that fatal name.
+
+"As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my
+estates in Barbadoes. It crossed my mind--wild as the idea may
+appear to you--to renounce the condition which compelled my son
+as well as myself to take the Armadale name, or lose the
+succession to the Armadale property. But, even in those days, the
+rumor of a contemplated emancipation of the slaves--the
+emancipation which is now close at hand--was spreading widely in
+the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian
+property might be affected if that threatened change ever took
+place. No man could tell--if I gave you back my own paternal
+name, and left you without other provision in the future than my
+own paternal estate--how you might one day miss the broad
+Armadale acres, or to what future penury I might be blindly
+condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how the fatalities
+gathered one on the other! Mark how your Christian name came to
+you, how your surname held to you, in spite of me!
+
+"My health had improved in my old home--but it was for a time
+only. I sank again, and the doctors ordered me to Europe.
+Avoiding England (why, you may guess), I took my passage, with
+you and your mother, for France. From France we passed into
+Italy. We lived here; we lived there. It was useless. Death had
+got met and Death followed me, go where I might. I bore it, for I
+had an alleviation to turn to which I had not deserved. You may
+shrink in horror from the very memory of me now. In those days,
+you comforted me. The only warmth I still felt at my heart was
+the warmth you brought to it. My last glimpses of happiness in
+this world were the glimpses given me by my infant son.
+
+"We removed from Italy, and went next to Lausanne--the place from
+which I am now writing to you. The post of this morning has
+brought me news, later and fuller than any I had received thus
+far, of the widow of the murdered man. The letter lies before me
+while I write. It comes from a friend of my early days, who has
+seen her, and spoken to her--who has been the first to inform her
+that the report of my death in Madeira was false. He writes, at a
+loss to account for the violent agitation which she showed on
+hearing that I was still alive, that I was married, and that I
+had an infant son. He asks me if I can explain it. He speaks in
+terms of sympathy for her--a young and beautiful woman, buried in
+the retirement of a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast; her
+father dead; her family estranged from her, in merciless
+disapproval of her marriage. He writes words which might have cut
+me to the heart, but for a closing passage in his letter, which
+seized my whole attention the instant I came to it, and which has
+forced from me the narrative that these pages contain.
+
+"I now know what never even entered my mind as a suspicion till
+the letter reached me. I now know that the widow of the man whose
+death lies at my door has borne a posthumous child. That child is
+a boy--a year older than my own son. Secure in her belief in my
+death, his mother has done what my son's mother did: she has
+christened her child by his father's name. Again, in the second
+generation, there are two Allan Armadales as there were in the
+first. After working its deadly mischief with the fathers, the
+fatal resemblance of names has descended to work its deadly
+mischief with the sons.
+
+"Guiltless minds may see nothing thus far but the result of a
+series of events which could lead no other way. I--with that
+man's life to answer for--I, going down into my grave, with my
+crime unpunished and unatoned, see what no guiltless minds can
+discern. I see danger in the future, begotten of the danger in
+the past--treachery that is the offspring of _his_ treachery, and
+crime that is the child of _my_ crime. Is the dread that now
+shakes me to the soul a phantom raised by the superstition of a
+dying man? I look into the Book which all Christendom venerates,
+and the Book tells me that the sin of the father shall be visited
+on the child. I look out into the world, and I see the living
+witnesses round me to that terrible truth. I see the vices which
+have contaminated the father descending, and contaminating the
+child; I see the shame which has disgraced the father's name
+descending, and disgracing the child's. I look in on myself, and
+I see my crime ripening again for the future in the self-same
+circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the past, and
+descending, in inherited contamination of evil, from me to my
+son."
+
+
+At those lines the writing ended. There the stroke had struck
+him, and the pen had dropped from his hand.
+
+He knew the place; he remembered the words. At the instant when
+the reader's voice stopped, he looked eagerly at the doctor. "I
+have got what comes next in my mind," he said, with slower and
+slower articulation. "Help me to speak it."
+
+The doctor administered a stimulant, and signed to Mr. Neal to
+give him time. After a little delay, the flame of the sinking
+spirit leaped up in his eyes once more. Resolutely struggling
+with his failing speech, he summoned the Scotchman to take the
+pen, and pronounced the closing sentences of the narrative, as
+his memory gave them back to him, one by one, in these words:
+
+
+"Despise my dying conviction if you will, but grant me, I
+solemnly implore you, one last request. My son! the only hope I
+have left for you hangs on a great doubt--the doubt whether we
+are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that
+mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we
+all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is
+before death. If this be so, indeed, respect--though you respect
+nothing else--the warning which I give you from my grave. Never,
+to your dying day, let any living soul approach you who is
+associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your
+father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if the
+widow still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the
+way to the marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And
+more than all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own.
+Offend your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has
+connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you,
+if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from
+him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between
+you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent
+to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof,
+and breathe the same air, with that man. Never let the two Allan
+Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!
+
+"There lies the way by which you may escape--if any way there be.
+Take it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness,
+through all your life to come!
+
+"I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than
+the influence of this confession to incline you to my will, I
+would have spared you the disclosure which these pages contain.
+You are lying on my breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a
+child, while a stranger's hand writes these words for you as they
+fall from my lips. Think what the strength of my conviction must
+be, when I can find the courage, on my death-bed, to darken all
+your young life at its outset with the shadow of your father's
+crime. Think, and be warned. Think, and forgive me if you can."
+
+
+There it ended. Those were the father's last words to the son.
+
+Inexorably faithful to his forced duty, Mr. Neal laid aside the
+pen, and read over aloud the lines he had just written. "Is there
+more to add?" he asked, with his pitilessly steady voice. There
+was no more to add.
+
+Mr. Neal folded the manuscript, inclosed it in a sheet of paper,
+and sealed it with Mr. Armadale's own seal. "The address?" he
+said, with his merciless business formality. "To Allan Armadale,
+junior," he wrote, as the words were dictated from the bed. "Care
+of Godfrey Hammick, Esq., Offices of Messrs. Hammick and Ridge,
+Lincoln's Inn Fields, London." Having written the address, he
+waited, and considered for a moment. "Is your executor to open
+this?" he asked.
+
+"No! he is to give it to my son when my son is of an age to
+understand it."
+
+"In that case," pursued Mr. Neal, with all his wits in
+remorseless working order, "I will add a dated note to the
+address, repeating your own words as you have just spoken them,
+and explaining the circumstances under which my handwriting
+appears on the document." He wrote the note in the briefest and
+plainest terms, read it over aloud as he had read over what went
+before, signed his name and address at the end, and made the
+doctor sign next, as witness of the proceedings, and as medical
+evidence of the condition in which Mr. Armadale then lay. This
+done, he placed the letter in a second inclosure, sealed it as
+before, and directed it to Mr. Hammick, with the superscription
+of "private" added to the address. "Do you insist on my posting
+this?" he asked, rising with the letter in his hand.
+
+"Give him time to think," said the doctor. "For the child's sake,
+give him time to think! A minute may change him."
+
+"I will give him five minutes," answered Mr. Neal, placing his
+watch on the table, implacably just to the very last.
+
+They waited, both looking attentively at Mr. Armadale. The signs
+of change which had appeared in him already were multiplying
+fast. The movement which continued mental agitation had
+communicated to the muscles of his face was beginning, under the
+same dangerous influence, to spread downward. His once helpless
+hands lay still no longer; they struggled pitiably on the
+bedclothes. At sight of that warning token, the doctor turned
+with a gesture of alarm, and beckoned Mr. Neal to come nearer.
+"Put the question at once," he said; "if you let the five minutes
+pass, you may be too late."
+
+Mr. Neal approached the bed. He, too, noticed the movement of the
+hands. "Is that a bad sign?" he asked.
+
+The doctor bent his head gravely. "Put your question at once," he
+repeated, "or you may be too late."
+
+Mr. Neal held the letter before the eyes of the dying man "Do you
+know what this is?"
+
+"My letter."
+
+"Do you insist on my posting it?"
+
+He mastered his failing speech for the last time, and gave the
+answer: "Yes!"
+
+Mr. Neal moved to the door, with the letter in his hand. The
+German followed him a few steps, opened his lips to plead for a
+longer delay, met the Scotchman's inexorable eye, and drew back
+again in silence. The door closed and parted them, without a word
+having passed on either side.
+
+The doctor went back to the bed and whispered to the sinking man:
+"Let me call him back; there is time to stop him yet!" It was
+useless. No answer came; nothing showed that he heeded, or even
+heard. His eyes wandered from the child, rested for a moment on
+his own struggling hand, and looked up entreatingly in the
+compassionate face that bent over him. The doctor lifted the
+hand, paused, followed the father's longing eyes back to the
+child, and, interpreting his last wish, moved the hand gently
+toward the boy's head. The hand touched it, and trembled
+violently. In another instant the trembling seized on the arm,
+and spread over the whole upper part of the body. The face turned
+from pale to red, from red to purple, from purple to pale again.
+Then the toiling hands lay still, and the shifting color changed
+no more.
+
+
+The window of the next room was open, when the doctor entered it
+from the death chamber, with the child in
+ his arms. He looked out as he passed by, and saw Mr. Neal in the
+street below, slowly returning to the inn.
+
+"Where is the letter?" he asked.
+
+Three words sufficed for the Scotchman's answer.
+
+"In the post."
+
+THE END OF THE PROLOGUE.
+
+
+
+THE STORY.
+
+_BOOK THE FIRST._
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE MYSTERY OF OZIAS MIDWINTER.
+
+ON a warm May night, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one,
+the Reverend Decimus Brock--at that time a visitor to the Isle of
+Man--retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious
+personal responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no
+distinct idea of the means by which he might relieve himself from
+the pressure of his present circumstances.
+
+The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life at
+which a sensible man learns to decline (as often as his temper
+will let him) all useless conflict with the tyranny of his own
+troubles. Abandoning any further effort to reach a decision in
+the emergency that now beset him, Mr. Brock sat down placidly in
+his shirt sleeves on the side of his bed, and applied his mind to
+consider next whether the emergency itself was as serious as he
+had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this new way
+out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly
+traveling to the end in view by the least inspiriting of all
+human journeys--a journey through the past years of his own life.
+
+One by one the events of those years--all connected with the same
+little group of characters, and all more or less answerable for
+the anxiety which was now intruding itself between the clergyman
+and his night's rest--rose, in progressive series, on Mr. Brock's
+memory. The first of the series took him back, through a period
+of fourteen years, to his own rectory on the Somersetshire shores
+of the Bristol Channel, and closeted him at a private interview
+with a lady who had paid him a visit in the character of a total
+stranger to the parson and the place.
+
+
+The lady's complexion was fair, the lady's figure was well
+preserved; she was still a young woman, and she looked even
+younger than her age. There was a shade of melancholy in her
+expression, and an undertone of suffering in her voice--enough,
+in each case, to indicate that she had known trouble, but not
+enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of others. She
+brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old, whom
+she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way, at the
+beginning of the interview, to amuse himself in the rectory
+garden. Her card had preceded her entrance into the study, and
+had announced her under the name of "Mrs. Armadale." Mr. Brock
+began to feel interested in her before she had opened her lips;
+and when the son had been dismissed, he awaited with some anxiety
+to hear what the mother had to say to him.
+
+Mrs. Armadale began by informing the rector that she was a widow.
+Her husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their
+union, on the voyage from Madeira to Lisbon. She had been brought
+to England, after her affliction, under her father's protection;
+and her child--a posthumous son--had been born on the family
+estate in Norfolk. Her father's death, shortly afterward, had
+deprived her of her only surviving parent, and had exposed her to
+neglect and misconstruction on the part of her remaining
+relatives (two brothers), which had estranged her from them, she
+feared, for the rest of her days. For some time past she had
+lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devoting herself
+to the education of her boy, who had now reached an age at which
+he required other than his mother's teaching. Leaving out of the
+question her own unwillingness to part with him, in her solitary
+position, she was especially anxious that he should not be thrown
+among strangers by being sent to school. Her darling project was
+to bring him up privately at home, and to keep him, as he
+advanced in years, from all contact with the temptations and the
+dangers of the world.
+
+With these objects in view, her longer sojourn in her own
+locality (where the services of the resident clergyman, in the
+capacity of tutor, were not obtainable) must come to an end. She
+had made inquiries, had heard of a house that would suit her in
+Mr. Brock's neighborhood, and had also been told that Mr. Brock
+himself had formerly been in the habit of taking pupils.
+Possessed of this information, she had ventured to present
+herself, with references that vouched for her respectability, but
+without a formal introduction; and she had now to ask whether (in
+the event of her residing in the neighborhood) any terms that
+could be offered would induce Mr. Brock to open his doors once
+more to a pupil, and to allow that pupil to be her son.
+
+If Mrs. Armadale had been a woman of no personal attractions, or
+if Mr. Brock had been provided with an intrenchment to fight
+behind in the shape of a wife, it is probable that the widow's
+journey might have been taken in vain. As things really were, the
+rector examined the references which were offered to him, and
+asked time for consideration. When the time had expired, he did
+what Mrs. Armadale wished him to do--he offered his back to the
+burden, and let the mother load him with the responsibility of
+the son.
+
+This was the first event of the series; the date of it being the
+year eighteen hundred and thirty-seven. Mr. Brock's memory,
+traveling forward toward the present from that point, picked up
+the second event in its turn, and stopped next at the year
+eighteen hundred and forty-five.
+
+                              -------------
+
+The fishing-village on the Somersetshire coast was still the
+scene, and the characters were once again--Mrs. Armadale and her
+son.
+
+Through the eight years that had passed, Mr. Brock's
+responsibility had rested on him lightly enough. The boy had
+given his mother and his tutor but little trouble. He was
+certainly slow over his books, but more from a constitutional
+inability to fix his attention on his tasks than from want of
+capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be
+denied, was heedless to the last degree: he acted recklessly on
+his first impulses, and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions.
+On the other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his
+disposition was open as the day; a more generous, affectionate,
+sweet-tempered lad it would have been hard to find anywhere. A
+certain quaint originality of character, and a natural
+healthiness in all his tastes, carried him free of most of the
+dangers to which his mother's system of education inevitably
+exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of the sea and of
+all that belongs to it; and as he grew in years, there was no
+luring him away from the water-side, and no keeping him out of
+the boat-builder's yard. In course of time his mother caught him
+actually working there, to her infinite annoyance and surprise,
+as a volunteer. He acknowledged that his whole future ambition
+was to have a yard of his own, and that his one present object
+was to learn to build a boat for himself. Wisely foreseeing that
+such a pursuit as this for his leisure hours was exactly what was
+wanted to reconcile the lad to a position of isolation from
+companions of his own rank and age, Mr. Brock prevailed on Mrs.
+Armadale, with no small difficulty, to let her son have his way.
+At the period of that second event in the clergyman's life with
+his pupil which is now to be related, young Armadale had
+practiced long enough in the builder's yard to have reached the
+summit of his wishes, by laying with his own hands the keel of
+his own boat.
+
+Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allan had completed
+his sixteenth year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the
+yard, and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking
+the _Times_ newspaper with him in his hand.
+
+The years that had passed since they had first met had long since
+regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbor. The first
+advances which Mr. Brock's growing admiration for the widow had
+led him to make in the early days of their intercourse had been
+met on her side by an appeal to his forbearance which had closed
+his lips for the future. She had satisfied him, at once and
+forever, th at the one place in her heart which he could hope to
+occupy was the place of a friend. He loved her well enough to
+take what she would give him: friends they became, and friends
+they remained from that time forth. No jealous dread of another
+man's succeeding where he had failed imbittered the clergyman's
+placid relations with the woman whom he loved. Of the few
+resident gentlemen in the neighborhood, none were ever admitted
+by Mrs. Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her.
+Contentedly self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof
+against every social attraction that would have tempted other
+women in her position and at her age. Mr. Brock and his
+newspaper, appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea-table
+three times a week, told her all she knew or cared to know of the
+great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless
+limits of her daily life.
+
+On the evening in question Mr. Brock took the arm-chair in which
+he always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank,
+and opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs.
+Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same
+sofa, with the same sort of needle-work everlastingly in her
+hand.
+
+"Bless my soul!" cried the rector, with his voice in a new
+octave, and his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of
+the newspaper.
+
+No such introduction to the evening readings as this had ever
+happened before in all Mrs. Armadale's experience as a listener.
+She looked up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity, and
+besought her reverend friend to favor her with an explanation.
+
+"I can hardly believe my own eyes," said Mr. Brock. "Here is an
+advertisement, Mrs. Armadale, addressed to your son."
+
+Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows:
+
+
+IF this should meet the eye of ALLAN ARMADALE, he is desired to
+communicate, either personally or by letter, with Messrs. Hammick
+and Ridge (Lincoln's Inn Fields, London), on business of
+importance which seriously concerns him. Any one capable of
+informing Messrs. E. and R. where the person herein advertised
+can be found would confer a favor by doing the same. To prevent
+mistakes, it is further notified that the missing Allan Armadale
+is a youth aged fifteen years, and that this advertisement is
+inserted at the instance of his family and friends.
+
+
+"Another family, and other friends," said Mrs. Armadale. "The
+person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son."
+
+The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in
+her face, when he looked up, shocked him. Her delicate complexion
+had faded away to a dull white; her eyes were averted from her
+visitor with a strange mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked
+an older woman than she was, by ten good years at least.
+
+"The name is so very uncommon," said Mr. Brock, imagining he had
+offended her, and trying to excuse himself. "It really seemed
+impossible there could be two persons--"
+
+"There _are_ two," interposed Mrs. Armadale. "Allan, as you know,
+is sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you
+will find the missing person described as being only fifteen.
+Although he bears the same surname and the same Christian name,
+he is, I thank God, in no way whatever related to my son. As long
+as I live, it will be the object of my hopes and prayers that
+Allan may never see him, may never even hear of him. My kind
+friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with me if I leave
+these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past misfortune
+and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of, even
+to _you._ Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by
+never referring to this again? Will you do even more--will you
+promise not to speak of it to Allan, and not to let that
+newspaper fall in his way?"
+
+Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left
+her to herself.
+
+The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs.
+Armadale to be capable of regarding her with any unworthy
+distrust. But it would be idle to deny that he felt disappointed
+by her want of confidence in him, and that he looked
+inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on his way back
+to his own house.
+
+It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale's motives for
+burying her son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote
+country village was not so much to keep him under her own eye as
+to keep him from discovery by his namesake. Why did she dread the
+idea of their ever meeting? Was it a dread for herself, or a
+dread for her son? Mr. Brock's loyal belief in his friend
+rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at some
+past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale's. That night he destroyed the
+advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the
+subject should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There
+was another Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his
+pupil's blood, and a vagabond advertised in the public
+newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. More, for Mrs.
+Armadale's sake, he had no wish to discover--and more he would
+never seek to know.
+
+This was the second in the series of events which dated from the
+rector's connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock's
+memory, traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances,
+reached the third stage of its journey through the by-gone time,
+and stopped at the year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.
+
+The five years that had passed had made little if any change in
+Allan's character. He had simply developed (to use his tutor's
+own expression) from a boy of sixteen to a boy of twenty-one. He
+was just as easy and open in his disposition as ever; just as
+quaintly and inveterately good-humored; just as heedless in
+following his own impulses, lead him where they might. His bias
+toward the sea had strengthened with his advance to the years of
+manhood. From building a boat, he had now got on--with two
+journeymen at work under him--to building a decked vessel of
+five-and-thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to
+divert him to higher aspirations; had taken him to Oxford, to see
+what college life was like; had taken him to London, to expand
+his mind by the spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had
+diverted Allan, but had not altered him in the least. He was as
+impenetrably superior to all worldly ambition as Diogenes
+himself. "Which is best," asked this unconscious philosopher, "to
+find out the way to be happy for yourself, or to let other people
+try if they can find it out for you?" From that moment Mr. Brock
+permitted his pupil's character to grow at its own rate of
+development, and Allan went on uninterruptedly with the work of
+his yacht.
+
+Time, which had wrought so little change in the son, had not
+passed harmless over the mother.
+
+Mrs. Armadale's health was breaking fast. As her strength failed,
+her temper altered for the worse: she grew more and more fretful,
+more and more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more
+reluctant to leave her own room. Since the appearance of the
+advertisement five years since, nothing had happened to force her
+memory back to the painful associations connected with her early
+life. No word more on the forbidden topic had passed between the
+rector and herself; no suspicion had ever been raised in Allan's
+mind of the existence of his namesake; and yet, without the
+shadow of a reason for any special anxiety, Mrs. Armadale had
+become, of late years, obstinately and fretfully uneasy on the
+subject of her son. More than once Mr. Brock dreaded a serious
+disagreement between them; but Allan's natural sweetness of
+temper, fortified by his love for his mother, carried him
+triumphantly through all trials. Not a hard word or a harsh look
+ever escaped him in her presence; he was unchangeably loving and
+forbearing with her to the very last.
+
+Such were the positions of the son, the mother, and the friend,
+when the next notable event happened in the lives of the three.
+On a dreary afternoon, early in the month of November, Mr. Brock
+was disturbed over the composition of his sermon by a visit from
+the landlord of the village inn.
+
+After making his introductory apologies, the landlord st ated the
+urgent business on which he had come to the rectory clearly
+enough.
+
+A few hours since a young man had been brought to the inn by some
+farm laborers in the neighborhood, who had found him wandering
+about one of their master's fields in a disordered state of mind,
+which looked to their eyes like downright madness. The landlord
+had given the poor creature shelter while he sent for medical
+help; and the doctor, on seeing him, had pronounced that he was
+suffering from fever on the brain, and that his removal to the
+nearest town at which a hospital or a work-house infirmary could
+be found to receive him would in all probability be fatal to his
+chances of recovery. After hearing this expression of opinion,
+and after observing for himself that the stranger's only luggage
+consisted of a small carpet-bag which had been found in the field
+near him, the landlord had set off on the spot to consult the
+rector, and to ask, in this serious emergency, what course he was
+to take next.
+
+Mr. Brock was the magistrate as well as the clergyman of the
+district, and the course to be taken, in the first instance, was
+to his mind clear enough. He put on his hat, and accompanied the
+landlord back to the inn.
+
+At the inn door they were joined by Allan, who had heard the news
+through another channel, and who was waiting Mr. Brock's arrival,
+to follow in the magistrate's train, and to see what the stranger
+was like. The village surgeon joined them at the same moment, and
+the four went into the inn together.
+
+They found the landlord's son on one side, and the hostler on the
+other, holding the man down in his chair. Young, slim, and
+undersized, he was strong enough at that moment to make it a
+matter of difficulty for the two to master him. His tawny
+complexion, his large, bright brown eyes, and his black beard
+gave him something of a foreign look. His dress was a little
+worn, but his linen was clean. His dusky hands were wiry and
+nervous, and were lividly discolored in more places than one by
+the scars of old wounds. The toes of one of his feet, off which
+he had kicked the shoe, grasped at the chair rail through his
+stocking, with the sensitive muscular action which is only seen
+in those who have been accustomed to go barefoot. In the frenzy
+that now possessed him, it was impossible to notice, to any
+useful purpose, more than this. After a whispered consultation
+with Mr. Brock, the surgeon personally superintended the
+patient's removal to a quiet bedroom at the back of the house.
+Shortly afterward his clothes and his carpet-bag were sent
+downstairs, and were searched, on the chance of finding a clew by
+which to communicate with his friends, in the magistrate's
+presence.
+
+The carpet- bag contained nothing but a change of clothing, and
+two books--the Plays of Sophocles, in the original Greek, and the
+"Faust" of Goethe, in the original German. Both volumes were much
+worn by reading, and on the fly-leaf of each were inscribed the
+initials O. M. So much the bag revealed, and no more.
+
+The clothes which the man wore when he was discovered in the
+field were tried next. A purse (containing a sovereign and a few
+shillings), a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a handkerchief, and a little
+drinking-cup of horn were produced in succession. The next
+object, and the last, was found crumpled up carelessly in the
+breast-pocket of the coat. It was a written testimonial to
+character, dated and signed, but without any address.
+
+So far as this document could tell it, the stranger's story was a
+sad one indeed. He had apparently been employed for a short time
+as usher at a school, and had been turned adrift in the world, at
+the outset of his illness, from the fear that the fever might be
+infectious, and that the prosperity of the establishment might
+suffer accordingly. Not the slightest imputation of any
+misbehavior in his employment rested on him. On the contrary, the
+schoolmaster had great pleasure in testifying to his capacity and
+his character, and in expressing a fervent hope that he might
+(under Providence) succeed in recovering his health in somebody
+else's house. The written testimonial which afforded this glimpse
+at the man's story served one purpose more: it connected him with
+the initials on the books, and identified him to the magistrate
+and the landlord under the strangely uncouth name of Ozias
+Midwinter.
+
+Mr. Brock laid aside the testimonial, suspecting that the
+schoolmaster had purposely abstained from writing his address on
+it, with the view of escaping all responsibility in the event of
+his usher's death. In any case, it was manifestly useless, under
+existing circumstances, to think of tracing the poor wretch's
+friends, if friends he had. To the inn he had been brought, and,
+as a matter of common humanity, at the inn he must remain for the
+present. The difficulty about expenses, if it came to the worst,
+might possibly be met by charitable contributions from the
+neighbors, or by a collection after a sermon at church. Assuring
+the landlord that he would consider this part of the question and
+would let him know the result, Mr. Brock quitted the inn, without
+noticing for the moment that he had left Allan there behind him.
+
+Before he had got fifty yards from the house his pupil overtook
+him. Allan had been most uncharacteristically silent and serious
+all through the search at the inn; but he had now recovered his
+usual high spirits A stranger would have set him down as wanting
+in common feeling.
+
+"This is a sad business," said the rector. "I really don't know
+what to do for the best about that unfortunate man."
+
+"You may make your mind quite easy, sir," said young Armadale, in
+his off-hand way. "I settled it all with the landlord a minute
+ago."
+
+"You!" exclaimed Mr. Brock, in the utmost astonishment.
+
+"I have merely given a few simple directions," pursued Allan.
+"Our friend the usher is to have everything he requires, and is
+to be treated like a prince; and when the doctor and the landlord
+want their money they are to come to me."
+
+"My dear Allan," Mr. Brock gently remonstrated, "when will you
+learn to think before you act on those generous impulses of
+yours? You are spending more money already on your yacht-building
+than you can afford--"
+
+"Only think! we laid the first planks of the deck the day before
+yesterday," said Allan, flying off to the new subject in his
+usual bird-witted way. "There's just enough of it done to walk
+on, if you don't feel giddy. I'll help you up the ladder, Mr.
+Brock, if you'll only come and try."
+
+"Listen to me," persisted the rector. "I'm not talking about the
+yacht now; that is to say, I am only referring to the yacht as
+all illustration--"
+
+"And a very pretty illustration, too," remarked the incorrigible
+Allan. "Find me a smarter little vessel of her size in all
+England, and I'll give up yacht-building to-morrow. Whereabouts
+were we in our conversation, sir? I'm rather afraid we have lost
+ourselves somehow."
+
+"I am rather afraid one of us is in the habit of losing himself
+every time he opens his lips," retorted Mr. Brock. "Come, come,
+Allan, this is serious. You have been rendering yourself liable
+for expenses which you may not be able to pay. Mind, I am far
+from blaming you for your kind feeling toward this poor
+friendless man--"
+
+"Don't be low-spirited about him, sir. He'll get over it--he'll
+be all right again in a week or so. A capital fellow, I have not
+the least doubt!" continued Allan, whose habit it was to believe
+in everybody and to despair of nothing. "Suppose you ask him to
+dinner when he gets well, Mr. Brock? I should like to find out
+(when we are all three snug and friendly together over our wine,
+you know) how he came by that extraordinary name of his. Ozias
+Midwinter! Upon my life, his father ought to be ashamed of
+himself."
+
+"Will you answer me one question before I go in?" said the
+rector, stopping in despair at his own gate. "This man's bill for
+lodging and medical attendance may mount to twenty or thirty
+pounds before he gets well again, if he ever does get well. How
+are you to pay for it?"
+
+"What's that the Chancellor of the Exchequer says when he finds
+himself in a mess with his accounts, and doesn't see his way out
+again?" asked
+ Allan. "He always tells his honorable friend he is quite willing
+to leave a something or other--"
+
+"A margin?" suggested Mr. Brock.
+
+"That's it," said Allan. "I'm like the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer. I'm quite willing to leave a margin. The yacht (bless
+her heart!) doesn't eat up everything. If I'm short by a pound or
+two, don't be afraid, sir. There's no pride about me; I'll go
+round with the hat, and get the balance in the neighborhood.
+Deuce take the pounds, shillings, and pence! I wish they could
+all three get rid of themselves, like the Bedouin brothers at the
+show. Don't you remember the Bedouin brothers, Mr. Brock? 'Ali
+will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat of his
+brother Muli; Muli will take a lighted torch, and jump down the
+throat of his brother Hassan; and Hassan, taking a third lighted
+torch, will conclude the performances by jumping down his own
+throat, and leaving the spectators in total darkness.'
+Wonderfully good, that--what I call real wit, with a fine strong
+flavor about it. Wait a minute! Where are we? We have lost
+ourselves again. Oh, I remember--money. What I can't beat into my
+thick head," concluded Allan, quite unconscious that he was
+preaching socialist doctrines to a clergyman; "is the meaning of
+the fuss that's made about giving money away. Why can't the
+people who have got money to spare give it to the people who
+haven't got money to spare, and make things pleasant and
+comfortable all the world over in that way? You're always telling
+me to cultivate ideas, Mr. Brock There's an idea, and, upon my
+life, I don't think it's a bad one."
+
+Mr. Brock gave his pupil a good-humored poke with the end of his
+stick. "Go back to your yacht," he said. "All the little
+discretion you have got in that flighty head of yours is left on
+board in your tool-chest. How that lad will end," pursued the
+rector, when he was left by himself, "is more than any human
+being can say. I almost wish I had never taken the responsibility
+of him on my shoulders."
+
+Three weeks passed before the stranger with the uncouth name was
+pronounced to be at last on the way to recovery.
+
+During this period Allan had made regular inquiries at the inn,
+and, as soon as the sick man was allowed to see visitors, Allan
+was the first who appeared at his bedside. So far Mr. Brock's
+pupil had shown no more than a natural interest in one of the few
+romantic circumstances which had varied the monotony of the
+village life: he had committed no imprudence, and he had exposed
+himself to no blame. But as the days passed, young Armadale's
+visits to the inn began to lengthen considerably, and the surgeon
+(a cautious elderly man) gave the rector a private hint to bestir
+himself. Mr. Brock acted on the hint immediately, and discovered
+that Allan had followed his usual impulses in his usual headlong
+way. He had taken a violent fancy to the castaway usher and had
+invited Ozias Midwinter to reside permanently in the neighborhood
+in the new and interesting character of his bosom friend.
+
+Before Mr. Brock could make up his mind how to act in this
+emergency, he received a note from Allan's mother, begging him to
+use his privilege as an old friend, and to pay her a visit in her
+room.
+
+He found Mrs. Armadale suffering under violent nervous agitation,
+caused entirely by a recent interview with her son. Allan had
+been sitting with her all the morning, and had talked of nothing
+but his new friend. The man with the horrible name (as poor Mrs.
+Armadale described him) had questioned Allan, in a singularly
+inquisitive manner, on the subject of himself and his family, but
+had kept his own personal history entirely in the dark. At some
+former period of his life he had been accustomed to the sea and
+to sailing. Allan had, unfortunately, found this out, and a bond
+of union between them was formed on the spot. With a merciless
+distrust of the stranger--simply _because_ he was a
+stranger--which appeared rather unreasonable to Mr. Brock, Mrs.
+Armadale besought the rector to go to the inn without a moment's
+loss of time, and never to rest until he had made the man give a
+proper account of himself. "Find out everything about his father
+and mother!" she said, in her vehement female way. "Make sure
+before you leave him that he is not a vagabond roaming the
+country under an assumed name."
+
+"My dear lady," remonstrated the rector, obediently taking his
+hat, "whatever else we may doubt, I really think we may feel sure
+about the man's name! It is so remarkably ugly that it must be
+genuine. No sane human being would _assume_ such a name as Ozias
+Midwinter."
+
+"You may be quite right, and I may be quite wrong; but pray go
+and see him," persisted Mrs. Armadale. "Go, and don't spare him,
+Mr. Brock. How do we know that this illness of his may not have
+been put on for a purpose?"
+
+It was useless to reason with her. The whole College of
+Physicians might have certified to the man's illness, and, in her
+present frame of mind, Mrs. Armadale would have disbelieved the
+College, one and all, from the president downward. Mr. Brock took
+the wise way out of the difficulty--he said no more, and he set
+off for the inn immediately.
+
+Ozias Midwinter, recovering from brain-fever, was a startling
+object to contemplate on a first view of him. His shaven head,
+tied up in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard
+cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild;
+his rough black beard; his long, supple, sinewy fingers, wasted
+by suffering till they looked like claws--all tended to
+discompose the rector at the outset of the interview. When the
+first feeling of surprise had worn off, the impression that
+followed it was not an agreeable one. Mr. Brock could not conceal
+from himself that the stranger's manner was against him. The
+general opinion has settled that, if a man is honest, he is bound
+to assert it by looking straight at his fellow-creatures when he
+speaks to them. If this man was honest, his eyes showed a
+singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they
+were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his
+organization, which appeared to pervade every fiber in his lean,
+lithe body. The rector's healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept
+responsively at every casual movement of the usher's supple brown
+fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher's haggard
+yellow face. "God forgive me!" thought Mr. Brock, with his mind
+running on Allan and Allan's mother, "I wish I could see my way
+to turning Ozias Midwinter adrift in the world again!"
+
+The conversation which ensued between the two was a very guarded
+one. Mr. Brock felt his way gently, and found himself, try where
+he might, always kept politely, more or less, in the dark.
+
+From first to last, the man's real character shrank back with a
+savage shyness from the rector's touch. He started by an
+assertion which it was impossible to look at him and believe--he
+declared that he was only twenty years of age. All he could be
+persuaded to say on the subject of the school was that the bare
+recollection of it was horrible to him. He had only filled the
+usher's situation for ten days when the first appearance of his
+illness caused his dismissal. How he had reached the field in
+which he had been found was more than he could say. He remembered
+traveling a long distance by railway, with a purpose (if he had a
+purpose) which it was now impossible to recall, and then
+wandering coastward, on foot, all through the day, or all through
+the night--he was not sure which. The sea kept running in his
+mind when his mind began to give way. He had been employed on the
+sea as a lad. He had left it, and had filled a situation at a
+bookseller's in a country town. He had left the bookseller's, and
+had tried the school. Now the school had turned him out, he must
+try something else. It mattered little what he tried---failure
+(for which nobody was ever to blame but himself) was sure to be
+the end of it, sooner or later. Friends to assist him, he had
+none to apply to; and as for relations, he wished to be excused
+from speaking of them. For all he knew they might be dead, and
+for all _they_ knew _he_ might be dead. That was a melancholy
+acknowledgment to ma ke at his time of life, there was no denying
+it. It might tell against him in the opinions of others; and it
+did tell against him, no doubt, in the opinion of the gentleman
+who was talking to him at that moment.
+
+These strange answers were given in a tone and manner far removed
+from bitterness on the one side, or from indifference on the
+other. Ozias Midwinter at twenty spoke of his life as Ozias
+Midwinter at seventy might have spoken with a long weariness of
+years on him which he had learned to bear patiently.
+
+Two circumstances pleaded strongly against the distrust with
+which, in sheer perplexity of mind, Mr. Brock blindly regarded
+him. He had written to a savings-bank in a distant part of
+England, had drawn his money, and had paid the doctor and the
+landlord. A man of vulgar mind, after acting in this manner,
+would have treated his obligations lightly when he had settled
+his bills. Ozias Midwinter spoke of his obligations--and
+especially of his obligation to Allan--with a fervor of
+thankfulness which it was not surprising only, but absolutely
+painful to witness. He showed a horrible sincerity of
+astonishment at having been treated with common Christian
+kindness in a Christian land. He spoke of Allan's having become
+answerable for all the expenses of sheltering, nursing, and
+curing him, with a savage rapture of gratitude and surprise which
+burst out of him like a flash of lightning. "So help me God!"
+cried the castaway usher, "I never met with the like of him: I
+never heard of the like of him before!" In the next instant, the
+one glimpse of light which the man had let in on his own
+passionate nature was quenched again in darkness. His wandering
+eyes, returning to their old trick, looked uneasily away from Mr.
+Brock, and his voice dropped back once more into its unnatural
+steadiness and quietness of tone. "I beg your pardon, sir," he
+said. "I have been used to be hunted, and cheated, and starved.
+Everything else comes strange to me. " Half attracted by the man,
+half repelled by him, Mr. Brock, on rising to take leave,
+impulsively offered his hand, and then, with a sudden misgiving,
+confusedly drew it back again. "You meant that kindly, sir," said
+Ozias Midwinter, with his own hands crossed resolutely behind
+him. "I don't complain of your thinking better of it. A man who
+can't give a proper account of himself is not a man for a
+gentleman in your position to take by the hand."
+
+Mr. Brock left the inn thoroughly puzzled. Before returning to
+Mrs. Armadale he sent for her son. The chances were that the
+guard had been off the stranger's tongue when he spoke to Allan,
+and with Allan's frankness there was no fear of his concealing
+anything that had passed between them from the rector s
+knowledge.
+
+Here again Mr. Brock's diplomacy achieved no useful results.
+
+Once started on the subject of Ozias Midwinter, Allan rattled on
+about his new friend in his usual easy, light-hearted way. But he
+had really nothing of importance to tell, for nothing of
+importance had been revealed to him. They had talked about
+boat-building and sailing by the hour together, and Allan had got
+some valuable hints. They had discussed (with diagrams to assist
+them, and with more valuable hints for Allan) the serious
+impending question of the launch of the yacht. On other occasions
+they had diverged to other subjects--to more of them than Allan
+could remember, on the spur of the moment. Had Midwinter said
+nothing about his relations in the flow of all this friendly
+talk? Nothing, except that they had not behaved well to him--hang
+his relations! Was he at all sensitive on the subject of his own
+odd name? Not the least in the world; he had set the example,
+like a sensible fellow, of laughing at it himself.
+
+Mr. Brock still persisted. He inquired next what Allan had seen
+in the stranger to take such a fancy to? Allan had seen in
+him--what he didn't see in people in general. He wasn't like all
+the other fellows in the neighborhood. All the other fellows were
+cut out on the same pattern. Every man of them was equally
+healthy, muscular, loud, hard-hearted, clean-skinned, and rough;
+every man of them drank the same draughts of beer, smoked the
+same short pipes all day long, rode the best horse, shot over the
+best dog, and put the best bottle of wine in England on his table
+at night; every man of them sponged himself every morning in the
+same sort of tub of cold water and bragged about it in frosty
+weather in the same sort of way; every man of them thought
+getting into debt a capital joke and betting on horse-races one
+of the most meritorious actions that a human being can perform.
+They were, no doubt, excellent fellows in their way; but the
+worst of them was, they were all exactly alike. It was a perfect
+godsend to meet with a man like Midwinter--a man who was not cut
+out on the regular local pattern, and whose way in the world had
+the one great merit (in those parts) of being a way of his own.
+
+Leaving all remonstrances for a fitter opportunity, the rector
+went back to Mrs. Armadale. He could not disguise from himself
+that Allan's mother was the person really answerable for Allan's
+present indiscretion. If the lad had seen a little less of the
+small gentry in the neighborhood, and a little more of the great
+outside world at home and abroad, the pleasure of cultivating
+Ozias Midwinter's society might have had fewer attractions for
+him.
+
+Conscious of the unsatisfactory result of his visit to the inn,
+Mr. Brock felt some anxiety about the reception of his report
+when he found himself once more in Mrs. Armadale's presence. His
+forebodings were soon realized. Try as he might to make the best
+of it, Mrs. Armadale seized on the one suspicious fact of the
+usher's silence about himself as justifying the strongest
+measures that could be taken to separate him from her son. If the
+rector refused to interfere, she declared her intention of
+writing to Ozias Midwinter with her own hand. Remonstrance
+irritated her to such a pitch that she astounded Mr. Brock by
+reverting to the forbidden subject of five years since, and
+referring him to the conversation which had passed between them
+when the advertisement had been discovered in the newspaper. She
+passionately declared that the vagabond Armadale of that
+advertisement, and the vagabond Midwinter at the village inn,
+might, for all she know to the contrary, be one and the same.
+Foreboding a serious disagreement between the mother and son if
+the mother interfered, Mr. Brock undertook to see Midwinter
+again, and to tell him plainly that he must give a proper account
+of himself, or that his intimacy with Allan must cease. The two
+concessions which he exacted from Mrs. Armadale in return were
+that she should wait patiently until the doctor reported the man
+fit to travel, and that she should be careful in the interval not
+to mention the matter in any way to her son.
+
+In a week's time Midwinter was able to drive out (with Allan for
+his coachman) in the pony chaise belonging to the inn, and in ten
+days the doctor privately reported him as fit to travel. Toward
+the close of that tenth day, Mr. Brock met Allan and his new
+friend enjoying the last gleams of wintry sunshine in one of the
+inland lanes. He waited until the two had separated, and then
+followed the usher on his way back to the inn.
+
+The rector's resolution to speak pitilessly to the purpose was in
+some danger of failing him as he drew nearer and nearer to the
+friendless man, and saw how feebly he still walked, how loosely
+his worn coat hung about him, and how heavily he leaned on his
+cheap, clumsy stick. Humanely reluctant to say the decisive words
+too precipitately, Mr. Brock tried him first with a little
+compliment on the range of his reading, as shown by the volume of
+Sophocles and the volume of Goethe which had been found in his
+bag, and asked how long he had been acquainted with German and
+Greek. The quick ear of Midwinter detected something wrong in the
+tone of Mr. Brock's voice. He turned in the darkening twilight,
+and looked suddenly and suspiciously in the rector's face.
+
+"You have something to say to me," he answered; "and it is not
+what you are saying now."
+
+There was no help for it but to accept the challenge. Very
+delicately, with many preparatory words, to which the other
+listened in unbroken silence, Mr. Brock came little by little
+nearer and nearer to the point. Long before he had really reached
+it--long before a man of no more than ordinary sensibility would
+have felt what was coming--Ozias Midwinter stood still in the
+lane, and told the rector that he need say no more.
+
+"I understand you, sir," said the usher. "Mr. Armadale has an
+ascertained position in the world; Mr. Armadale has nothing to
+conceal, and nothing to be ashamed of. I agree with you that I am
+not a fit companion for him. The best return I can make for his
+kindness is to presume on it no longer. You may depend on my
+leaving this place to-morrow morning."
+
+He spoke no word more; he would hear no word more. With a
+self-control which, at his years and with his temperament, was
+nothing less than marvelous, he civilly took off his hat, bowed,
+and returned to the inn by himself
+
+Mr. Brock slept badly that night. The issue of the interview in
+the lane had made the problem of Ozias Midwinter a harder problem
+to solve than ever.
+
+Early the next morning a letter was brought to the rector from
+the inn, and the messenger announced that the strange gentleman
+had taken his departure. The letter inclosed an open note
+addressed to Allan, and requested Allan's tutor (after first
+reading it himself) to forward it or not at his own sole
+discretion. The note was a startlingly short one; it began and
+ended in a dozen words: "Don't blame Mr. Brock; Mr. Brock is
+right. Thank you, and good-by.--O. M."
+
+The rector forwarded the note to its proper destination, as a
+matter of course, and sent a few lines to Mrs. Armadale at the
+same time to quiet her anxiety by the news of the usher's
+departure. This done, he waited the visit from his pupil, which
+would probably follow the delivery of the note, in no very
+tranquil frame of mind. There might or might not be some deep
+motive at the bottom of Midwinter's conduct; but thus far it was
+impossible to deny that he had behaved in such a manner as to
+rebuke the rector's distrust, and to justify Allan's good opinion
+of him.
+
+The morning wore on, and young Armadale never appeared. After
+looking for him vainly in the yard where the yacht was building,
+Mr. Brock went to Mrs. Armadale's house, and there heard news
+from the servant which turned his steps in the direction of the
+inn. The landlord at once acknowledged the truth: young Mr.
+Armadale had come there with an open letter in his hand, and had
+insisted on being informed of the road which his friend had
+taken. For the first time in the landlord's experience of him,
+the young gentleman was out of temper; and the girl who waited on
+the customers had stupidly mentioned a circumstance which had
+added fuel to the fire. She had acknowledged having heard Mr.
+Midwinter lock himself into his room overnight, and burst into a
+violent fit of crying. That trifling particular had set Mr.
+Armadale's face all of a flame; he had shouted and sworn; he had
+rushed into the stables; and forced the hostler to saddle him a
+horse, and had set off full gallop on the road that Ozias
+Midwinter had taken before him.
+
+After cautioning the landlord to keep Allan's conduct a secret if
+any of Mrs. Armadale's servants came that morning to the inn, Mr.
+Brock went home again, and waited anxiously to see what the day
+would bring forth.
+
+To his infinite relief his pupil appeared at the rectory late in
+the afternoon.
+
+Allan looked and spoke with a dogged determination which was
+quite new in his old friend's experience of him. Without waiting
+to be questioned, he told his story in his usual straightforward
+way. He had overtaken Midwinter on the road; and--after trying
+vainly first to induce him to return, then to find out where he
+was going to--had threatened to keep company with him for the
+rest of the day, and had so extorted the confession that he was
+going to try his luck in London. Having gained this point, Allan
+had asked next for his friend's address in London, had been
+entreated by the other not to press his request, had pressed it,
+nevertheless, with all his might, and had got the address at last
+by making an appeal to Midwinter's gratitude, for which (feeling
+heartily ashamed of himself) he had afterward asked Midwinter's
+pardon. "I like the poor fellow, and I won't give him up,"
+concluded Allan, bringing his clinched fist down with a thump on
+the rectory table. "Don't be afraid of my vexing my mother; I'll
+leave you to speak to her, Mr. Brock, at your own time and in
+your own way; and I'll just say this much more by way of bringing
+the thing to an end. Here is the address safe in my pocket-book,
+and here am I, standing firm for once on a resolution of my own.
+I'll give you and my mother time to reconsider this; and, when
+the time is up, if my friend Midwinter doesn't come to _me,_ I'll
+go to my friend Midwinter."
+
+So the matter rested for the present; and such was the result of
+turning the castaway usher adrift in the world again.
+
+                              -------------
+
+A month passed, and brought in the new year--'51. Overleaping
+that short lapse of time, Mr. Brock paused, with a heavy heart,
+at the next event; to his mind the one mournful, the one
+memorable event of the series--Mrs. Armadale's death.
+
+The first warning of the affliction that was near at hand had
+followed close on the usher's departure in December, and had
+arisen out of a circumstance which dwelt painfully on the
+rector's memory from that time forth.
+
+But three days after Midwinter had left for London, Mr. Brock was
+accosted in the village by a neatly dressed woman, wearing a gown
+and bonnet of black silk and a red Paisley shawl, who was a total
+stranger to him, and who inquired the way to Mrs. Armadale's
+house. She put the question without raising the thick black veil
+that hung over her face. Mr. Brock, in giving her the necessary
+directions, observed that she was a remarkably elegant and
+graceful woman, and looked after her as she bowed and left him,
+wondering who Mrs. Armadale's visitor could possibly be.
+
+A quarter of an hour later the lady, still veiled as before,
+passed Mr. Brock again close to the inn. She entered the house,
+and spoke to the landlady. Seeing the landlord shortly afterward
+hurrying round to the stables, Mr. Brock asked him if the lady
+was going away. Yes; she had come from the railway in the
+omnibus, but she was going back again more creditably in a
+carriage of her own hiring, supplied by the inn.
+
+The rector proceeded on his walk, rather surprised to find his
+thoughts running inquisitively on a woman who was a stranger to
+him. When he got home again, he found the village surgeon waiting
+his return with an urgent message from Allan's mother. About an
+hour since, the surgeon had been sent for in great haste to see
+Mrs. Armadale. He had found her suffering from an alarming
+nervous attack, brought on (as the servants suspected) by an
+unexpected, and, possibly, an unwelcome visitor, who had called
+that morning. The surgeon had done all that was needful, and had
+no apprehension of any dangerous results. Finding his patient
+eagerly desirous, on recovering herself, to see Mr. Brock
+immediately, he had thought it important to humor her, and had
+readily undertaken to call at the rectory with a message to that
+effect.
+
+Looking at Mrs. Armadale with a far deeper interest in her than
+the surgeon's interest, Mr. Brock saw enough in her face, when it
+turned toward him on his entering the room, to justify instant
+and serious alarm. She allowed him no opportunity of soothing
+her; she heeded none of his inquiries. Answers to certain
+questions of her own were what she wanted, and what she was
+determined to have: Had Mr. Brock seen the woman who had presumed
+to visit her that morning? Yes. Had Allan seen her? No; Allan had
+been at work since breakfast, and was at work still, in his yard
+by the water-side.
+
+This latter reply appeared to quiet Mrs. Armadale for the moment;
+she put her next question--the most extraordinary question of the
+three--more composedly: Did the rector think Allan would object
+to leaving his vessel for the presen t, and to accompanying his
+mother on a journey to look out for a new house in some other
+part of England? In the greatest amazement Mr. Brock asked what
+reason there could possibly be for leaving her present residence?
+Mrs. Armadale's reason, when she gave it, only added to his
+surprise. The woman's first visit might be followed by a second;
+and rather than see her again, rather than run the risk of
+Allan's seeing her and speaking to her, Mrs. Armadale would leave
+England if necessary, and end her days in a foreign land. Taking
+counsel of his experience as a magistrate, Mr. Brock inquired if
+the woman had come to ask for money. Yes; respectably as she was
+dressed, she had described herself as being "in distress"; had
+asked for money, and had got it. But the money was of no
+importance; the one thing needful was to get away before the
+woman came again. More and more surprised, Mr. Brock ventured on
+another question: Was it long since Mrs. Armadale and her visitor
+had last met? Yes; longer than all Allan's lifetime--as long ago
+as the year before Allan was born.
+
+At that reply, the rector shifted his ground, and took counsel
+next of his experience as a friend.
+
+"Is this person," he asked, "connected in any way with the
+painful remembrances of your early life?"
+
+"Yes; with the painful remembrance of the time when I was
+married," said Mrs. Armadale. "She was associated, as a mere
+child, with a circumstance which I must think of with shame and
+sorrow to my dying day."
+
+Mr. Brock noticed the altered tone in which his old friend spoke,
+and the unwillingness with which she gave her answer.
+
+"Can you tell me more about her without referring to yourself?"
+he went on. "I am sure I can protect you, if you will only help
+me a little. Her name, for instance--you can tell me her name?"
+
+Mrs. Armadale shook her head, "The name I knew her by," she said,
+"would be of no use to you. She has been married since then; she
+told me so herself."
+
+"And without telling you her married name?"
+
+"She refused to tell it."
+
+"Do you know anything of her friends?"
+
+"Only of her friends when she was a child. They called themselves
+her uncle and aunt. They were low people, and they deserted her
+at the school on my father's estate. We never heard any more of
+them."
+
+"Did she remain under your father's care?"
+
+"She remained under my care; that is to say, she traveled with
+us. We were leaving England, just as that time, for Madeira. I
+had my father's leave to take her with me, and to train the
+wretch to be my maid--"
+
+At those words Mrs. Armadale stopped confusedly. Mr. Brock tried
+gently to lead her on. It was useless; she started up in violent
+agitation, and walked excitedly backward and forward in the room.
+
+"Don't ask me any more!" she cried out, in loud, angry tones. "I
+parted with her when she was a girl of twelve years old. I never
+saw her again, I never heard of her again, from that time to
+this. I don't know how she has discovered me, after all the years
+that have passed; I only know that she _has_ discovered me. She
+will find her way to Allan next; she will poison my son's mind
+against me. Help me to get away from her! help me to take Allan
+away before she comes back!"
+
+The rector asked no more questions; it would have been cruel to
+press her further. The first necessity was to compose her by
+promising compliance with all that she desired. The second was to
+induce her to see another medical man. Mr. Brock contrived to
+reach his end harmlessly in this latter case by reminding her
+that she wanted strength to travel, and that her own medical
+attendant might restore her (all the more speedily to herself if
+he were assisted by the best professional advice. Having overcome
+her habitual reluctance to seeing strangers by this means, the
+rector at once went to Allan; and, delicately concealing what
+Mrs. Armadale had said at the interview, broke the news to him
+that his mother was seriously ill. Allan would hear of no
+messengers being sent for assistance: he drove off on the spot to
+the railway, and telegraphed himself to Bristol for medical help.
+
+On the next morning the help came, and Mr. Brock's worst fears
+were confirmed. The village surgeon had fatally misunderstood the
+case from the first, and the time was past now at which his
+errors of treatment might have been set right. The shock of the
+previous morning had completed the mischief. Mrs. Armadale's days
+were numbered.
+
+The son who dearly loved her, the old friend to whom her life was
+precious, hoped vainly to the last. In a month from the
+physician's visit all hope was over; and Allan shed the first
+bitter tears of his life at his mother's grave.
+
+She had died more peacefully than Mr. Brock had dared to hope,
+leaving all her little fortune to her son, and committing him
+solemnly to the care of her one friend on earth. The rector had
+entreated her to let him write and try to reconcile her brothers
+with her before it was too late. She had only answered sadly that
+it was too late already. But one reference escaped her in her
+last illness to those early sorrows which had weighed heavily on
+all her after-life, and which had passed thrice already, like
+shadows of evil, between the rector and herself. Even on her
+deathbed she had shrunk from letting the light fall clearly on
+the story of the past. She had looked at Allan kneeling by the
+bedside, and had whispered to Mr. Brock: "_Never let his Namesake
+come near him! Never let that Woman find him out!_" No word more
+fell from her that touched on the misfortunes which had tried her
+in the past, or on the dangers which she dreaded in the future.
+The secret which she had kept from her son and from her friend
+was a secret which she carried with her to the grave.
+
+When the last offices of affection and respect had been
+performed, Mr. Brock felt it his duty, as executor to the
+deceased lady, to write to her brothers, and to give them
+information of her death. Believing that he had to deal with two
+men who would probably misinterpret his motives if he left
+Allan's position unexplained, he was careful to remind them that
+Mrs. Armadale's son was well provided for, and that the object of
+his letter was simply to communicate the news of their sister's
+decease. The two letters were dispatched toward the middle of
+January, and by return of post the answers were received. The
+first which the rector opened was written not by the elder
+brother, but by the elder brother's only son. The young man had
+succeeded to the estates in Norfolk on his father's death, some
+little time since. He wrote in a frank and friendly spirit,
+assuring Mr. Brock that, however strongly his father might have
+been prejudiced against Mrs. Armadale, the hostile feeling had
+never extended to her son. For himself, he had only to add that
+he would be sincerely happy to welcome his cousin to Thorpe
+Ambrose whenever his cousin came that way.
+
+The second letter was a far less agreeable reply to receive than
+the first. The younger brother was still alive, and still
+resolute neither to forget nor forgive. He informed Mr. Brock
+that his deceased sister's choice of a husband, and her conduct
+to her father at the time of her marriage, had made any relations
+of affection or esteem impossible, on his side, from that time
+forth. Holding the opinions he did, it would be equally painful
+to his nephew and himself if any personal intercourse took place
+between them. He had adverted, as generally as possible, to the
+nature of the differences which had kept him apart from his late
+sister, in order to satisfy Mr. Brock's mind that a personal
+acquaintance with young Mr. Armadale was, as a matter of
+delicacy, quite out of the question and, having done this, he
+would beg leave to close the correspondence.
+
+Mr. Brock wisely destroyed the second letter on the spot, and,
+after showing Allan his cousin's invitation, suggested that he
+should go to Thorpe Ambrose as soon as he felt fit to present
+himself to strangers.
+
+Allan listened to the advice patiently enough; but he declined to
+profit by it. "I will shake hands with my cousin willingly if I
+ever meet him," he said; "but I will visit no family, and be a
+guest in no house, in which my mother has
+ been badly treated." Mr. Brock remonstrated gently, and tried to
+put matters in their proper light. Even at that time--even while
+he was still ignorant of events which were then
+impending--Allan's strangely isolated position in the world was a
+subject of serious anxiety to his old friend and tutor. The
+proposed visit to Thorpe Ambrose opened the very prospect of his
+making friends and connections suited to him in rank and age
+which Mr. Brock most desired to see; but Allan was not to be
+persuaded; he was obstinate and unreasonable; and the rector had
+no alternative but to drop the subject.
+
+One on another the weeks passed monotonously, and Allan showed
+but little of the elasticity of his age and character in bearing
+the affliction that had made him motherless. He finished and
+launched his yacht; but his own journeymen remarked that the work
+seemed to have lost its interest for him. It was not natural to
+the young man to brood over his solitude and his grief as he was
+brooding now. As the spring advanced, Mr. Brock began to feel
+uneasy about the future, if Allan was not roused at once by
+change of scene. After much pondering, the rector decided on
+trying a trip to Paris, and on extending the journey southward if
+his companion showed an interest in Continental traveling.
+Allan's reception of the proposal made atonement for his
+obstinacy in refusing to cultivate his cousin's acquaintance; he
+was willing to go with Mr. Brock wherever Mr. Brock pleased. The
+rector took him at his word, and in the middle of March the two
+strangely assorted companions left for London on their way to
+Paris.
+
+Arrived in London, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly face to
+face with a new anxiety. The unwelcome subject of Ozias
+Midwinter, which had been buried in peace since the beginning of
+December, rose to the surface again, and confronted the rector at
+the very outset of his travels, more unmanageably than ever.
+
+Mr. Brock's position in dealing with this difficult matter had
+been hard enough to maintain when he had first meddled with it.
+He now found himself with no vantage-ground left to stand on.
+Events had so ordered it that the difference of opinion between
+Allan and his mother on the subject of the usher was entirely
+disassociated with the agitation which had hastened Mrs.
+Armadale's death. Allan's resolution to say no irritating words,
+and Mr. Brock's reluctance to touch on a disagreeable topic, had
+kept them both silent about Midwinter in Mrs. Armadale's presence
+during the three days which had intervened between that person's
+departure and the appearance of the strange woman in the village.
+In the period of suspense and suffering that had followed no
+recurrence to the subject of the usher had been possible, and
+none had taken place. Free from all mental disquietude on this
+score, Allan had stoutly preserved his perverse interest in his
+new friend. He had written to tell Midwinter of his affliction,
+and he now proposed (unless the rector formally objected to it)
+paying a visit to his friend before he started for Paris the next
+morning.
+
+What was Mr. Brock to do? There was no denying that Midwinter's
+conduct had pleaded unanswerably against poor Mrs. Armadale's
+unfounded distrust of him. If the rector, with no convincing
+reason to allege against it, and with no right to interfere but
+the right which Allan's courtesy gave him, declined to sanction
+the proposed visit, then farewell to all the old sociability and
+confidence between tutor and pupil on the contemplated tour.
+Environed by difficulties, which might have been possibly worsted
+by a less just and a less kind-hearted man, Mr. Brock said a
+cautious word or two at parting, and (with more confidence in
+Midwinter's discretion and self-denial than he quite liked to
+acknowledge, even to himself) left Allan free to take his own
+way.
+
+After whiling away an hour, during the interval of his pupil's
+absence, by a walk in the streets, the rector returned to his
+hotel, and, finding the newspaper disengaged in the coffee-room,
+sat down absently to look over it. His eye, resting idly on the
+title-page, was startled into instant attention by the very first
+advertisement that it chanced to light on at the head of the
+column. There was Allan's mysterious namesake again, figuring in
+capital letters, and associated this time (in the character of a
+dead man) with the offer of a pecuniary reward. Thus it ran:
+
+
+SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.--To parish clerks, sextons, and others.
+Twenty Pounds reward will be paid to any person who can produce
+evidence of the death of ALLAN ARMADALE, only son of the late
+Allan Armadale, of Barbadoes, and born in Trinidad in the year
+1830. Further particulars on application to Messrs. Hammick and
+Ridge, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.
+
+
+Even Mr. Brock's essentially unimaginative mind began to stagger
+superstitiously in the dark as he laid the newspaper down again.
+Little by little a vague suspicion took possession of him that
+the whole series of events which had followed the first
+appearance of Allan's namesake in the newspaper six years since
+was held together by some mysterious connection, and was tending
+steadily to some unimaginable end. Without knowing why, he began
+to feel uneasy at Allan's absence. Without knowing why, he became
+impatient to get his pupil away from England before anything else
+happened between night and morning.
+
+In an hour more the rector was relieved of all immediate anxiety
+by Allan's return to the hotel. The young man was vexed and out
+of spirits. He had discovered Midwinter's lodgings, but he had
+failed to find Midwinter himself. The only account his landlady
+could give of him was that he had gone out at his customary time
+to get his dinner at the nearest eating-house, and that he had
+not returned, in accordance with his usual regular habits, at his
+usual regular hour. Allan had therefore gone to inquire at the
+eating-house, and had found, on describing him, that Midwinter
+was well known there. It was his custom, on other days, to take a
+frugal dinner, and to sit half an hour afterward reading the
+newspaper. On this occasion, after dining, he had taken up the
+paper as usual, had suddenly thrown it aside again, and had gone,
+nobody knew where, in a violent hurry. No further information
+being attainable, Allan had left a note at the lodgings, giving
+his address at the hotel, and begging Midwinter to come and say
+good-by before his departure for Paris.
+
+The evening passed, and Allan's invisible friend never appeared.
+The morning came, bringing no obstacles with it, and Mr. Brock
+and his pupil left London. So far Fortune had declared herself at
+last on the rector's side. Ozias Midwinter, after intrusively
+rising to the surface, had conveniently dropped out of sight
+again. What was to happen next?
+
+                              -------------
+
+Advancing once more, by three weeks only, from past to present,
+Mr. Brock's memory took up the next event on the seventh of
+April. To all appearance, the chain was now broken at last. The
+new event had no recognizable connection (either to his mind or
+to Allan's) with any of the persons who had appeared, or any of
+the circumstances that had happened, in the by-gone time.
+
+The travelers had as yet got no further than Paris. Allan's
+spirits had risen with the change; and he had been made all the
+readier to enjoy the novelty of the scene around him by receiving
+a letter from Midwinter, containing news which Mr. Brock himself
+acknowledged promised fairly for the future. The ex-usher had
+been away on business when Allan had called at his lodgings,
+having been led by an accidental circumstance to open
+communications with his relatives on that day. The result had
+taken him entirely by surprise: it had unexpectedly secured to
+him a little income of his own for the rest of his life. His
+future plans, now that this piece of good fortune had fallen to
+his share, were still unsettled. But if Allan wished to hear what
+he ultimately decided on, his agent in London (whose direction he
+inclosed) would receive communications for him, and would furnish
+Mr. Armadale at all future times with his address.
+
+On receipt of this letter, Allan had seized the pen
+ in his usual headlong way, and had insisted on Midwinter's
+immediately joining Mr. Brock and himself on their travels. The
+last days of March passed, and no answer to the proposal was
+received. The first days of April came, and on the seventh of the
+month there was a letter for Allan at last on the
+breakfast-table. He snatched it up, looked at the address, and
+threw the letter down again impatiently. The handwriting was not
+Midwinter's. Allan finished his breakfast before he cared to read
+what his correspondent had to say to him.
+
+The meal over, young Armadale lazily opened the letter. He began
+it with an expression of supreme indifference. He finished it
+with a sudden leap out of his chair, and a loud shout of
+astonishment. Wondering, as he well might, at this extraordinary
+outbreak, Mr. Brock took up the letter which Allan had tossed
+across the table to him. Before he had come to the end of it, his
+hands dropped helplessly on his knees, and the blank bewilderment
+of his pupil's expression was accurately reflected on his own
+face.
+
+If ever two men had good cause for being thrown completely off
+their balance, Allan and the rector were those two. The letter
+which had struck them both with the same shock of astonishment
+did, beyond all question, contain an announcement which, on a
+first discovery of it, was simply incredible. The news was from
+Norfolk, and was to this effect. In little more than one week's
+time death had mown down no less than three lives in the family
+at Thorpe Ambrose, and Allan Armadale was at that moment heir to
+an estate of eight thousand a year!
+
+A second perusal of the letter enabled the rector and his
+companion to master the details which had escaped them on a first
+reading
+
+The writer was the family lawyer at Thorpe Ambrose. After
+announcing to Allan the deaths of his cousin Arthur at the age of
+twenty-five, of his uncle Henry at the age of forty-eight, and of
+his cousin John at the age of twenty-one, the lawyer proceeded to
+give a brief abstract of the terms of the elder Mr. Blanchard's
+will. The claims of male issue were, as is not unusual in such
+cases, preferred to the claims of female issue. Failing Arthur
+and his issue male, the estate was left to Henry and his issue
+male. Failing them, it went to the issue male of Henry's sister;
+and, in default of such issue, to the next heir male. As events
+had happened, the two young men, Arthur and John, had died
+unmarried, and Henry Blanchard had died, leaving no surviving
+child but a daughter. Under these circumstances, Allan was the
+next heir male pointed at by the will, and was now legally
+successor to the Thorpe Ambrose estate. Having made this
+extraordinary announcement, the lawyer requested to be favored
+with Mr. Armadale's instructions, and added, in conclusion, that
+he would be happy to furnish any further particulars that were
+desired.
+
+It was useless to waste time in wondering at an event which
+neither Allan nor his mother had ever thought of as even remotely
+possible. The only thing to be done was to go back to England at
+once. The next day found the travelers installed once more in
+their London hotel, and the day after the affair was placed in
+the proper professional hands. The inevitable corresponding and
+consulting ensued, and one by one the all-important particulars
+flowed in, until the measure of information was pronounced to be
+full.
+
+This was the strange story of the three deaths:
+
+At the time when Mr. Brock had written to Mrs. Armadale's
+relatives to announce the news of her decease (that is to say, in
+the middle of the month of January), the family at Thorpe Ambrose
+numbered five persons--Arthur Blanchard (in possession of the
+estate), living in the great house with his mother; and Henry
+Blanchard, the uncle, living in the neighborhood, a widower with
+two children, a son and a daughter. To cement the family
+connection still more closely, Arthur Blanchard was engaged to be
+married to his cousin. The wedding was to be celebrated with
+great local rejoicings in the coming summer, when the young lady
+had completed her twentieth year.
+
+The month of February had brought changes with it in the family
+position. Observing signs of delicacy in the health of his son,
+Mr. Henry Blanchard left Norfolk, taking the young man with him,
+under medical advice, to try the climate of Italy. Early in the
+ensuing month of March, Arthur Blanchard also left Thorpe
+Ambrose, for a few days only, on business which required his
+presence in London. The business took him into the City. Annoyed
+by the endless impediments in the streets, he returned westward
+by one of the river steamers, and, so returning, met his death.
+
+As the steamer left the wharf, he noticed a woman near him who
+had shown a singular hesitation in embarking, and who had been
+the last of the passengers to take her place in the vessel. She
+was neatly dressed in black silk, with a red Paisley shawl over
+her shoulders, and she kept her face hidden behind a thick veil.
+Arthur Blanchard was struck by the rare grace and elegance of her
+figure, and he felt a young man's passing curiosity to see her
+face. She neither lifted her veil nor turned her head his way.
+After taking a few steps hesitatingly backward and forward on the
+deck, she walked away on a sudden to the stern of the vessel. In
+a minute more there was a cry of alarm from the man at the helm,
+and the engines were stopped immediately. The woman had thrown
+herself overboard.
+
+The passengers all rushed to the side of the vessel to look.
+Arthur Blanchard alone, without an instant's hesitation, jumped
+into the river. He was an excellent swimmer, and he reached the
+woman as she rose again to the surface, after sinking for the
+first time. Help was at hand, and they were both brought safely
+ashore. The woman was taken to the nearest police station, and
+was soon restored to her senses, her preserver giving his name
+and address, as usual in such cases, to the inspector on duty,
+who wisely recommended him to get into a warm bath, and to send
+to his lodgings for dry clothes. Arthur Blanchard, who had never
+known an hour's illness since he was a child, laughed at the
+caution, and went back in a cab. The next day he was too ill to
+attend the examination before the magistrate. A fortnight
+afterward he was a dead man.
+
+The news of the calamity reached Henry Blanchard and his son at
+Milan, and within an hour of the time when they received it they
+were on their way back to England. The snow on the Alps had
+loosened earlier than usual that year, and the passes were
+notoriously dangerous. The father and son, traveling in their own
+carriage, were met on the mountain by the mail returning, after
+sending the letters on by hand. Warnings which would have
+produced their effect under any ordinary circumstances were now
+vainly addressed to the two Englishmen. Their impatience to be at
+home again, after the catastrophe which had befallen their
+family, brooked no delay. Bribes lavishly offered to the
+postilions, tempted them to go on. The carriage pursued its way,
+and was lost to view in the mist. When it was seen again, it was
+disinterred from the bottom of a precipice--the men, the horses,
+and the vehicle all crushed together under the wreck and ruin of
+an avalanche.
+
+So the three lives were mown down by death. So, in a clear
+sequence of events, a woman's suicide-leap into a river had
+opened to Allan Armadale the succession to the Thorpe Ambrose
+estates.
+
+Who was the woman? The man who saved her life never knew. The
+magistrate who remanded her, the chaplain who exhorted her, the
+reporter who exhibited her in print, never knew. It was recorded
+of her with surprise that, though most respectably dressed, she
+had nevertheless described herself as being "in distress." She
+had expressed the deepest contrition, but had persisted in giving
+a name which was on the face of it a false one; in telling a
+commonplace story, which was manifestly an invention; and in
+refusing to the last to furnish any clew to her friends. A lady
+connected with a charitable institution ("interested by her
+extreme elegance and beauty") had volunteered to take charge of
+her, and to bring her into a better frame of mind . The first
+day's experience of the penitent had been far from cheering, and
+the second day's experience had been conclusive. She had left the
+institution by stealth; and--though the visiting clergyman,
+taking a special interest in the case, had caused special efforts
+to be made--all search after her, from that time forth, had
+proved fruitless.
+
+While this useless investigation (undertaken at Allan's express
+desire) was in progress, the lawyers had settled the preliminary
+formalities connected with the succession to the property. All
+that remained was for the new master of Thorpe Ambrose to decide
+when he would personally establish himself on the estate of which
+he was now the legal possessor.
+
+Left necessarily to his own guidance in this matter, Allan
+settled it for himself in his usual hot-headed, generous way. He
+positively declined to take possession until Mrs. Blanchard and
+her niece (who had been permitted thus far, as a matter of
+courtesy, to remain in their old home) had recovered from the
+calamity that had befallen them, and were fit to decide for
+themselves what their future proceedings should be. A private
+correspondence followed this resolution, comprehending, on
+Allan's side, unlimited offers of everything he had to give (in a
+house which he had not yet seen), and, on the ladies' side, a
+discreetly reluctant readiness to profit by the young gentleman's
+generosity in the matter of time. To the astonishment of his
+legal advisers, Allan entered their office one morning,
+accompanied by Mr. Brock, and announced, with perfect composure,
+that the ladies had been good enough to take his own arrangements
+off his hands, and that, in deference to their convenience, he
+meant to defer establishing himself at Thorpe Ambrose till that
+day two months. The lawyers stared at Allan, and Allan, returning
+the compliment, stared at the lawyers.
+
+"What on earth are you wondering at, gentlemen?" he inquired,
+with a boyish bewilderment in his good-humored blue eyes. "Why
+shouldn't I give the ladies their two months, if the ladies want
+them? Let the poor things take their own time, and welcome. My
+rights? and my position? Oh, pooh! pooh! I'm in no hurry to be
+squire of the parish; it's not in my way. What do I mean to do
+for the two months? What I should have done anyhow, whether the
+ladies had stayed or not; I mean to go cruising at sea. That's
+what _I_ like! I've got a new yacht at home in Somersetshire--a
+yacht of my own building. And I'll tell you what, sir," continued
+Allan, seizing the head partner by the arm in the fervor of his
+friendly intentions, "you look sadly in want of a holiday in the
+fresh air, and you shall come along with me on the trial trip of
+my new vessel. And your partners, too, if they like. And the head
+clerk, who is the best fellow I ever met with in my life. Plenty
+of room--we'll all shake down together on the floor, and we'll
+give Mr. Brock a rug on the cabin table. Thorpe Ambrose be
+hanged! Do you mean to say, if you had built a vessel yourself
+(as I have), you would go to any estate in the three kingdoms,
+while your own little beauty was sitting like a duck on the water
+at home, and waiting for you to try her? You legal gentlemen are
+great hands at argument. What do you think of that argument? I
+think it's unanswerable--and I'm off to Somersetshire to-morrow."
+
+With those words, the new possessor of eight thousand a year
+dashed into the head clerk's office, and invited that functionary
+to a cruise on the high seas, with a smack on the shoulder which
+was heard distinctly by his masters in the next room. The firm
+looked in interrogative wonder at Mr. Brock. A client who could
+see a position among the landed gentry of England waiting for
+him, without being in a hurry to occupy it at the earliest
+possible opportunity, was a client of whom they possessed no
+previous experience.
+
+"He must have been very oddly brought up," said the lawyers to
+the rector.
+
+"Very oddly," said the rector to the lawyers.
+
+A last leap over one month more brought Mr. Brock to the present
+time--to the bedroom at Castletown, in which he was sitting
+thinking, and to the anxiety which was obstinately intruding
+itself between him and his night's rest. That anxiety was no
+unfamiliar enemy to the rector's peace of mind. It had first
+found him out in Somersetshire six months since, and it had now
+followed him to the Isle of Man under the inveterately obtrusive
+form of Ozias Midwinter.
+
+The change in Allan's future prospects had worked no
+corresponding alteration in his perverse fancy for the castaway
+at the village inn. In the midst of the consultations with the
+lawyers he had found time to visit Midwinter, and on the journey
+back with the rector there was Allan's friend in the carriage,
+returning with them to Somersetshire by Allan's own invitation.
+
+The ex-usher's hair had grown again on his shaven skull, and his
+dress showed the renovating influence of an accession of
+pecuniary means, but in all other respects the man was unchanged.
+He met Mr. Brock's distrust with the old uncomplaining
+resignation to it; he maintained the same suspicious silence on
+the subject of his relatives and his early life; he spoke of
+Allan's kindness to him with the same undisciplined fervor of
+gratitude and surprise. "I have done what I could, sir," he said
+to Mr. Brock, while Allan was asleep in the railway carriage. "I
+have kept out of Mr. Armadale's way, and I have not even answered
+his last letter to me. More than that is more than I can do. I
+don't ask you to consider my own feeling toward the only human
+creature who has never suspected and never ill-treated me. I can
+resist my own feeling, but I can't resist the young gentleman
+himself. There's not another like him in the world. If we are to
+be parted again, it must be his doing or yours--not mine. The
+dog's master has whistled," said this strange man, with a
+momentary outburst of the hidden passion in him, and a sudden
+springing of angry tears in his wild brown eyes, "and it is hard,
+sir, to blame the dog when the dog comes."
+
+Once more Mr. Brock's humanity got the better of Mr. Brock's
+caution. He determined to wait, and see what the coming days of
+social intercourse might bring forth.
+
+The days passed; the yacht was rigged and fitted for sea; a
+cruise was arranged to the Welsh coast--and Midwinter the Secret
+was the same Midwinter still. Confinement on board a little
+vessel of five-and-thirty tons offered no great attraction to a
+man of Mr. Brock's time of life. But he sailed on the trial trip
+of the yacht nevertheless, rather than trust Allan alone with his
+new friend.
+
+Would the close companionship of the three on their cruise tempt
+the man into talking of his own affairs? No; he was ready enough
+on other subjects, especially if Allan led the way to them. But
+not a word escaped him about himself. Mr. Brock tried him with
+questions about his recent inheritance, and was answered as he
+had been answered once already at the Somersetshire inn. It was a
+curious coincidence, Midwinter admitted, that Mr. Armadale's
+prospects and his own prospects should both have unexpectedly
+changed for the better about the same time. But there the
+resemblance ended. It was no large fortune that had fallen into
+his lap, though it was enough for his wants. It had not
+reconciled him with his relations, for the money had not come to
+him as a matter of kindness, but as a matter of right. As for the
+circumstance which had led to his communicating with his family,
+it was not worth mentioning, seeing that the temporary renewal of
+intercourse which had followed had produced no friendly results.
+Nothing had come of it but the money--and, with the money, an
+anxiety which troubled him sometimes, when he woke in the small
+hours of the morning.
+
+At those last words he became suddenly silent, as if for once his
+well-guarded tongue had betrayed him.
+
+Mr. Brock seized the opportunity, and bluntly asked him what the
+nature of the anxiety might be. Did it relate to money? No; it
+related to a Letter which had been waiting for him for many
+years. Had he received the letter? Not yet; it had been left
+under charge of one of the partners in the firm which had man
+aged the business of his inheritance for him; the partner had
+been absent from England; and the letter, locked up among his own
+private papers, could not be got at till he returned. He was
+expected back toward the latter part of that present May, and, if
+Midwinter could be sure where the cruise would take them to at
+the close of the month, he thought he would write and have the
+letter forwarded. Had he any family reasons to be anxious about
+it? None that he knew of; he was curious to see what had been
+waiting for him for many years, and that was all. So he answered
+the rector's questions, with his tawny face turned away over the
+low bulwark of the yacht, and his fishing-line dragging in his
+supple brown hands.
+
+Favored by wind and weather, the little vessel had done wonders
+on her trial trip. Before the period fixed for the duration of
+the cruise had half expired, the yacht was as high up on the
+Welsh coast as Holyhead; and Allan, eager for adventure in
+unknown regions, had declared boldly for an extension of the
+voyage northward to the Isle of Man. Having ascertained from
+reliable authority that the weather really promised well for a
+cruise in that quarter, and that, in the event of any unforeseen
+necessity for return, the railway was accessible by the steamer
+from Douglas to Liverpool, Mr. Brock agreed to his pupil's
+proposal. By that night's post he wrote to Allan's lawyers and to
+his own rectory, indicating Douglas in the Isle of Man as the
+next address to which letters might be forwarded. At the
+post-office he met Midwinter, who had just dropped a letter into
+the box. Remembering what he had said on board the yacht, Mr.
+Brock concluded that they had both taken the same precaution, and
+had ordered their correspondence to be forwarded to the same
+place.
+
+Late the next day they set sail for the Isle of Man.
+
+For a few hours all went well; but sunset brought with it the
+signs of a coming change. With the darkness the wind rose to a
+gale, and the question whether Allan and his journeymen had or
+had not built a stout sea-boat was seriously tested for the first
+time. All that night, after trying vainly to bear up for
+Holyhead, the little vessel kept the sea, and stood her trial
+bravely. The next morning the Isle of Man was in view, and the
+yacht was safe at Castletown. A survey by daylight of hull and
+rigging showed that all the damage done might be set right again
+in a week's time. The cruising party had accordingly remained at
+Castletown, Allan being occupied in superintending the repairs,
+Mr. Brock in exploring the neighborhood, and Midwinter in making
+daily pilgrimages on foot to Douglas and back to inquire for
+letters.
+
+The first of the cruising party who received a letter was Allan.
+"More worries from those everlasting lawyers," was all he said,
+when he had read the letter, and had crumpled it up in his
+pocket. The rector's turn came next, before the week's sojourn at
+Castletown had expired. On the fifth day he found a letter from
+Somersetshire waiting for him at the hotel. It had been brought
+there by Midwinter, and it contained news which entirely
+overthrew all Mr. Brock's holiday plans. The clergyman who had
+undertaken to do duty for him in his absence had been
+unexpectedly summoned home again; and Mr. Brock had no choice
+(the day of the week being Friday) but to cross the next morning
+from Douglass to Liverpool, and get back by railway on Saturday
+night in time for Sunday's service.
+
+Having read his letter, and resigned himself to his altered
+circumstances as patiently as he might, the rector passed next to
+a question that pressed for serious consideration in its turn.
+Burdened with his heavy responsibility toward Allan, and
+conscious of his own undiminished distrust of Allan's new friend,
+how was he to act, in the emergency that now beset him, toward
+the two young men who had been his companions on the cruise?
+
+Mr. Brock had first asked himself that awkward question on the
+Friday afternoon, and he was still trying vainly to answer it,
+alone in his own room, at one o'clock on the Saturday morning. It
+was then only the end of May, and the residence of the ladies at
+Thorpe Ambrose (unless they chose to shorten it of their own
+accord) would not expire till the middle of June. Even if the
+repairs of the yacht had been completed (which was not the case),
+there was no possible pretense for hurrying Allan back to
+Somersetshire. But one other alternative remained--to leave him
+where he was. In other words, to leave him, at the turning-point
+of his life, under the sole influence of a man whom he had first
+met with as a castaway at a village inn, and who was still, to
+all practical purposes, a total stranger to him.
+
+In despair of obtaining any better means of enlightenment to
+guide his decision, Mr. Brock reverted to the impression which
+Midwinter had produced on his own mind in the familiarity of the
+cruise.
+
+Young as he was, the ex-usher had evidently lived a varied life.
+He could speak of books like a man who had really enjoyed them;
+he could take his turn at the helm like a sailor who knew his
+duty; he could cook, and climb the rigging, and lay the cloth for
+dinner, with an odd delight in the exhibition of his own
+dexterity. The display of these, and other qualities like them,
+as his spirits rose with the cruise, had revealed the secret of
+his attraction for Allan plainly enough. But had all disclosures
+rested there? Had the man let no chance light in on his character
+in the rector's presence? Very little; and that little did not
+set him forth in a morally alluring aspect. His way in the world
+had lain evidently in doubtful places; familiarity with the small
+villainies of vagabonds peeped out of him now and then; and, more
+significant still, he habitually slept the light, suspicious
+sleep of a man who has been accustomed to close his eyes in doubt
+of the company under the same roof with him. Down to the very
+latest moment of the rector's experience of him--down to that
+present Friday night--his conduct had been persistently secret
+and unaccountable to the very last. After bringing Mr. Brock's
+letter to the hotel, he had mysterious disappeared from the house
+without leaving any message for his companions, and without
+letting anybody see whether he had or had not received a letter
+himself. At nightfall he had come back stealthily in the
+darkness, had been caught on the stairs by Allan, eager to tell
+him of the change in the rector's plans, had listened to the news
+without a word of remark! and had ended by sulkily locking
+himself into his own room. What was there in his favor to set
+against such revelations of his character as these--against his
+wandering eyes, his obstinate reserve with the rector, his
+ominous silence on the subject of family and friends? Little or
+nothing: the sum of all his merits began and ended with his
+gratitude to Allan.
+
+
+Mr. Brock left his seat on the side of the bed, trimmed his
+candle, and, still lost in his own thoughts, looked out absently
+at the night. The change of place brought no new ideas with it.
+His retrospect over his own past life had amply satisfied him
+that his present sense of responsibility rested on no merely
+fanciful grounds, and, having brought him to that point, had left
+him there, standing at the window, and seeing nothing but the
+total darkness in his own mind faithfully reflected by the total
+darkness of the night.
+
+"If I only had a friend to apply to!" thought the rector. "If I
+could only find some one to help me in this miserable place!"
+
+At the moment when the aspiration crossed his mind, it was
+suddenly answered by a low knock at the door, and a voice said
+softly in the passage outside, "Let me come in."
+
+After an instant's pause to steady his nerves, Mr. Brock opened
+the door, and found himself, at one o'clock in the morning,
+standing face to face on the threshold of his own bedroom with
+Ozias Midwinter.
+
+"Are you ill?" asked the rector, as soon as his astonishment
+would allow him to speak.
+
+"I have come here to make a clean breast of it!" was the strange
+answer. "Will you let me in?"
+
+With those words he walked into the room, his eyes on the ground,
+his lips ashy pale, and his han d holding something hidden behind
+him.
+
+"I saw the light under your door," he went on, without looking
+up, and without moving his hand, "and I know the trouble on your
+mind which is keeping you from your rest. You are going away
+to-morrow morning, and you don't like leaving Mr. Armadale alone
+with a stranger like me."
+
+Startled as he was, Mr. Brock saw the serious necessity of being
+plain with a man who had come at that time, and had said those
+words to him.
+
+"You have guessed right," he answered. "I stand in the place of a
+father to Allan Armadale, and I am naturally unwilling to leave
+him, at his age, with a man whom I don't know."
+
+Ozias Midwinter took a step forward to the table. His wandering
+eyes rested on the rector's New Testament, which was one of the
+objects lying on it.
+
+"You have read that Book, in the years of a long life, to many
+congregations," he said. "Has it taught you mercy to your
+miserable fellow-creatures?"
+
+Without waiting to be answered, he looked Mr. Brock in the face
+for the first time, and brought his hidden hand slowly into view.
+
+"Read that," he said; "and, for Christ's sake, pity me when you
+know who I am."
+
+He laid a letter of many pages on the table. It was the letter
+that Mr. Neal had posted at Wildbad nineteen years since.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE. MAN REVEALED.
+
+THE first cool breathings of the coming dawn fluttered through
+the open window as Mr. Brock read the closing lines of the
+Confession. He put it from him in silence, without looking up.
+The first shock of discovery had struck his mind, and had passed
+away again. At his age, and with his habits of thought, his grasp
+was not strong enough to hold the whole revelation that had
+fallen on him. All his heart. when he closed the manuscript, was
+with the memory of the woman who had been the beloved friend of
+his later and happier life; all his thoughts were busy with the
+miserable secret of her treason to her own father which the
+letter had disclosed.
+
+He was startled out of the narrow limits of his own little grief
+by the vibration of the table at which he sat, under a hand that
+was laid on it heavily. The instinct of reluctance was strong in
+him; but he conquered it, and looked up. There, silently
+confronting him in the mixed light of the yellow candle flame and
+the faint gray dawn, stood the castaway of the village inn--the
+inheritor of the fatal Armadale name.
+
+Mr. Brock shuddered as the terror of the present time and the
+darker terror yet of the future that might be coming rushed back
+on him at the sight of the man's face. The man saw it, and spoke
+first.
+
+"Is my father's crime looking at you out of my eyes?" he asked.
+"Has the ghost of the drowned man followed me into the room?"
+
+The suffering and the passion that he was forcing back shook the
+hand that he still kept on the table, and stifled the voice in
+which he spoke until it sank to a whisper.
+
+"I have no wish to treat you otherwise than justly and kindly,"
+answered Mr. Brock. "Do me justice on my side, and believe that I
+am incapable of cruelly holding you responsible for your father's
+crime."
+
+The reply seemed to compose him. He bowed his head in silence,
+and took up the confession from the table.
+
+"Have you read this through?" he asked, quietly.
+
+"Every word of it, from first to last."
+
+"Have I dealt openly with you so far. Has Ozias Midwinter--"
+
+"Do you still call yourself by that name," interrupted Mr. Brock,
+"now your true name is known to me?"
+
+"Since I have read my father's confession," was the answer, "I
+like my ugly alias better than ever. Allow me to repeat the
+question which I was about to put to you a minute since: Has
+Ozias Midwinter done his best thus far to enlighten Mr. Brock?"
+
+The rector evaded a direct reply. "Few men in your position," he
+said, "would have had the courage to show me that letter."
+
+"Don't be too sure, sir, of the vagabond you picked up at the inn
+till you know a little more of him than you know now. You have
+got the secret of my birth, but you are not in possession yet of
+the story of my life. You ought to know it, and you shall know
+it, before you leave me alone with Mr. Armadale. Will you wait,
+and rest a little while, or shall I tell it you now?"
+
+"Now," said Mr. Brock, still as far away as ever from knowing the
+real character of the man before him.
+
+Everything Ozias Midwinter said, everything Ozias Midwinter did,
+was against him. He had spoken with a sardonic indifference,
+almost with an insolence of tone, which would have repelled the
+sympathies of any man who heard him. And now, instead of placing
+himself at the table, and addressing his story directly to the
+rector, he withdrew silently and ungraciously to the window-seat.
+There he sat, his face averted, his hands mechanically turning
+the leaves of his father's letter till he came to the last. With
+his eyes fixed on the closing lines of the manuscript, and with a
+strange mixture of recklessness and sadness in his voice, he
+began his promised narrative in these words:
+
+
+"The first thing you know of me," he said, "is what my father's
+confession has told you already. He mentions here that I was a
+child, asleep on his breast, when he spoke his last words in this
+world, and when a stranger's hand wrote them down for him at his
+deathbed. That stranger's name, as you may have noticed, is
+signed on the cover--'Alexander Neal, Writer to the Signet,
+Edinburgh.' The first recollection I have is of Alexander Neal
+beating me with a horsewhip (I dare say I deserved it), in the
+character of my stepfather."
+
+"Have you no recollection of your mother at the same time?" asked
+Mr. Brock.
+
+"Yes; I remember her having shabby old clothes made up to fit me,
+and having fine new frocks bought for her two children by her
+second husband. I remember the servants laughing at me in my old
+things, and the horsewhip finding its way to my shoulders again
+for losing my temper and tearing my shabby clothes. My next
+recollection gets on to a year or two later. I remember myself
+locked up in a lumber-room, with a bit of bread and a mug of
+water, wondering what it was that made my mother and my
+stepfather seem to hate the very sight of me. I never settled
+that question till yesterday, and then I solved the mystery, when
+my father's letter was put into my hands. My mother knew what had
+really happened on board the French timber-ship, and my
+stepfather knew what had really happened, and they were both well
+aware that the shameful secret which they would fain have kept
+from every living creature was a secret which would be one day
+revealed to _me._ There was no help for it--the confession was in
+the executor's hands, and there was I, an ill-conditioned brat,
+with my mother's negro blood in my face, and my murdering
+father's passions in my heart, inheritor of their secret in spite
+of them! I don't wonder at the horsewhip now, or the shabby old
+clothes, or the bread and water in the lumber-room. Natural
+penalties all of them, sir, which the child was beginning to pay
+already for the father's sin."
+
+Mr. Brock looked at the swarthy, secret face, still obstinately
+turned away from him. "Is this the stark insensibility of a
+vagabond," he asked himself, "or the despair, in disguise, of a
+miserable man?"
+
+"School is my next recollection," the other went on--"a cheap
+place in a lost corner of Scotland. I was left there, with a bad
+character to help me at starting. I spare you the story of the
+master's cane in the schoolroom, and the boys' kicks in the
+playground. I dare say there was ingrained ingratitude in my
+nature; at any rate, I ran away. The first person who met me
+asked my name. I was too young and too foolish to know the
+importance of concealing it, and, as a matter of course, I was
+taken back to school the same evening. The result taught me a
+lesson which I have not forgotten since. In a day or two more,
+like the vagabond I was, I ran away for the second time. The
+school watch-dog had had his instructions, I suppose: he stopped
+me before I got outside the gate. Here is his mark, among the
+rest, on the back of my hand. His master's marks I can't show
+you; they are all on my back. Can you believe in my perversity?
+There was a devil in me that no dog
+ could worry out. I ran away again as soon as I left my bed, and
+this time I got off. At nightfall I found myself (with a
+pocketful of the school oatmeal) lost on a moor. I lay down on
+the fine soft heather, under the lee of a great gray rock. Do you
+think I felt lonely? Not I! I was away from the master's cane,
+away from my schoolfellows' kicks, away from my mother, away from
+my stepfather; and I lay down that night under my good friend the
+rock, the happiest boy in all Scotland!"
+
+Through the wretched childhood which that one significant
+circumstance disclosed, Mr. Brock began to see dimly how little
+was really strange, how little really unaccountable, in the
+character of the man who was now speaking to him.
+
+"I slept soundly," Midwinter continued, "under my friend the
+rock. When I woke in the morning, I found a sturdy old man with a
+fiddle sitting on one side of me, and two performing dogs on the
+other. Experience had made me too sharp to tell the truth when
+the man put his first questions. He didn't press them; he gave me
+a good breakfast out of his knapsack, and he let me romp with the
+dogs. 'I'll tell you what,' he said, when he had got my
+confidence in this manner, 'you want three things, my man: you
+want a new father, a new family, and a new name. I'll be your
+father. I'll let you have the dogs for your brothers; and, if
+you'll promise to be very careful of it, I'll give you my own
+name into the bargain. Ozias Midwinter, Junior, you have had a
+good breakfast; if you want a good dinner, come along with me!'
+He got up, the dogs trotted after him, and I trotted after the
+dogs. Who was my new father? you will ask. A half-breed gypsy,
+sir; a drunkard, a ruffian, and a thief--and the best friend I
+ever had! Isn't a man your friend who gives you your food, your
+shelter, and your education? Ozias Midwinter taught me to dance
+the Highland fling, to throw somersaults, to walk on stilts, and
+to sing songs to his fiddle. Sometimes we roamed the country, and
+performed at fairs. Sometimes we tried the large towns, and
+enlivened bad company over its cups. I was a nice, lively little
+boy of eleven years old, and bad company, the women especially,
+took a fancy to me and my nimble feet. I was vagabond enough to
+like the life. The dogs and I lived together, ate, and drank, and
+slept together. I can't think of those poor little four-footed
+brothers of mine, even now, without a choking in the throat. Many
+is the beating we three took together; many is the hard day's
+dancing we did together; many is the night we have slept
+together, and whimpered together, on the cold hill-side. I'm not
+trying to distress you, sir; I'm only telling you the truth. The
+life with all its hardships was a life that fitted me, and the
+half-breed gypsy who gave me his name, ruffian as he was, was a
+ruffian I liked."
+
+"A man who beat you!" exclaimed Mr. Brock, in astonishment.
+
+"Didn't I tell you just now, sir, that I lived with the dogs? and
+did you ever hear of a dog who liked his master the worse for
+beating him? Hundreds of thousands of miserable men, women, and
+children would have liked that man (as I liked him) if he had
+always given them what he always gave me--plenty to eat. It was
+stolen food mostly, and my new gypsy father was generous with it.
+He seldom laid the stick on us when he was sober; but it diverted
+him to hear us yelp when he was drunk. He died drunk, and enjoyed
+his favorite amusement with his last breath. One day (when I had
+been two years in his service), after giving us a good dinner out
+on the moor, he sat down with his back against a stone, and
+called us up to divert himself with his stick. He made the dogs
+yelp first, and then he called to me. I didn't go very willingly;
+he had been drinking harder than usual, and the more he drank the
+better he liked his after-dinner amusement. He was in high
+good-humor that day, and he hit me so hard that he toppled over,
+in his drunken state, with the force of his own blow. He fell
+with his face in a puddle, and lay there without moving. I and
+the dogs stood at a distance, and looked at him: we thought he
+was feigning, to get us near and have another stroke at us. He
+feigned so long that we ventured up to him at last. It took me
+some time to pull him over; he was a heavy man. When I did get
+him on his back, he was dead. We made all the outcry we could;
+but the dogs were little, and I was little, and the place was
+lonely; and no help came to us. I took his fiddle and his stick;
+I said to my two brothers, 'Come along, we must get our own
+living now;' and we went away heavy-hearted, and left him on the
+moor. Unnatural as it may seem to you, I was sorry for him. I
+kept his ugly name through all my after-wanderings, and I have
+enough of the old leaven left in me to like the sound of it
+still. Midwinter or Armadale, never mind my name now, we will
+talk of that afterward; you must know the worst of me first."
+
+"Why not the best of you?" said Mr. Brock, gently.
+
+"Thank you, sir; but I am here to tell the truth. We will get on,
+if you please, to the next chapter in my story. The dogs and I
+did badly, after our master's death; our luck was against us. I
+lost one of my little brothers--the best performer of the two; he
+was stolen, and I never recovered him. My fiddle and my stilts
+were taken from me next, by main force, by a tramp who was
+stronger than I. These misfortunes drew Tommy and me--I beg your
+pardon, sir, I mean the dog--closer together than ever.
+
+I think we had some kind of dim foreboding on both sides that we
+had not done with our misfortunes yet; anyhow, it was not very
+long before we were parted forever. We were neither of us thieves
+(our master had been satisfied with teaching us to dance); but we
+both committed an invasion of the rights of property, for all
+that. Young creatures, even when they are half starved, cannot
+resist taking a run sometimes on a fine morning. Tommy and I
+could not resist taking a run into a gentleman's plantation; the
+gentleman preserved his game; and the gentleman's keeper knew his
+business. I heard a gun go off; you can guess the rest. God
+preserve me from ever feeling such misery again as I felt when I
+lay down by Tommy, and took him, dead and bloody, in my arms! The
+keeper attempted to part us; I bit him, like the wild animal I
+was. He tried the stick on me next; he might as well have tried
+it on one of the trees. The noise reached the ears of two young
+ladies riding near the place--daughters of the gentleman on whose
+property I was a trespasser. They were too well brought up to
+lift their voices against the sacred right of preserving game,
+but they were kind-hearted girls, and they pitied me, and took me
+home with them. I remember the gentlemen of the house (keen
+sportsmen all of them) roaring with laughter as I went by the
+windows, crying, with my little dead dog in my arms. Don't
+suppose I complain of their laughter; it did me good service; it
+roused the indignation of the two ladies. One of them took me
+into her own garden, and showed me a place where I might bury my
+dog under the flowers, and be sure that no other hands should
+ever disturb him again. The other went to her father, and
+persuaded him to give the forlorn little vagabond a chance in the
+house, under one of the upper servants. Yes! you have been
+cruising in company with a man who was once a foot-boy. I saw you
+look at me, when I amused Mr. Armadale by laying the cloth on
+board the yacht. Now you know why I laid it so neatly, and forgot
+nothing. It has been my good fortune to see something of society;
+I have helped to fill its stomach and black its boots. My
+experience of the servants' hall was not a long one. Before I had
+worn out my first suit of livery, there was a scandal in the
+house. It was the old story; there is no need to tell it over
+again for the thousandth time. Loose money left on a table, and
+not found there again; all the servants with characters to appeal
+to except the foot-boy, who had been rashly taken on trial. Well!
+well! I was lucky in that house to the last; I was not prosecuted
+for taking what I had not only never touched, but never even
+seen: I was only turned out. One morning I went in m y old
+clothes to the grave where I had buried Tommy. I gave the place a
+kiss; I said good-by to my little dead dog; and there I was, out
+in the world again, at the ripe age of thirteen years!"
+
+"In that friendless state, and at that tender age," said Mr.
+Brock, "did no thought cross your mind of going home again?"
+
+"I went home again, sir, that very night--I slept on the
+hill-side. What other home had I? In a day or two's time I
+drifted back to the large towns and the bad company, the great
+open country was so lonely to me, now I had lost the dogs! Two
+sailors picked me up next. I was a handy lad, and I got a
+cabin-boy's berth on board a coasting- vessel. A cabin-boy's
+berth means dirt to live in, offal to eat, a man's work on a
+boy's shoulders, and the rope's-end at regular intervals. The
+vessel touched at a port in the Hebrides. I was as ungrateful as
+usual to my best benefactors; I ran away again. Some women found
+me, half dead of starvation, in the northern wilds of the Isle of
+Skye. It was near the coast and I took a turn with the fishermen
+next. There was less of the rope's-end among my new masters; but
+plenty of exposure to wind and weather, and hard work enough to
+have killed a boy who was not a seasoned tramp like me. I fought
+through it till the winter came, and then the fishermen turned me
+adrift again. I don't blame them; food was scarce, and mouths
+were many. With famine staring the whole community in the face,
+why should they keep a boy who didn't belong to them? A great
+city was my only chance in the winter-time; so I went to Glasgow,
+and all but stepped into the lion's mouth as soon as I got there.
+I was minding an empty cart on the Broomielaw, when I heard my
+stepfather's voice on the pavement side of the horse by which I
+was standing. He had met some person whom he knew, and, to my
+terror and surprise, they were talking about me. Hidden behind
+the horse, I heard enough of their conversation to know that I
+had narrowly escaped discovery before I went on board the
+coasting-vessel. I had met at that time with another vagabond boy
+of my own age; we had quarreled and parted. The day after, my
+stepfather's inquiries were made in that very district, and it
+became a question with him (a good personal description being
+unattainable in either case) which of the two boys he should
+follow. One of them, he was informed, was known as "Brown," and
+the other as "Midwinter." Brown was just the common name which a
+cunning runaway boy would be most likely to assume; Midwinter,
+just the remarkable name which he would be most likely to avoid.
+The pursuit had accordingly followed Brown, and had allowed me to
+escape. I leave you to imagine whether I was not doubly and
+trebly determined to keep my gypsy master's name after that. But
+my resolution did not stop here. I made up my mind to leave the
+country altogether. After a day or two's lurking about the
+outward-bound vessels in port, I found out which sailed first,
+and hid myself on board. Hunger tried hard to force me out before
+the pilot had left; but hunger was not new to me, and I kept my
+place. The pilot was out of the vessel when I made my appearance
+on deck, and there was nothing for it but to keep me or throw me
+overboard. The captain said (I have no doubt quite truly) that he
+would have preferred throwing me overboard; but the majesty of
+the law does sometimes stand the friend even of a vagabond like
+me. In that way I came back to a sea-life. In that way I learned
+enough to make me handy and useful (as I saw you noticed) on
+board Mr. Armadale's yacht. I sailed more than one voyage, in
+more than one vessel, to more than one part of the world, and I
+might have followed the sea for life, if I could only have kept
+my temper under every provocation that could be laid on it. I had
+learned a great deal; but, not having learned that, I made the
+last part of my last voyage home to the port of Bristol in irons;
+and I saw the inside of a prison for the first time in my life,
+on a charge of mutinous conduct to one of my officers. You have
+heard me with extraordinary patience, sir, and I am glad to tell
+you, in return, that we are not far now from the end of my story.
+You found some books, if I remember right, when you searched my
+luggage at the Somersetshire inn?"
+
+Mr. Brock answered in the affirmative.
+
+"Those books mark the next change in my life--and the last,
+before I took the usher's place at the school. My term of
+imprisonment was not a long one. Perhaps my youth pleaded for me;
+perhaps the Bristol magistrates took into consideration the time
+I had passed in irons on board ship. Anyhow, I was just turned
+seventeen when I found myself out on the world again. I had no
+friends to receive me; I had no place to go to. A sailor's life,
+after what had happened, was a life I recoiled from in disgust. I
+stood in the crowd on the bridge at Bristol, wondering what I
+should do with my freedom now I had got it back. Whether I had
+altered in the prison, or whether I was feeling the change in
+character that comes with coming manhood, I don't know; but the
+old reckless enjoyment of the old vagabond life seemed quite worn
+out of my nature. An awful sense of loneliness kept me wandering
+about Bristol, in horror of the quiet country, till after
+nightfall. I looked at the lights kindling in the parlor windows,
+with a miserable envy of the happy people inside. A word of
+advice would have been worth something to me at that time. Well!
+I got it: a policeman advised me to move on. He was quite right;
+what else could I do? I looked up at the sky, and there was my
+old friend of many a night's watch at sea, the north star. 'All
+points of the compass are alike to me,' I thought to myself;
+'I'll go _your_ way.' Not even the star would keep me company
+that night. It got behind a cloud, and left me alone in the rain
+and darkness. I groped my way to a cart-shed, fell asleep, and
+dreamed of old times, when I served my gypsy master and lived
+with the dogs. God! what I would have given when I woke to have
+felt Tommy's little cold muzzle in my hand! Why am I dwelling on
+these things? Why don't I get on to the end? You shouldn't
+encourage me, sir, by listening, so patiently. After a week more
+of wandering, without hope to help me, or prospects to look to, I
+found myself in the streets of Shrewsbury, staring in at the
+windows of a book-seller's shop. An old man came to the shop
+door, looked about him, and saw me. 'Do you want a job?' he
+asked. 'And are you not above doing it cheap?' The prospect of
+having something to do, and some human creature to speak a word
+to, tempted me, and I did a day's dirty work in the book-seller's
+warehouse for a shilling. More work followed at the same rate. In
+a week I was promoted to sweep out the shop and put up the
+shutters. In no very long time after, I was trusted to carry the
+books out; and when quarter-day came, and the shop-man left, I
+took his place. Wonderful luck! you will say; here I had found my
+way to a friend at last. I had found my way to one of the most
+merciless misers in England; and I had risen in the little world
+of Shrewsbury by the purely commercial process of underselling
+all my competitors. The job in the warehouse had been declined at
+the price by every idle man in the town, and I did it. The
+regular porter received his weekly pittance under weekly protest.
+I took two shillings less, and made no complaint. The shop-man
+gave warning on the ground that he was underfed as well as
+underpaid . I received half his salary, and lived contentedly on
+his reversionary scraps. Never were two men so well suited to
+each other as that book-seller and I. _His_ one object in life
+was to find somebody who would work for him at starvation wages.
+_My_ one object in life was to find somebody who would give me an
+asylum over my head. Without a single sympathy in common--without
+a vestige of feeling of any sort, hostile or friendly, growing up
+between us on either side--without wishing each other good-night
+when we parted on the house stairs, or good-morning when we met
+at the shop counter, we lived alone in that house, strangers from
+first to last, for two whole years.  A dismal existence for a lad
+of my age, was it not? You are a clergyman and a scholar--surely
+you can guess what made the life endurable to me?"
+
+Mr. Brock remembered the well-worn volumes which had been found
+in the usher's bag. "The books made it endurable to you," he
+said.
+
+The eyes of the castaway kindled with a new light.
+
+"Yes!" he said, "the books--the generous friends who met me
+without suspicion--the merciful masters who never used me ill!
+The only years of my life that I can look back on with something
+like pride are the years I passed in the miser's house. The only
+unalloyed pleasure I have ever tasted is the pleasure that I
+found for myself on the miser's shelves. Early and late, through
+the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the
+fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught. There
+were few customers to serve, for the books were mostly of the
+solid and scholarly kind. No responsibilities rested on me, for
+the accounts were kept by my master, and only the small sums of
+money were suffered to pass through my hands. He soon found out
+enough of me to know that my honesty was to be trusted, and that
+my patience might be counted on, treat me as he might. The one
+insight into _his_ character which I obtained, on my side,
+widened the distance between us to its last limits. He was a
+confirmed opium-eater in secret--a prodigal in laudanum, though a
+miser in all besides. He never confessed his frailty, and I never
+told him I had found it out. He had his pleasure apart from me,
+and I had my pleasure apart from _him._ Week after week, month
+after month, there we sat, without a friendly word ever passing
+between us--I, alone with my book at the counter; he, alone with
+his ledger in the parlor, dimly visible to me through the dirty
+window-pane of the glass door, sometimes poring over his figures,
+sometimes lost and motionless for hours in the ecstasy of his
+opium trance. Time passed, and made no impression on us; the
+seasons of two years came and went, and found us still unchanged.
+One morning, at the opening of the third year, my master did not
+appear, as usual, to give me my allowance for breakfast. I went
+upstairs, and found him helpless in his bed. He refused to trust
+me with the keys of the cupboard, or to let me send for a doctor.
+I bought a morsel of bread, and went back to my books, with no
+more feeling for _him_ (I honestly confess it) than he would have
+had for _me_ under the same circumstances. An hour or two later I
+was roused from my reading by an occasional customer of ours, a
+retired medical man. He went upstairs. I was glad to get rid of
+him and return to my books. He came down again, and disturbed me
+once more. 'I don't much like you, my lad,' he said; 'but I think
+it my duty to say that you will soon have to shift for yourself.
+You are no great favorite in the town, and you may have some
+difficulty in finding a new place. Provide yourself with a
+written character from your master before it is too late.' He
+spoke to me coldly. I thanked him coldly on my side, and got my
+character the same day. Do you think my master let me have it for
+nothing? Not he! He bargained with me on his deathbed. I was his
+creditor for a month's salary, and he wouldn't write a line of my
+testimonial until I had first promised to forgive him the debt.
+Three days afterward he died, enjoying to the last the happiness
+of having overreached his shop-man. 'Aha!' he whispered, when the
+doctor formally summoned me to take leave of him, 'I got you
+cheap!' Was Ozias Midwinter's stick as cruel as that? I think
+not. Well! there I was, out on the world again, but surely with
+better prospects this time. I had taught myself to read Latin,
+Greek, and German; and I had got my written character to speak
+for me. All useless! The doctor was quite right; I was not liked
+in the town. The lower order of the people despised me for
+selling my services to the miser at the miser's price. As for the
+better classes, I did with them (God knows how!) what I have
+always done with everybody except Mr. Armadale--I produced a
+disagreeable impression at first sight; I couldn't mend it
+afterward; and there was an end of me in respectable quarters. It
+is quite likely I might have spent all my savings, my puny little
+golden offspring of two years' miserable growth, but for a school
+advertisement which I saw in a local paper. The heartlessly mean
+terms that were offered encouraged me to apply; and I got the
+place. How I prospered in it, and what became of me next, there
+is no need to tell you. The thread of my story is all wound off;
+my vagabond life stands stripped of its mystery; and you know the
+worst of me at last."
+
+
+A moment of silence followed those closing words. Midwinter rose
+from the window-seat, and came back to the table with the letter
+from Wildbad in his hand.
+
+"My father's confession has told you who I am; and my own
+confession has told you what my life has been," he said,
+addressing Mr. Brock, without taking the chair to which the
+rector pointed. "I promised to make a clean breast of it when I
+first asked leave to enter this room. Have I kept my word?"
+
+"It is impossible to doubt it," replied Mr. Brock. "You have
+established your claim on my confidence and my sympathy. I should
+be insensible, indeed, if I could know what I now know of your
+childhood and your youth, and not feel something of Allan's
+kindness for Allan's friend."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Midwinter, simply and gravely.
+
+He sat down opposite Mr. Brook at the table for the first time.
+
+"In a few hours you will have left this place," he proceeded. "If
+I can help you to leave it with your mind at ease, I will. There
+is more to be said between us than we have said up to this time.
+My future relations with Mr. Armadale are still left undecided;
+and the serious question raised by my father's letter is a
+question which we have neither of us faced yet."
+
+He paused, and looked with a momentary impatience at the candle
+still burning on the table, in the morning light. The struggle to
+speak with composure, and to keep his own feelings stoically out
+of view, was evidently growing harder and harder to him.
+
+"It may possibly help your decision," he went on, "if I tell you
+how I determined to act toward Mr. Armadale--in the matter of the
+similarity of our names--when I first read this letter, and when
+I had composed myself sufficiently to be able to think at all."
+He stopped, and cast a second impatient look at the lighted
+candle. "Will you excuse the odd fancy of an odd man?" he asked,
+with a faint smile. "I want to put out the candle: I want to
+speak of the new subject, in the new light."
+
+He extinguished the candle as he spoke, and let the first
+tenderness of the daylight flow uninterruptedly into the room.
+
+"I must once more ask your patience," he resumed, "if I return
+for a moment to myself and my circumstances. I have already told
+you that my stepfather made an attempt to discover me some years
+after I had turned my back on the Scotch school. He took that
+step out of no anxiety of his own, but simply as the agent of my
+father's trustees. In the exercise of their discretion, they had
+sold the estates in Barbadoes (at the time of the emancipation of
+the slaves, and the ruin of West Indian property) for what the
+estates would fetch. Having invested the proceeds, they were
+bound to set aside a sum for my yearly education. This
+responsibility obliged them to make the attempt to trace me--a
+fruitless attempt, as you already know. A little later (as I have
+been since informed) I was publicly addressed by an advertisement
+in the newspapers, which I never saw. Later still, when I was
+twenty-one, a second advertisement appeared (which I did see)
+offering a reward for evidence of my death. If I was alive, I had
+a right to my half share of the proceeds of the estates on coming
+of age; if dead, the money reverted to my mother. I went to the
+lawyers, and heard from them what I have just told you. After
+some difficulty in proving my identity--and after an interview
+with my stepfather, and a message from my mother, which has
+hopelessly widened the old breach between us--my claim was
+allowed; and my money is now invested for
+ me in the funds, under the name that is really my own."
+
+Mr. Brock drew eagerly nearer to the table. He saw the end now to
+which the speaker was tending
+
+"Twice a year," Midwinter pursued, "I must sign my own name to
+get my own income. At all other times, and under all other
+circumstances, I may hide my identity under any name I please. As
+Ozias Midwinter, Mr. Armadale first knew me; as Ozias Midwinter
+he shall know me to the end of my days. Whatever may be the
+result of this interview--whether I win your confidence or
+whether I lose it--of one thing you may feel sure: your pupil
+shall never know the horrible secret which I have trusted to your
+keeping. This is no extraordinary resolution; for, as you know
+already, it costs me no sacrifice of feeling to keep my assumed
+name. There is nothing in my conduct to praise; it comes
+naturally out of the gratitude of a thankful man. Review the
+circumstances for yourself, sir, and set my own horror of
+revealing them to Mr. Armadale out of the question. If the story
+of the names is ever told, there can be no limiting it to the
+disclosure of my father's crime; it must go back to the story of
+Mrs. Armadale's marriage. I have heard her son talk of her; I
+know how he loves her memory. As God is my witness, he shall
+never love it less dearly through _me!_"
+
+Simply as the words were spoken, they touched the deepest
+sympathies in the rector's nature: they took his thoughts back to
+Mrs. Armadale's deathbed. There sat the man against whom she had
+ignorantly warned him in her son's interests; and that man, of
+his own free-will, had laid on himself the obligation of
+respecting her secret for her son's sake! The memory of his own
+past efforts to destroy the very friendship out of which this
+resolution had sprung rose and reproached Mr. Brock. He held out
+his hand to Midwinter for the first time. "In her name, and in
+her son's name," he said, warmly, "I thank you."
+
+Without replying, Midwinter spread the confession open before him
+on the table.
+
+"I think I have said all that it was my duty to say," he began,
+"before we could approach the consideration of this letter.
+Whatever may have appeared strange in my conduct toward you and
+toward Mr. Armadale may be now trusted to explain itself. You can
+easily imagine the natural curiosity and surprise that I must
+have felt (ignorant as I then was of the truth) when the sound of
+Mr. Armadale's name first startled me as the echo of my own. You
+will readily understand that I only hesitated to tell him I was
+his namesake, because I hesitated to damage my position--in your
+estimation, if not in his--by confessing that I had come among
+you under an assumed name. And, after all that you have just
+heard of my vagabond life and my low associates, you will hardly
+wonder at the obstinate silence I maintained about myself, at a
+time when I did not feel the sense of responsibility which my
+father's confession has laid on me. We can return to these small
+personal explanations, if you wish it, at another time; they
+cannot be suffered to keep us from the greater interests which we
+must settle before you leave this place. We may come now--" His
+voice faltered, and he suddenly turned his face toward the
+window, so as to hide it from the rector's view. "We may come
+now," he repeated, his hand trembling visibly as it held the
+page, "to the murder on board the timber-ship, and to the warning
+that has followed me from my father's grave."
+
+Softly--as if he feared they might reach Allan, sleeping in the
+neighboring room--he read the last terrible words which the
+Scotchman's pen had written at Wildbad, as they fell from his
+father's lips:
+
+"Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if the widow still lives.
+Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to the
+marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And, more than
+all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own. Offend
+your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has
+connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you,
+if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from
+him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between
+you; be ungrateful; be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent
+to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof
+and breathe the same air with that man. Never let the two Allan
+Armadales meet in this world; never, never, never!"
+
+After reading those sentences, he pushed the manuscript from him,
+without looking up. The fatal reserve which he had been in a fair
+way of conquering but a few minutes since, possessed itself of
+him once more. Again his eyes wandered; again his voice sank in
+tone. A stranger who had heard his story, and who saw him now,
+would have said, "His look is lurking, his manner is bad; he is,
+every inch of him, his father's son."
+
+"I have a question to ask you," said Mr. Brock, breaking the
+silence between them, on his side. "Why have you just read that
+passage in your father's letter?"
+
+"To force me into telling you the truth," was the answer. "You
+must know how much there is of my father in me before you trust
+me to be Mr. Armadale's friend. I got my letter yesterday, in the
+morning. Some inner warning troubled me, and I went down on the
+sea-shore by myself before I broke the seal. Do you believe the
+dead can come back to the world they once lived in? I believe my
+father came back in that bright morning light, through the glare
+of that broad sunshine and the roar of that joyful sea, and
+watched me while I read. When I got to the words that you have
+just heard, and when I knew that the very end which he had died
+dreading was the end that had really come, I felt the horror that
+had crept over him in his last moments creeping over me. I
+struggled against myself, as _he_ would have had me struggle. I
+tried to be all that was most repellent to my own gentler nature;
+I tried to think pitilessly of putting the mountains and the seas
+between me and the man who bore my name. Hours passed before I
+could prevail on myself to go back and run the risk of meeting
+Allan Armadale in this house. When I did get back, and when he
+met me at night on the stairs, I thought I was looking him in the
+face as _my_ father looked _his_ father in the face when the
+cabin door closed between them. Draw your own conclusions, sir.
+Say, if you like, that the inheritance of my father's heathen
+belief in fate is one of the inheritances he has left to me. I
+won't dispute it; I won't deny that all through yesterday _his_
+superstition was _my_ superstition. The night came before I could
+find my way to calmer and brighter thoughts. But I did find my
+way. You may set it down in my favor that I lifted myself at last
+above the influence of this horrible letter. Do you know what
+helped me?"
+
+"Did you reason with yourself?"
+
+"I can't reason about what I feel."
+
+"Did you quiet your mind by prayer?"
+
+"I was not fit to pray."
+
+"And yet something guided you to the better feeling and the truer
+view?"
+
+"Something did."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"My love for Allan Armadale."
+
+He cast a doubting, almost a timid look at Mr. Brock as he gave
+that answer, and, suddenly leaving the table, went back to the
+window-seat.
+
+"Have I no right to speak of him in that way?" he asked, keeping
+his face hidden from the rector. "Have I not known him long
+enough; have I not done enough for him yet? Remember what my
+experience of other men had been when I first saw his hand held
+out to me--when I first heard his voice speaking to me in my
+sick-room. What had I known of strangers' hands all through my
+childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to threaten and
+to strike me. His hand put my pillow straight, and patted me on
+the shoulder, and gave me my food and drink. What had I known of
+other men's voices, when I was growing up to be a man myself? I
+had only known them as voices that jeered, voices that cursed,
+voices that whispered in corners with a vile distrust. _His_
+voice said to me, 'Cheer up, Midwinter! we'll soon bring you
+round again. You'll be strong enough in a week to go out for a
+drive with me in our Somersetshire lanes.' Think of the gypsy's
+stick; think of the devils  laughing at me when I we nt by their
+windows with my little dead dog in my arms; think of the master
+who cheated me of my month's salary on his deathbed--and ask your
+own heart if the miserable wretch whom Allan Armadale has treated
+as his equal and his friend has said too much in saying that he
+loves him? I do love him! It _will_ come out of me; I can't keep
+it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my
+life--yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his
+kindness has made it a happy one--I tell you I would give my
+life--"
+
+The next words died away on his lips; the hysterical passion
+rose, and conquered him. He stretched out one of his hands with a
+wild gesture of entreaty to Mr. Brock; his head sank on the
+window-sill and he burst into tears.
+
+Even then the hard discipline of the man's life asserted itself.
+He expected no sympathy, he counted on no merciful human respect
+for human weakness. The cruel necessity of self-suppression was
+present to his mind, while the tears were pouring over his
+cheeks. "Give me a minute," he said, faintly. "I'll fight it down
+in a minute; I won't distress you in this way again."
+
+True to his resolution, in a minute he had fought it down. In a
+minute more he was able to speak calmly.
+
+"We will get back, sir, to those better thoughts which have
+brought me from my room to yours," he resumed. "I can only repeat
+that I should never have torn myself from the hold which this
+letter fastened on me, if I had not loved Allan Armadale with all
+that I have in me of a brother's love. I said to myself, 'If the
+thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving
+him is wrong!' That was some hours since, and I am in the same
+mind still. I can't believe--I won't believe--that a friendship
+which has grown out of nothing but kindness on one side, and
+nothing but gratitude on the other, is destined to lead to an
+evil end. Judge, you who are a clergyman, between the dead
+father, whose word is in these pages, and the living son, whose
+word is now on his lips! What is it appointed me to do, now that
+I am breathing the same air, and living under the same roof with
+the son of the man whom my father killed--to perpetuate my
+father's crime by mortally injuring him, or to atone for my
+father's crime by giving him the devotion of my whole life? The
+last of those two faiths is my faith, and shall be my faith,
+happen what may. In the strength of that better conviction, I
+have come here to trust you with my father's secret, and to
+confess the wretched story of my own life. In the strength of
+that better conviction, I can face you resolutely with the one
+plain question, which marks the one plain end of all that I have
+come here to say. Your pupil stands at the starting-point of his
+new career, in a position singularly friendless; his one great
+need is a companion of his own age on whom he can rely. The time
+has come, sir, to decide whether I am to be that companion or
+not. After all you have heard of Ozias Midwinter, tell me
+plainly, will you trust him to be Allan Armadale's friend?"
+
+Mr. Brock met that fearlessly frank question by a fearless
+frankness on his side.
+
+"I believe you love Allan," he said, "and I believe you have
+spoken the truth. A man who has produced that impression on me is
+a man whom I am bound to trust. I trust you."
+
+Midwinter started to his feet, his dark face flushing deep; his
+eyes fixed brightly and steadily, at last, on the rector's face.
+"A light! " he exclaimed, tearing the pages of his father's
+letter, one by one, from the fastening that held them. "Let us
+destroy the last link that holds us to the horrible past! Let us
+see this confession a heap of ashes before we part!"
+
+"Wait!" said Mr. Brock. "Before you burn it, there is a reason
+for looking at it once more."
+
+The parted leaves of the manuscript dropped from Midwinter's
+hands. Mr. Brock took them up, and sorted them carefully until he
+found the last page.
+
+"I view your father's superstition as you view it," said the
+rector. "But there is a warning given you here, which you will do
+well (for Allan's sake and for your own sake) not to neglect. The
+last link with the past will not be destroyed when you have
+burned these pages. One of the actors in this story of treachery
+and murder is not dead yet. Read those words."
+
+He pushed the page across the table, with his finger on one
+sentence. Midwinter's agitation misled him. He mistook the
+indication, and read, "Avoid the widow of the man I killed, if
+the widow still lives."
+
+"Not that sentence," said the rector. "The next."
+
+Midwinter read it: "Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the
+way to the marriage, if the maid is still in her service."
+
+"The maid and the mistress parted," said Mr. Brock, "at the time
+of the mistress's marriage. The maid and the mistress met again
+at Mrs. Armadale's residence in Somersetshire last year. I myself
+met the woman in the village, and I myself know that her visit
+hastened Mrs. Armadale's death. Wait a little, and compose
+yourself; I see I have startled you."
+
+He waited as he was bid, his color fading away to a gray paleness
+and the light in his clear brown eyes dying out slowly. What the
+rector had said had produced no transient impression on him;
+there was more than doubt, there was alarm in his face, as he sat
+lost in his own thought. Was the struggle of the past night
+renewing itself already? Did he feel the horror of his hereditary
+superstition creeping over him again?
+
+"Can you put me on my guard against her?" he asked, after a long
+interval of silence. "Can you tell me her name?"
+
+"I can only tell you what Mrs. Armadale told me," answered Mr.
+Brock. "The woman acknowledged having been married in the long
+interval since she and her mistress had last met. But not a word
+more escaped her about her past life. She came to Mrs. Armadale
+to ask for money, under a plea of distress. She got the money,
+and she left the house, positively refusing, when the question
+was put to her, to mention her married name."
+
+"You saw her yourself in the village. What was she like?"
+
+"She kept her veil down. I can't tell you."
+
+"You can tell me what you _did_ see?"
+
+"Certainly. I saw, as she approached me, that she moved very
+gracefully, that she had a beautiful figure, and that she was a
+little over the middle height. I noticed, when she asked me the
+way to Mrs. Armadale's house, that her manner was the manner of a
+lady, and that the tone of her voice was remarkably soft and
+winning. Lastly, I remembered afterward that she wore a thick
+black veil, a black bonnet, a black silk dress, and a red Paisley
+shawl. I feel all the importance of your possessing some better
+means of identifying her than I can give you. But unhappily--"
+
+He stopped. Midwinter was leaning eagerly across the table, and
+Midwinter's hand was laid suddenly on his arm.
+
+"Is it possible that you know the woman?" asked Mr. Brock,
+surprised at the sudden change in his manner.
+
+"No."
+
+"What have I said, then, that has startled you so?"
+
+"Do you remember the woman who threw herself from the river
+steamer?" asked the other--"the woman who caused that succession
+of deaths which opened Allan Armadale's way to the Thorpe Ambrose
+estate?"
+
+"I remember the description of her in the police report,"
+answered the rector.
+
+"_That_ woman," pursued Midwinter, "moved gracefully, and had a
+beautiful figure. _That_ woman wore a black veil, a black bonnet,
+a black silk gown, and a red Paisley shawl--" He stopped,
+released his hold of Mr. Brock's arm, and abruptly resumed his
+chair. "Can it be the same?" he said to himself in a whisper.
+"_Is_ there a fatality that follows men in the dark? And is it
+following _us_ in that woman's footsteps?"
+
+If the conjecture was right, the one event in the past which had
+appeared to be entirely disconnected with the events that had
+preceded it was, on the contrary, the one missing link which made
+the chain complete. Mr. Brock's comfortable common sense
+instinctively denied that startling conclusion. He looked at
+Midwinter with a compassionate smile.
+
+"My young friend," he said, kindly, "have you cleared your mind
+of all superstition as completely as you think? Is what you have
+just said worthy of the bet ter resolution at which you arrived
+last night?"
+
+Midwinter's head drooped on his breast; the color rushed back
+over his face; he sighed bitterly.
+
+"You are beginning to doubt my sincerity," he said. "I can't
+blame you."
+
+"I believe in your sincerity as firmly as ever," answered Mr.
+Brock. "I only doubt whether you have fortified the weak places
+in your nature as strongly as you yourself suppose. Many a man
+has lost the battle against himself far oftener than you have
+lost it yet, and has nevertheless won his victory in the end. I
+don't blame you, I don't distrust you. I only notice what has
+happened, to put you on your guard against yourself. Come! come!
+Let your own better sense help you; and you will agree with me
+that there is really no evidence to justify the suspicion that
+the woman whom I met in Somersetshire, and the woman who
+attempted suicide in London, are one and the same. Need an old
+man like me remind a young man like you that there are thousands
+of women in England with beautiful figures--thousands of women
+who are quietly dressed in black silk gowns and red Paisley
+shawls?"
+
+Midwinter caught eagerly at the suggestion; too eagerly, as it
+might have occurred to a harder critic on humanity than Mr.
+Brock.
+
+"You are quite right, sir," he said, "and I am quite wrong. Tens
+of thousands of women answer the description, as you say. I have
+been wasting time on my own idle fancies, when I ought to have
+been carefully gathering up facts. If this woman ever attempts to
+find her way to Allan, I must be prepared to stop her." He began
+searching restlessly among the manuscript leaves scattered about
+the table, paused over one of the pages, and examined it
+attentively. 'This helps me to something positive," he went on;
+"this helps me to a knowledge of her age. She was twelve at the
+time of Mrs. Armadale's marriage; add a year, and bring her to
+thirteen; add Allan's age (twenty-two), and we make her a woman
+of five-and-thirty at the present time. I know her age; and I
+know that she has her own reasons for being silent about her
+married life. This is something gained at the outset, and it may
+lead, in time, to something more." He looked up brightly again at
+Mr. Brock. "Am I in the right way now, sir? Am I doing my best to
+profit by the caution which you have kindly given me?"
+
+"You are vindicating your own better sense," answered the rector,
+encouraging him to trample down his own imagination, with an
+Englishman's ready distrust of the noblest of the human
+faculties. "You are paving the way for your own happier life."
+
+"Am I?" said the other, thoughtfully.
+
+He searched among the papers once more, and stopped at another of
+the scattered pages.
+
+"The ship!" he exclaimed, suddenly, his color changing again, and
+his manner altering on the instant.
+
+"What ship?" asked the rector.
+
+"The ship in which the deed was done," Midwinter answered, with
+the first signs of impatience that he had shown yet. "The ship in
+which my father's murderous hand turned the lock of the cabin
+door."
+
+"What of it?" said Mr. Brock.
+
+He appeared not to hear the question; his eyes remained fixed
+intently on the page that he was reading.
+
+"A French vessel, employed in the timber trade," he said, still
+speaking to himself--"a French vessel, named _La Grace de Dieu._
+If my father's belief had been the right belief--if the fatality
+had been following me, step by step, from my father's grave, in
+one or other of my voyages, I should have fallen in with that
+ship." He looked up again at Mr. Brock. "I am quite sure about it
+now," he said. "Those women are two, and not one."
+
+Mr. Brock shook his head.
+
+"I am glad you have come to that conclusion," he said. "But I
+wish you had reached it in some other way."
+
+Midwinter started passionately to his feet, and, seizing on the
+pages of the manuscript with both hands, flung them into the
+empty fireplace.
+
+"For God's sake let me burn it!" he exclaimed. "As long as there
+is a page left, I shall read it. And, as long as I read it, my
+father gets the better of me, in spite of myself!"
+
+Mr. Brock pointed to the match-box. In another moment the
+confession was in flames. When the fire had consumed the last
+morsel of paper, Midwinter drew a deep breath of relief.
+
+"I may say, like Macbeth: 'Why, so, being gone, I am a man
+again!' " he broke out with a feverish gayety. "You look
+fatigued, sir; and no wonder," he added, in a lower tone. "I have
+kept you too long from your rest--I will keep you no longer.
+Depend on my remembering what you have told me; depend on my
+standing between Allan and any enemy, man or woman, who comes
+near him. Thank you, Mr. Brock; a thousand thousand times, thank
+you! I came into this room the most wretched of living men; I can
+leave it now as happy as the birds that are singing outside!"
+
+As he turned to the door, the rays of the rising sun streamed
+through the window, and touched the heap of ashes lying black in
+the black fireplace. The sensitive imagination of Midwinter
+kindled instantly at the sight.
+
+"Look!" he said, joyously. "The promise of the Future shining
+over the ashes of the Past!"
+
+An inexplicable pity for the man, at the moment of his life when
+he needed pity least, stole over the rector's heart when the door
+had closed, and he was left by himself again.
+
+"Poor fellow! " he said, with an uneasy surprise at his own
+compassionate impulse. "Poor fellow!"
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+DAY AND NIGHT
+
+THE morning hours had passed; the noon had come and gone; and Mr.
+Brock had started on the first stage of his journey home.
+
+After parting from the rector in Douglas Harbor, the two young
+men had returned to Castletown, and had there separated at the
+hotel door, Allan walking down to the waterside to look after his
+yacht, and Midwinter entering the house to get the rest that he
+needed after a sleepless night.
+
+He darkened his room; he closed his eyes, but no sleep came to
+him. On this first day of the rector's absence, his sensitive
+nature extravagantly exaggerated the responsibility which he now
+held in trust for Mr. Brock. A nervous dread of leaving Allan by
+himself, even for a few hours only, kept him waking and doubting,
+until it became a relief rather than a hardship to rise from the
+bed again, and, following in Allan's footsteps, to take the way
+to the waterside which led to the yacht.
+
+The repairs of the little vessel were nearly completed. It was a
+breezy, cheerful day; the land was bright, the water was blue,
+the quick waves leaped crisply in the sunshine, the men were
+singing at their work. Descending to the cabin, Midwinter
+discovered his friend busily occupied in attempting to set the
+place to rights. Habitually the least systematic of mortals,
+Allan now and then awoke to an overwhelming sense of the
+advantages of order, and on such occasions a perfect frenzy of
+tidiness possessed him. He was down on his knees, hotly and
+wildly at work, when Midwinter looked in on him; and was fast
+reducing the neat little world of the cabin to its original
+elements of chaos, with a misdirected energy wonderful to see.
+
+"Here's a mess!" said Allan, rising composedly on the horizon of
+his own accumulated litter. "Do you know, my dear fellow, I begin
+to wish I had let well alone!"
+
+Midwinter smiled, and came to his friend's assistance with the
+natural neat-handedness of a sailor.
+
+The first object that he encountered was Allan's dressing-case,
+turned upside down, with half the contents scattered on the
+floor, and with a duster and a hearth-broom lying among them.
+Replacing the various objects which formed the furniture of the
+dressing-case one by one, Midwinter lighted unexpectedly on a
+miniature portrait, of the old-fashioned oval form, primly framed
+in a setting of small diamonds.
+
+"You don't seem to set much value on this," he said. "What is
+it?"
+
+Allan bent over him, and looked at the miniature. "It belonged to
+my mother," he answered; "and I set the greatest value on it. It
+is a portrait of my father."
+
+Midwinter put the miniature abruptly, into Allan's hands, and
+withdrew to the opposite side of the cabin.
+
+"You know best where the things ought to be put in your own
+dressing-case," he said, keeping his back turned on Allan. "I'll
+m ake the place tidy on this side of the cabin, and you shall
+make the place tidy on the other."
+
+He began setting in order the litter scattered about him on the
+cabin table and on the floor. But it seemed as if fate had
+decided that his friend's personal possessions should fall into
+his hands that morning, employ them where he might. One among the
+first objects which he took up was Allan's tobacco jar, with the
+stopper missing, and with a letter (which appeared by the bulk of
+it to contain inclosures) crumpled into the mouth of the jar in
+the stopper's place.
+
+"Did you know that you had put this here?" he asked. "Is the
+letter of any importance?"
+
+Allan recognized it instantly. It was the first of the little
+series of letters which had followed the cruising party to the
+Isle of Man--the letter which young Armadale had briefly referred
+to as bringing him "more worries from those everlasting lawyers,"
+and had then dismissed from further notice as recklessly as
+usual.
+
+"This is what comes of being particularly careful," said Allan;
+"here is an instance of my extreme thoughtfulness. You may not
+think it but I put the letter there on purpose. Every time I went
+to the jar, you know, I was sure to see the letter; and every
+time I saw the letter, I was sure to say to myself, 'This must be
+answered.' There's nothing to laugh at; it was a perfectly
+sensible arrangement, if I could only have remembered where I put
+the jar. Suppose I tie a knot in my pocket-handkerchief this
+time? You have a wonderful memory, my dear fellow. Perhaps you'll
+remind me in the course of the day, in case I forget the knot
+next."
+
+Midwinter saw his first chance, since Mr. Brock's departure, of
+usefully filling Mr. Brock's place.
+
+"Here is your writing-case," he said; "why not answer the letter
+at once? If you put it away again, you may forget it again."
+
+"Very true," returned Allan. "But the worst of it is, I can't
+quite make up my mind what answer to write. I want a word of
+advice. Come and sit down here, and I'll tell you all about it."
+
+With his loud boyish laugh--echoed by Midwinter, who caught the
+infection of his gayety--he swept a heap of miscellaneous
+incumbrances off the cabin sofa, and made room for his friend and
+himself to take their places. In the high flow of youthful
+spirits, the two sat down to their trifling consultation over a
+letter lost in a tobacco jar. It was a memorable moment to both
+of them, lightly as they thought of it at the time. Before they
+had risen again from their places, they had taken the first
+irrevocable step together on the dark and tortuous road of their
+future lives.
+
+Reduced to plain facts, the question on which Allan now required
+his friend's advice may be stated as follows:
+
+While the various arrangements connected with the succession to
+Thorpe Ambrose were in progress of settlement, and while the new
+possessor of the estate was still in London, a question had
+necessarily arisen relating to the person who should be appointed
+to manage the property. The steward employed by the Blanchard
+family had written, without loss of time, to offer his services.
+Although a perfectly competent and trustworthy man, he failed to
+find favor in the eyes of the new proprietor. Acting, as usual,
+on his first impulses, and resolved, at all hazards, to install
+Midwinter as a permanent inmate at Thorpe Ambrose, Allan had
+determined that the steward's place was the place exactly fitted
+for his friend, for the simple reason that it would necessarily
+oblige his friend to live with him on the estate. He had
+accordingly written to decline the proposal made to him without
+consulting Mr. Brock, whose disapproval he had good reason to
+fear; and without telling Midwinter, who would probably (if a
+chance were allowed him of choosing) have declined taking a
+situation which his previous training had by no means fitted him
+to fill.
+
+Further correspondence had followed this decision, and had raised
+two new difficulties which looked a little embarrassing on the
+face of them, but which Allan, with the assistance of his lawyer,
+easily contrived to solve. The first difficulty, of examining the
+outgoing steward's books, was settled by sending a professional
+accountant to Thorpe Ambrose; and the second difficulty, of
+putting the steward's empty cottage to some profitable use
+(Allan's plans for his friend comprehending Midwinter's residence
+under his own roof), was met by placing the cottage on the list
+of an active house agent in the neighboring county town. In this
+state the arrangements had been left when Allan quitted London.
+He had heard and thought nothing more of the matter, until a
+letter from his lawyers had followed him to the Isle of Man,
+inclosing two proposals to occupy the cottage, both received on
+the same day, and requesting to hear, at his earliest
+convenience, which of the two he was prepared to accept.
+
+Finding himself, after having conveniently forgotten the subject
+for some days past, placed face to face once more with the
+necessity for decision, Allan now put the two proposals into his
+friend's hands, and, after a rambling explanation of the
+circumstances of the case, requested to be favored with a word of
+advice. Instead of examining the proposals, Midwinter
+unceremoniously put them aside, and asked the two very natural
+and very awkward questions of who the new steward was to be, and
+why he was to live in Allan's house?
+
+"I'll tell you who, and I'll tell you why, when we get to Thorpe
+Ambrose," said Allan. "In the meantime we'll call the steward X.
+Y. Z., and we'll say he lives with me, because I'm devilish
+sharp, and I mean to keep him under my own eye. You needn't look
+surprised. I know the man thoroughly well; he requires a good
+deal of management. If I offered him the steward's place
+beforehand, his modesty would get in his way, and he would say
+'No.' If I pitch him into it neck and crop, without a word of
+warning and with nobody at hand to relieve him of the situation,
+he'll have nothing for it but to consult my interests, and say
+'Yes.' X. Y. Z. is not at all a bad fellow, I can tell you.
+You'll see him when we go to Thorpe Ambrose; and I rather think
+you and he will get on uncommonly well together."
+
+The humorous twinkle in Allan's eye, the sly significance in
+Allan's voice, would have betrayed his secret to a prosperous
+man. Midwinter was as far from suspecting it as the carpenters
+who were at work above them on the deck of the yacht.
+
+"Is there no steward now on the estate?" he asked, his face
+showing plainly that he was far from feeling satisfied with
+Allan's answer. "Is the business neglected all this time?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort!" returned Allan. "The business is going
+with 'a wet sheet and a flowing sea, and a wind that follows
+free.' I'm not joking; I'm only metaphorical. A regular
+accountant has poked his nose into the books, and a steady-going
+lawyer's clerk attends at the office once a week. That doesn't
+look like neglect, does it? Leave the new steward alone for the
+present, and just tell me which of those two tenants you would
+take, if you were in my place."
+
+Midwinter opened the proposals, and read them attentively.
+
+The first proposal was from no less a person than the solicitor
+at Thorpe Ambrose, who had first informed Allan at Paris of the
+large fortune that had fallen into his hands. This gentleman
+wrote personally to say that he had long admired the cottage,
+which was charmingly situated within the limits of the Thorpe
+Ambrose grounds. He was a bachelor, of studious habits, desirous
+of retiring to a country seclusion after the wear and tear of his
+business hours; and he ventured to say that Mr. Armadale, in
+accepting him as a tenant, might count on securing an unobtrusive
+neighbor, and on putting the cottage into responsible and careful
+hands.
+
+The second proposal came through the house agent, and proceeded
+from a total stranger. The tenant who offered for the cottage, in
+this case, was a retired officer in the army--one Major Milroy.
+His family merely consisted of an invalid wife and an only
+child--a young lady. His references were unexceptionable; and he,
+too, was especially anxious to secure the  cottage, as the perfect
+qui et of the situation was exactly what was required by Mrs.
+Milroy in her feeble state of health.
+
+"Well, which profession shall I favor?" asked Allan. "The army or
+the law?"
+
+"There seems to me to be no doubt about it," said Midwinter. "The
+lawyer has been already in correspondence with you; and the
+lawyer's claim is, therefore, the claim to be preferred." "I knew
+you would say that. In all the thousands of times I have asked
+other people for advice, I never yet got the advice I wanted.
+Here's this business of letting the cottage as an instance. I'm
+all on the other side myself. I want to have the major."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Young Armadale laid his forefinger on that part of the agent's
+letter which enumerated Major Milroy's family, and which
+contained the three words--"a young lady."
+
+"A bachelor of studious habits walking about my grounds," said
+Allan, "is not an interesting object; a young lady is. I have not
+the least doubt Miss Milroy is a charming girl. Ozias Midwinter
+of the serious countenance! think of her pretty muslin dress
+flitting about among your trees and committing trespasses on your
+property; think of her adorable feet trotting into your
+fruit-garden, and her delicious fresh lips kissing your ripe
+peaches; think of her dimpled hands among your early violets, and
+her little cream-colored nose buried in your blush-roses. What
+does the studious bachelor offer me in exchange for the loss of
+all this? He offers me a rheumatic brown object in gaiters and a
+wig. No! no! Justice is good, my dear friend; but, believe me,
+Miss Milroy is better."
+
+"Can you be serious about any mortal thing, Allan?"
+
+"I'll try to be, if you like. I know I ought to take the lawyer;
+but what can I do if the major's daughter keeps running in my
+head?"
+
+Midwinter returned resolutely to the just and sensible view of
+the matter, and pressed it on his friend's attention with all the
+persuasion of which he was master. After listening with exemplary
+patience until he had done, Allan swept a supplementary
+accumulation of litter off the cabin table, and produced from his
+waistcoat pocket a half-crown coin.
+
+"I've got an entirely new idea," he said. "Let's leave it to
+chance."
+
+The absurdity of the proposal--as coming from a landlord--was
+irresistible. Midwinter's gravity deserted him.
+
+"I'll spin," continued Allan, "and you shall call. We must give
+precedence to the army, of course; so we'll say Heads, the major;
+Tails, the lawyer. One spin to decide. Now, then, look out!"
+
+He spun the half-crown on the cabin table.
+
+"Tails!" cried Midwinter, humoring what he believed to be one of
+Allan's boyish jokes.
+
+The coin fell on the table with the Head uppermost.
+
+"You don't mean to say you are really in earnest!" said
+Midwinter, as the other opened his writing-case and dipped his
+pen in the ink.
+
+"Oh, but I am, though!" replied Allan. "Chance is on my side, and
+Miss Milroy's; and you're outvoted, two to one. It's no use
+arguing. The major has fallen uppermost, and the major shall have
+the cottage. I won't leave it to the lawyers; they'll only be
+worrying me with more letters. I'll write myself."
+
+He wrote his answers to the two proposals, literally in two
+minutes. One to the house agent: "Dear sir, I accept Major
+Milroy's offer; let him come in when he pleases. Yours truly,
+Allan Armadale." And one to the lawyer: "Dear sir, I regret that
+circumstances prevent me from accepting your proposal. Yours
+truly," etc. "People make a fuss about letter-writing," Allan
+remarked, when he had done. "_I_ find it easy enough."
+
+He wrote the addresses on his two notes, and stamped them for the
+post, whistling gayly. While he had been writing, he had not
+noticed how his friend was occupied. When he had done, it struck
+him that a sudden silence had fallen on the cabin; and, looking
+up, he observed that Midwinter's whole attention was strangely
+concentrated on the half crown as it lay head uppermost on the
+table. Allan suspended his whistling in astonishment.
+
+"What on earth are you doing?" he asked.
+
+"I was only wondering," replied Midwinter.
+
+"What about?" persisted Allan.
+
+"I was wondering," said the other, handing him back the
+half-crown, "whether there is such a thing as chance."
+
+Half an hour later the two notes were posted; and Allan, whose
+close superintendence of the repairs of the yacht had hitherto
+allowed him but little leisure time on shore, had proposed to
+while away the idle hours by taking a walk in Castletown. Even
+Midwinter's nervous anxiety to deserve Mr. Brock's confidence in
+him could detect nothing objectionable in this harmless proposal,
+and the young men set forth together to see what they could make
+of the metropolis of the Isle of Man.
+
+It is doubtful if there is a place on the habitable globe which,
+regarded as a sight-seeing investment offering itself to the
+spare attention of strangers, yields so small a percentage of
+interest in return as Castletown. Beginning with the waterside,
+there was an inner harbor to see, with a drawbridge to let
+vessels through; an outer harbor, ending in a dwarf lighthouse; a
+view of a flat coast to the right, and a view of a flat coast to
+the left. In the central solitudes of the city, there was a squat
+gray building called "the castle"; also a memorial pillar
+dedicated to one Governor Smelt, with a flat top for a statue,
+and no statue standing on it; also a barrack, holding the
+half-company of soldiers allotted to the island, and exhibiting
+one spirit-broken sentry at its lonely door. The prevalent color
+of the town was faint gray. The few shops open were parted at
+frequent intervals by other shops closed and deserted in despair.
+The weary lounging of boatmen on shore was trebly weary here; the
+youth of the district smoked together in speechless depression
+under the lee of a dead wall; the ragged children said
+mechanically: "Give us a penny," and before the charitable hand
+could search the merciful pocket, lapsed away again in
+misanthropic doubt of the human nature they addressed. The
+silence of the grave overflowed the churchyard, and filled this
+miserable town. But one edifice, prosperous to look at, rose
+consolatory in the desolation of these dreadful streets.
+Frequented by the students of the neighboring "College of King
+William," this building was naturally dedicated to the uses of a
+pastry-cook's shop. Here, at least (viewed through the friendly
+medium of the window), there was something going on for a
+stranger to see; for here, on high stools, the pupils of the
+college sat, with swinging legs and slowly moving jaws, and,
+hushed in the horrid stillness of Castletown, gorged their pastry
+gravely, in an atmosphere of awful silence.
+
+"Hang me if I can look any longer at the boys and the tarts!"
+said Allan, dragging his friend away from the pastry-cook's shop.
+"Let's try if we can't find something else to amuse us in the
+next street."
+
+The first amusing object which the next street presented was a
+carver-and-gilder's shop, expiring feebly in the last stage of
+commercial decay. The counter inside displayed nothing to view
+but the recumbent head of a boy, peacefully asleep in the
+unbroken solitude of the place. In the window were exhibited to
+the passing stranger three forlorn little fly-spotted frames; a
+small posting-bill, dusty with long-continued neglect, announcing
+that the premises were to let; and one colored print, the last of
+a series illustrating the horrors of drunkenness, on the fiercest
+temperance principles. The composition--representing an empty
+bottle of gin, an immensely spacious garret, a perpendicular
+Scripture reader, and a horizontal expiring family--appealed to
+public favor, under the entirely unobjectionable title of "The
+Hand of Death." Allan's resolution to extract amusement from
+Castletown by main force had resisted a great deal, but it failed
+him at this stage of the investigations. He suggested trying an
+excursion to some other place. Midwinter readily agreeing, they
+went back to the hotel to make inquiries.
+
+Thanks to the mixed influence of Allan's ready gift of
+familiarity, and total want of method in putting his questions, a
+perfect deluge of information flowed in on the two strangers,
+relating to every subje ct but the subject which had actually
+brought them to the hotel. They made various interesting
+discoveries in connection with the laws and constitution of the
+Isle of Man, and the manners and customs of the natives. To
+Allan's delight, the Manxmen spoke of England as of a well-known
+adjacent island, situated at a certain distance from the central
+empire of the Isle of Man. It was further revealed to the two
+Englishmen that this happy little nation rejoiced in laws of its
+own, publicly proclaimed once a year by the governor and the two
+head judges, grouped together on the top of an ancient mound, in
+fancy costumes appropriate to the occasion. Possessing this
+enviable institution, the island added to it the inestimable
+blessing of a local parliament, called the House of Keys, an
+assembly far in advance of the other parliament belonging to the
+neighboring island, in this respect--that the members dispensed
+with the people, and solemnly elected each other. With these and
+many more local particulars, extracted from all sorts and
+conditions of men in and about the hotel, Allan whiled away the
+weary time in his own essentially desultory manner, until the
+gossip died out of itself, and Midwinter (who had been speaking
+apart with the landlord) quietly recalled him to the matter in
+hand. The finest coast scenery in the island was said to be to
+the westward and the southward, and there was a fishing town in
+those regions called Port St. Mary, with a hotel at which
+travelers could sleep. If Allan's impressions of Castletown still
+inclined him to try an excursion to some other place, he had only
+to say so, and a carriage would be produced immediately. Allan
+jumped at the proposal, and in ten minutes more he and Midwinter
+were on their way to the western wilds of the island.
+
+With trifling incidents, the day of Mr. Brock's departure had
+worn on thus far. With trifling incidents, in which not even
+Midwinter's nervous watchfulness could see anything to distrust,
+it was still to proceed, until the night came--a night which one
+at least of the two companions was destined to remember to the
+end of his life.
+
+Before the travelers had advanced two miles on their road, an
+accident happened. The horse fell, and the driver reported that
+the animal had seriously injured himself. There was no
+alternative but to send for another carriage to Castletown, or to
+get on to Port St. Mary on foot.
+
+Deciding to walk, Midwinter and Allan had not gone far before
+they were overtaken by a gentleman driving alone in an open
+chaise. He civilly introduced himself as a medical man, living
+close to Port St. Mary, and offered seats in his carriage. Always
+ready to make new acquaintances, Allan at once accepted the
+proposal. He and the doctor (whose name was ascertained to be
+Hawbury) became friendly and familiar before they had been five
+minutes in the chaise together; Midwinter, sitting behind them,
+reserved and silent, on the back seat. They separated just
+outside Port St. Mary, before Mr. Hawbury's house, Allan
+boisterously admiring the doctor's neat French windows and pretty
+flower-garden and lawn, and wringing his hand at parting as if
+they had known each other from boyhood upward. Arrived in Port
+St. Mary, the two friends found themselves in a second Castletown
+on a smaller scale. But the country round, wild, open, and hilly,
+deserved its reputation. A walk brought them well enough on with
+the day--still the harmless, idle day that it had been from the
+first--to see the evening near at hand. After waiting a little to
+admire the sun, setting grandly over hill, and heath, and crag,
+and talking, while they waited, of Mr. Brock and his long journey
+home, they returned to the hotel to order their early supper.
+Nearer and nearer the night, and the adventure which the night
+was to bring with it, came to the two friends; and still the only
+incidents that happened were incidents to be laughed at, if they
+were noticed at all. The supper was badly cooked; the
+waiting-maid was impenetrably stupid; the old-fashioned bell-rope
+in the coffee-room had come down in Allan's hands, and, striking
+in its descent a painted china shepherdess on the chimney-piece,
+had laid the figure in fragments on the floor. Events as trifling
+as these were still the only events that had happened, when the
+twilight faded, and the lighted candles were brought into the
+room.
+
+Finding Midwinter, after the double fatigue of a sleepless night
+and a restless day, but little inclined for conversation, Allan
+left him resting on the sofa, and lounged into the passage of the
+hotel, on the chance of discovering somebody to talk to. Here
+another of the trivial incidents of the day brought Allan and Mr.
+Hawbury together again, and helped--whether happily or not, yet
+remained to be seen--to strengthen the acquaintance between them
+on either side.
+
+The "bar" of the hotel was situated at one end of the passage,
+and the landlady was in attendance there, mixing a glass of
+liquor for the doctor, who had just looked in for a little
+gossip. On Allan's asking permission to make a third in the
+drinking and the gossiping, Mr. Hawbury civilly handed him the
+glass which the landlady had just filled. It contained cold
+brandy-and-water. A marked change in Allan's face, as he suddenly
+drew back and asked for whisky instead, caught the doctor's
+medical eye. "A case of nervous antipathy," said Mr. Hawbury,
+quietly taking the glass away again. The remark obliged Allan to
+acknowledge that he had an insurmountable loathing (which he was
+foolish enough to be a little ashamed of mentioning) to the smell
+and taste of brandy. No matter with what diluting liquid the
+spirit was mixed, the presence of it, instantly detected by his
+organs of taste and smell, turned him sick and faint if the drink
+touched his lips. Starting from this personal confession, the
+talk turned on antipathies in general; and the doctor
+acknowledged, on his side, that he took a professional interest
+in the subject, and that he possessed a collection of curious
+cases at home, which his new acquaintance was welcome to look at,
+if Allan had nothing else to do that evening, and if he would
+call, when the medical work of the day was over, in an hour's
+time.
+
+Cordially accepting the invitation (which was extended to
+Midwinter also, if he cared to profit by it), Allan returned to
+the coffee-room to look after his friend. Half asleep and half
+awake, Midwinter was still stretched on the sofa, with the local
+newspaper just dropping out of his languid hand.
+
+"I heard your voice in the passage," he said, drowsily. "Whom
+were you talking to?"
+
+"The doctor," replied Allan. "I am going to smoke a cigar with
+him, in an hour's time. Will you come too?"
+
+Midwinter assented with a weary sigh. Always shyly unwilling to
+make new acquaintances, fatigue increased the reluctance he now
+felt to become Mr. Hawbury's guest. As matters stood, however,
+there was no alternative but to go; for, with Allan's
+constitutional imprudence, there was no safely trusting him alone
+anywhere, and more especially in a stranger's house. Mr. Brock
+would certainly not have left his pupil to visit the doctor
+alone; and Midwinter was still nervously conscious that he
+occupied Mr. Brock's place.
+
+"What shall we do till it's time to go?" asked Allan, looking
+about him. "Anything in this?" he added, observing the fallen
+newspaper, and picking it up from the floor.
+
+"I'm too tired to look. If you find anything interesting, read it
+out," said Midwinter, thinking that the reading might help to
+keep him awake.
+
+Part of the newspaper, and no small part of it, was devoted to
+extracts from books recently published in London. One of the
+works most largely laid under contribution in this manner was of
+the sort to interest Allan: it was a highly spiced narrative of
+Traveling Adventures in the wilds of Australia. Pouncing on an
+extract which described the sufferings of the traveling-party,
+lost in a trackless wilderness, and in danger of dying by thirst,
+Allan announced that he had found something to make his friend's
+flesh creep, and began eagerly to read the passage aloud.
+
+Resolute not to sleep, Midwinter followed the progress of the
+adve nture, sentence by sentence, without missing a word. The
+consultation of the lost travelers, with death by thirst staring
+them in the face; the resolution to press on while their strength
+lasted; the fall of a heavy shower, the vain efforts made to
+catch the rainwater, the transient relief experienced by sucking
+their wet clothes; the sufferings renewed a few hours after; the
+night advance of the strongest of the party, leaving the weakest
+behind; the following a flight of birds when morning dawned; the
+discovery by the lost men of the broad pool of water that saved
+their lives--all this Midwinter's fast-failing attention mastered
+painfully, Allan's voice growing fainter and fainter on his ear
+with every sentence that was read. Soon the next words seemed to
+drop away gently, and nothing but the slowly sinking sound of the
+voice was left. Then the light in the room darkened gradually,
+the sound dwindled into delicious silence, and the last waking
+impressions of the weary Midwinter came peacefully to an end.
+
+The next event of which he was conscious was a sharp ringing at
+the closed door of the hotel. He started to his feet, with the
+ready alacrity of a man whose life has accustomed him to wake at
+the shortest notice. An instant's look round showed him that the
+room was empty, and a glance at his watch told him that it was
+close on midnight. The noise made by the sleepy servant in
+opening the door, and the tread the next moment of quick
+footsteps in the passage, filled him with a sudden foreboding of
+something wrong. As he hurriedly stepped forward to go out and
+make inquiry, the door of the coffee-room opened, and the doctor
+stood before him.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you," said Mr. Hawbury. "Don't be alarmed;
+there's nothing wrong."
+
+"Where is my friend?" asked Midwinter.
+
+"At the pier head," answered the doctor. "I am, to a certain
+extent, responsible for what he is doing now; and I think some
+careful person, like yourself, ought to be with him."
+
+The hint was enough for Midwinter. He and the doctor set out for
+the pier immediately, Mr. Hawbury mentioning on the way the
+circumstances under which he had come to the hotel.
+
+Punctual to the appointed hour Allan had made his appearance at
+the doctor's house, explaining that he had left his weary friend
+so fast asleep on the sofa that he had not had the heart to wake
+him. The evening had passed pleasantly, and the conversation had
+turned on many subjects, until, in an evil hour, Mr. Hawbury had
+dropped a hint which showed that he was fond of sailing, and that
+he possessed a pleasure-boat of his own in the harbor. Excited on
+the instant by his favorite topic, Allan had left his host no
+hospitable alternative but to take him to the pier head and show
+him the boat. The beauty of the night and the softness of the
+breeze had done the rest of the mischief; they had filled Allan
+with irresistible longings for a sail by moonlight. Prevented
+from accompanying his guest by professional hindrances which
+obliged him to remain on shore, the doctor, not knowing what else
+to do, had ventured on disturbing Midwinter, rather than take the
+responsibility of allowing Mr. Armadale (no matter how well he
+might be accustomed to the sea) to set off on a sailing trip at
+midnight entirely by himself.
+
+The time taken to make this explanation brought Midwinter and the
+doctor to the pier head. There, sure enough, was young Armadale
+in the boat, hoisting the sail, and singing the sailor's
+"Yo-heave-ho!" at the top of his voice.
+
+"Come along, old boy!" cried Allan. "You're just in time for a
+frolic by moonlight!"
+
+Midwinter suggested a frolic by daylight, and an adjournment to
+bed in the meantime.
+
+"Bed!" cried Allan, on whose harum-scarum high spirits Mr.
+Hawbury's hospitality had certainly not produced a sedative
+effect. "Hear him, doctor! one would think he was ninety! Bed,
+you drowsy old dormouse! Look at that, and think of bed if you
+can!"
+
+He pointed to the sea. The moon was shining in the cloudless
+heaven; the night-breeze blew soft and steady from the land; the
+peaceful waters rippled joyfully in the silence and the glory of
+the night. Midwinter turned to the doctor with a wise resignation
+to circumstances: he had seen enough to satisfy him that all
+words of remonstrance would be words simply thrown away.
+
+"How is the tide?" he asked.
+
+Mr. Hawbury told him.
+
+"Are there oars in the boat?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I am well used to the sea," said Midwinter, descending the pier
+steps. "You may trust me to take care of my friend, and to take
+care of the boat."
+
+"Good-night, doctor!" shouted Allan. "Your whisky-and-water is
+delicious--your boat's a little beauty--and you're the best
+fellow I ever met in my life!"
+
+The doctor laughed and waved his hand, and the boat glided out
+from the harbor, with Midwinter at the helm.
+
+As the breeze then blew, they were soon abreast of the westward
+headland, bounding the Bay of Poolvash, and the question was
+started whether they should run out to sea or keep along the
+shore. The wisest proceeding, in the event of the wind failing
+them, was to keep by the land. Midwinter altered the course of
+the boat, and they sailed on smoothly in a south-westerly
+direction, abreast of the coast.
+
+Little by little the cliffs rose in height, and the rocks, massed
+wild and jagged, showed rifted black chasms yawning deep in their
+seaward sides. Off the bold promontory called Spanish Head,
+Midwinter looked ominously at his watch. But Allan pleaded hard
+for half all hour more, and for a glance at the famous channel of
+the Sound, which they were now fast nearing, and of which he had
+heard some startling stories from the workmen employed on his
+yacht. The new change which Midwinter's compliance with this
+request rendered it necessary to make in the course of the boat
+brought her close to the wind; and revealed, on one side, the
+grand view of the southernmost shores of the Isle of Man, and, on
+the other, the black precipices of the islet called the Calf,
+separated from the mainland by the dark and dangerous channel of
+the Sound.
+
+Once more Midwinter looked at his watch. "We have gone far
+enough," he said. "Stand by the sheet!"
+
+"Stop!" cried Allan, from the bows of the boat. "Good God! here's
+a wrecked ship right ahead of us!"
+
+Midwinter let the boat fall off a little, and looked where the
+other pointed.
+
+There, stranded midway between the rocky boundaries on either
+side of the Sound--there, never again to rise on the living
+waters from her grave on the sunken rock; lost and lonely in the
+quiet night; high, and dark, and ghostly in the yellow moonshine,
+lay the Wrecked Ship.
+
+"I know the vessel," said Allan, in great excitement. "I heard my
+workmen talking of her yesterday. She drifted in here, on a
+pitch-dark night, when they couldn't see the lights; a poor old
+worn-out merchantman, Midwinter, that the ship-brokers have
+bought to break up. Let's run in and have a look at her."
+
+Midwinter hesitated. All the old sympathies of his sea-life
+strongly inclined him to follow Allan's suggestion; but the wind
+was falling light, and he distrusted the broken water and the
+swirling currents of the channel ahead. "This is an ugly place to
+take a boat into when you know nothing about it," he said.
+
+"Nonsense!" returned Allan. "It's as light as day, and we float
+in two feet of water."
+
+Before Midwinter could answer, the current caught the boat, and
+swept them onward through the channel straight toward the wreck.
+
+"Lower the sail," said Midwinter, quietly, "and ship the oars. We
+are running down on her fast enough now, whether we like it or
+not."
+
+Both well accustomed to the use of the oar, they brought the
+course of the boat under sufficient control to keep her on the
+smoothest side of the channel--the side which was nearest to the
+Islet of the Calf. As they came swiftly up with the wreck,
+Midwinter resigned his oar to Allan; and, watching his
+opportunity, caught a hold with the boat-hook on the fore-chains
+of the vessel. The next moment they had the boat safely in hand,
+under the lee of the wreck.
+
+The ship's ladder used by the workmen hung over the fore-chains.
+Mounting it, with the boat's rope in his teeth, Midwinter secured
+one end , and lowered the other to Allan in the boat. "Make that
+fast," he said, "and wait till I see if it's all safe on board."
+With those words, he disappeared behind the bulwark.
+
+"Wait?" repeated Allan, in the blankest astonishment at his
+friend's excessive caution. "What on earth does he mean? I'll be
+hanged if I wait. Where one of us goes, the other goes too!"
+
+He hitched the loose end of the rope round the forward thwart of
+the boat, and, swinging himself up the ladder, stood the next
+moment on the deck. "Anything very dreadful on board?" he
+inquired sarcastically, as he and his friend met.
+
+Midwinter smiled. "Nothing whatever," he replied. "But I couldn't
+be sure that we were to have the whole ship to ourselves till I
+got over the bulwark and looked about me."
+
+Allan took a turn on the deck, and surveyed the wreck critically
+from stem to stern.
+
+"Not much of a vessel," he said; "the Frenchmen generally build
+better ships than this."
+
+Midwinter crossed the deck, and eyed Allan in a momentary
+silence.
+
+"Frenchmen?" he repeated, after an interval. "Is this vessel
+French?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"The men I have got at work on the yacht told me. They know all
+about her."
+
+Midwinter came a little nearer. His swarthy face began to look,
+to Allan's eyes, unaccountably pale in the moonlight.
+
+"Did they mention what trade she was engaged in?"
+
+"Yes; the timber trade."
+
+As Allan gave that answer, Midwinter's lean brown hand clutched
+him fast by the shoulder, and Midwinter's teeth chattered in his
+head like the teeth of a man struck by a sudden chill.
+
+"Did they tell you her name?" he asked, in a voice that dropped
+suddenly to a whisper.
+
+"They did, I think. But it has slipped my memory.--Gently, old
+fellow; these long claws of yours are rather tight on my
+shoulder."
+
+"Was the name--?" He stopped, removed his hand, and dashed away
+the great drops that were gathering on his forehead. "Was the
+name _La Grace de Dieu?_"
+
+"How the deuce did you come to know it? That's the name, sure
+enough. _La Grace de Dieu._"
+
+At one bound, Midwinter leaped on the bulwark of the wreck.
+
+"The boat!" he cried, with a scream of horror that rang far and
+wide through the stillness of the night, and brought Allan
+instantly to his side.
+
+The lower end of the carelessly hitched rope was loose on the
+water, and ahead, in the track of the moonlight, a small black
+object was floating out of view. The boat was adrift.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE PAST.
+
+ONE stepping back under the dark shelter of the bulwark, and one
+standing out boldly in the yellow light of the moon, the two
+friends turned face to face on the deck of the timber-ship, and
+looked at each other in silence. The next moment Allan's
+inveterate recklessness seized on the grotesque side of the
+situation by main force. He seated himself astride on the
+bulwark, and burst out boisterously into his loudest and
+heartiest laugh.
+
+"All my fault," he said; "but there's no help for it now. Here we
+are, hard and fast in a trap of our own setting; and there goes
+the last of the doctor's boat! Come out of the dark, Midwinter; I
+can't half see you there, and I want to know what's to be done
+next."
+
+Midwinter neither answered nor moved. Allan left the bulwark,
+and, mounting the forecastle, looked down attentively at the
+waters of the Sound.
+
+"One thing is pretty certain," he said. "With the current on that
+side, and the sunken rocks on this, we can't find our way out of
+the scrape by swimming, at any rate. So much for the prospect at
+this end of the wreck. Let's try how things look at the other.
+Rouse up, messmate!" he called out, cheerfully, as he passed
+Midwinter. "Come and see what the old tub of a timber-ship has
+got to show us astern." He sauntered on, with his hands in his
+pockets, humming the chorus of a comic song.
+
+His voice had produced no apparent effect on his friend; but, at
+the light touch of his hand in passing, Midwinter started, and
+moved out slowly from the shadow of the bulwark. "Come along!"
+cried Allan, suspending his singing for a moment, and glancing
+back. Still, without a word of answer, the other followed. Thrice
+he stopped before he reached the stern end of the wreck: the
+first time, to throw aside his hat, and push back his hair from
+his forehead and temples; the second time, reeling, giddy, to
+hold for a moment by a ring-bolt close at hand; the last time
+(though Allan was plainly visible a few yards ahead), to look
+stealthily behind him, with the furtive scrutiny of a man who
+believes that other footsteps are following him in the dark .
+"Not yet!" he whispered to himself, with eyes that searched the
+empty air. "I shall see him astern, with his hand on the lock of
+the cabin door."
+
+The stern end of the wreck was clear of the ship-breakers'
+lumber, accumulated in the other parts of the vessel. Here, the
+one object that rose visible on the smooth surface of the deck
+was the low wooden structure which held the cabin door and roofed
+in the cabin stairs. The wheel-house had been removed, the
+binnacle had been removed, but the cabin entrance, and all that
+had belonged to it, had been left untouched. The scuttle was on,
+and the door was closed.
+
+On gaining the after-part of the vessel, Allan walked straight to
+the stern, and looked out to sea over the taffrail. No such thing
+as a boat was in view anywhere on the quiet, moon-brightened
+waters. Knowing Midwinter's sight to be better than his own, he
+called out, "Come up here, and see if there's a fisherman within
+hail of us." Hearing no reply, he looked back. Midwinter had
+followed him as far as the cabin, and had stopped there. He
+called again in a louder voice, and beckoned impatiently.
+Midwinter had heard the call, for he looked up, but still he
+never stirred from his place. There he stood, as if he had
+reached the utmost limits of the ship and could go no further.
+
+Allan went back and joined him. It was not easy to discover what
+he was looking at, for he kept his face turned away from the
+moonlight; but it seemed as if his eyes were fixed, with a
+strange expression of inquiry, on the cabin door. "What is there
+to look at there?" Allan asked. "Let's see if it's locked." As he
+took a step forward to open the door, Midwinter's hand seized him
+suddenly by the coat collar and forced him back. The moment
+after, the hand relaxed without losing its grasp, and trembled
+violently, like the hand of a man completely unnerved.
+
+"Am I to consider myself in custody?" asked Allan, half
+astonished and half amused. "Why in the name of wonder do you
+keep staring at the cabin door? Any suspicious noises below? It's
+no use disturbing the rats--if that's what you mean--we haven't
+got a dog with us. Men? Living men they can't be; for they would
+have heard us and come on deck. Dead men? Quite impossible! No
+ship's crew could be drowned in a land-locked place like this,
+unless the vessel broke up under them--and here's the vessel as
+steady as a church to speak for herself. Man alive, how your hand
+trembles! What is there to scare you in that rotten old cabin?
+What are you shaking and shivering about? Any company of the
+supernatural sort on board? Mercy preserve us! (as the old women
+say) do you see a ghost?"
+
+"_I see two!_" answered the other, driven headlong into speech
+and action by a maddening temptation to reveal the truth. "Two!"
+he repeated, his breath bursting from him in deep, heavy gasps,
+as he tried vainly to force back the horrible words. "The ghost
+of a man like you, drowning in the cabin! And the ghost of a man
+like me, turning the lock of the door on him!"
+
+Once more young Armadale's hearty laughter rang out loud and long
+through the stillness of the night.
+
+"Turning the lock of the door, is he?" said Allan, as soon as his
+merriment left him breath enough to speak. "That's a devilish
+unhandsome action, Master Midwinter, on the part of your ghost.
+The least I can do, after that, is to let mine out of the cabin,
+and give him the run of the ship."
+
+With no more than a momentary exertion of his superior strength,
+he freed himself easily from Midwinter's hold. "Below there!" he
+called out, gayly, as he laid his strong hand on the crazy lock,
+and tore open the cabin
+ door. "Ghost of Allan Armadale, come on deck!" In his terrible
+ignorance of the truth, he put his head into the doorway and
+looked down, laughing, at the place where his murdered father had
+died. "Pah!" he exclaimed, stepping back suddenly, with a shudder
+of disgust. "The air is foul already; and the cabin is full of
+water."
+
+It was true. The sunken rocks on which the vessel lay wrecked had
+burst their way through her lower timbers astern, and the water
+had welled up through the rifted wood. Here, where the deed had
+been done, the fatal parallel between past and present was
+complete. What the cabin had been in the time of the fathers,
+that the cabin was now in the time of the sons.
+
+Allan pushed the door to again with his foot, a little surprised
+at the sudden silence which appeared to have fallen on his friend
+from the moment when he had laid his hand on the cabin lock. When
+he turned to look, the reason of the silence was instantly
+revealed. Midwinter had dropped on the deck. He lay senseless
+before the cabin door; his face turned up, white and still, to
+the moonlight, like the face of a dead man.
+
+In a moment Allan was at his side. He looked uselessly round the
+lonely limits of the wreck, as he lifted Midwinter's head on his
+knee, for a chance of help, where all chance was ruthlessly cut
+off. "What am I to do?" he said to himself, in the first impulse
+of alarm. "Not a drop of water near, but the foul water in the
+cabin." A sudden recollection crossed his memory, the florid
+color rushed back over his face, and he drew from his pocket a
+wicker-covered flask. "God bless the doctor for giving me this
+before we sailed!" he broke out, fervently, as he poured down
+Midwinter's throat some drops of the raw whisky which the flask
+contained. The stimulant acted instantly on the sensitive system
+of the swooning man. He sighed faintly, and slowly opened his
+eyes. "Have I been dreaming?" he asked, looking up vacantly in
+Allan's face. His eyes wandered higher, and encountered the
+dismantled masts of the wreck rising weird and black against the
+night sky. He shuddered at the sight of them, and hid his face on
+Allan's knee. "No dream!" he murmured to himself, mournfully. "Oh
+me, no dream!"
+
+"You hare been overtired all day," said Allan, "and this infernal
+adventure of ours has upset you. Take some more whisky, it's sure
+to do you good. Can you sit by yourself, if I put you against the
+bulwark, so?"
+
+"Why by myself? Why do you leave me?" asked Midwinter.
+
+Allan pointed to the mizzen shrouds of the wreck, which were
+still left standing. "You are not well enough to rough it here
+till the workmen come off in the morning," he said. "We must find
+our way on shore at once, if we can. I am going up to get a good
+view all round, and see if there's a house within hail of us."
+
+Even in the moment that passed while those few words were spoken,
+Midwinter's eyes wandered back distrustfully to the fatal cabin
+door. "Don't go near it!" he whispered. "Don't try to open it,
+for God's sake!"
+
+"No, no," returned Allan, humoring him. "When I come down from
+the rigging, I'll come back here." He said the words a little
+constrainedly, noticing, for the first time while he now spoke,
+an underlying distress in Midwinter's face, which grieved and
+perplexed him. "You're not angry with me?" he said, in his
+simple, sweet-tempered way. "All this is my fault, I know; and I
+was a brute and a fool to laugh at you, when I ought to have seen
+you were ill. I am so sorry, Midwinter. Don't be angry with me!"
+
+Midwinter slowly raised his head. His eyes rested with a mournful
+interest, long and tender, on Allan's anxious face.
+
+"Angry?" he repeated, in his lowest, gentlest tones. "Angry with
+_ you?_--Oh, my poor boy, were you to blame for being kind to me
+when I was ill in the old west-country inn? And was I to blame
+for feeling your kindness thankfully? Was it our fault that we
+never doubted each other, and never knew that we were traveling
+together blindfold on the way that was to lead us here? The cruel
+time is coming, Allan, when we shall rue the day we ever met.
+Shake hands, brother, on the edge of the precipice--shake hands
+while we are brothers still!"
+
+Allan turned away quickly, convinced that his mind had not yet
+recovered the shock of the fainting fit. "Don't forget the
+whisky!" he said, cheerfully, as he sprang into the rigging, and
+mounted to the mizzen-top.
+
+It was past two, the moon was waning, and the darkness that comes
+before dawn was beginning to gather round the wreck. Behind
+Allan, as he now stood looking out from the elevation of the
+mizzen-top, spread the broad and lonely sea. Before him were the
+low, black, lurking rocks, and the broken waters of the channel,
+pouring white and angry into the vast calm of the westward ocean
+beyond. On the right hand, heaved back grandly from the
+water-side, were the rocks and precipices, with their little
+table-lands of grass between; the sloping downs, and
+upward-rolling heath solitudes of the Isle of Man. On the left
+hand rose the craggy sides of the Islet of the Calf, here rent
+wildly into deep black chasms, there lying low under long
+sweeping acclivities of grass and heath. No sound rose, no light
+was visible, on either shore. The black lines of the topmost
+masts of the wreck looked shadowy and faint in the darkening
+mystery of the sky; the land breeze had dropped; the small
+shoreward waves fell noiseless: far or near, no sound was audible
+but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water ahead, pouring
+through the awful hush of silence in which earth and ocean waited
+for the coming day.
+
+Even Allan's careless nature felt the solemn influence of the
+time. The sound of his own voice startled him when he looked down
+and hailed his friend on deck
+
+"I think I see one house," he said. "Here-away, on the mainland
+to the right." He looked again, to make sure, at a dim little
+patch of white, with faint white lines behind it, nestling low in
+a grassy hollow, on the main island. "It looks like a stone house
+and inclosure," he resumed. "I'll hail it, on the chance." He
+passed his arm round a rope to steady himself, made a
+speaking-trumpet of his hands, and suddenly dropped them again
+without uttering a sound. "It's so awfully quiet," he whispered
+to himself. "I'm half afraid to call out." He looked down again
+on deck. "I shan't startle you, Midwinter, shall I?" he said,
+with an uneasy laugh. He looked once more at the faint white
+object, in the grassy hollow. "It won't do to have come up here
+for nothing," he thought, and made a speaking-trumpet of his
+hands again. This time he gave the hail with the whole power of
+his lungs. "On shore there!" he shouted, turning his face to the
+main island. "Ahoy-hoy-hoy!"
+
+The last echoes of his voice died away and were lost. No sound
+answered him but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water
+ahead.
+
+He looked down again at his friend, and saw the dark figure of
+Midwinter rise erect, and pace the deck backward and forward,
+never disappearing out of sight of the cabin when it retired
+toward the bows of the wreck, and never passing beyond the cabin
+when it returned toward the stern. "He is impatient to get away,"
+thought Allan; "I'll try again." He hailed the land once more,
+and, taught by previous experience, pitched his voice in its
+highest key.
+
+This time another sound than the sound of the bubbling water
+answered him. The lowing of frightened cattle rose from the
+building in the grassy hollow, and traveled far and drearily
+through the stillness of the morning air. Allan waited and
+listened. If the building was a farmhouse the disturbance among
+the beasts would rouse the men. If it was only a cattle-stable,
+nothing more would happen. The lowing of the frightened brutes
+rose and fell drearily, the minutes passed, and nothing happened.
+
+"Once more!" said Allan, looking down at the restless figure
+pacing beneath him. For the third time he hailed the land. For
+the third time he waited and listened.
+
+In a pause of silence among the cattle, he heard behind him, on
+the opposite shore of the channel, faint and far among the
+solitudes of the Islet of the Calf, a sharp, sudden sound, like
+the distant clash of a heavy
+ door-bolt drawn back. Turning at once in the new direction, he
+strained his eyes to look for a house. The last faint rays of the
+waning moonlight trembled here and there on the higher rocks, and
+on the steeper pinnacles of ground, but great strips of darkness
+lay dense and black over all the land between; and in that
+darkness the house, if house there were, was lost to view.
+
+"I have roused somebody at last," Allan called out,
+encouragingly, to Midwinter, still walking to and fro on the
+deck, strangely indifferent to all that was passing above and
+beyond him. "Look out for the answering, hail!" And with his face
+set toward the islet, Allan shouted for help.
+
+The shout was not answered, but mimicked with a shrill, shrieking
+derision, with wilder and wilder cries, rising out of the deep
+distant darkness, and mingling horribly the expression of a human
+voice with the sound of a brute's. A sudden suspicion crossed
+Allan's mind, which made his head swim and turned his hand cold
+as it held the rigging. In breathless silence he looked toward
+the quarter from which the first mimicry of his cry for help had
+come. After a moment's pause the shrieks were renewed, and the
+sound of them came nearer. Suddenly a figure, which seemed the
+figure of a man, leaped up black on a pinnacle of rock, and
+capered and shrieked in the waning gleam of the moonlight. The
+screams of a terrified woman mingled with the cries of the
+capering creature on the rock. A red spark flashed out in the
+darkness from a light kindled in an invisible window. The hoarse
+shouting of a man's voice in anger was heard through the noise. A
+second black figure leaped up on the rock, struggled with the
+first figure, and disappeared with it in the darkness. The cries
+grew fainter and fainter, the screams of the woman were stilled,
+the hoarse voice of the man was heard again for a moment, hailing
+the wreck in words made unintelligible by the distance, but in
+tones plainly expressive of rage and fear combined. Another
+moment, and the clang of the door-bolt was heard again, the red
+spark of light was quenched in darkness, and all the islet lay
+quiet in the shadows once more. The lowing of the cattle on the
+main-land ceased, rose again, stopped. Then, cold and cheerless
+as ever, the eternal bubbling of the broken water welled up
+through the great gap of silence--the one sound left, as the
+mysterious stillness of the hour fell like a mantle from the
+heavens, and closed over the wreck.
+
+Allan descended from his place in the mizzen-top, and joined his
+friend again on deck.
+
+"We must wait till the ship-breakers come off to their work," he
+said, meeting Midwinter halfway in the course of his restless
+walk. "After what has happened, I don't mind confessing that I've
+had enough of hailing the land. Only think of there being a
+madman in that house ashore, and of my waking him! Horrible,
+wasn't it?"
+
+Midwinter stood still for a moment, and looked at Allan, with the
+perplexed air of a man who hears circumstances familiarly
+mentioned to which he is himself a total stranger. He appeared,
+if such a thing had been possible, to have passed over entirely
+without notice all that had just happened on the Islet of the
+Calf.
+
+"Nothing is horrible _out_ of this ship," he said. "Everything is
+horrible _in_ it."
+
+Answering in those strange words, he turned away again, and went
+on with his walk.
+
+Allan picked up the flask of whisky lying on the deck near him,
+and revived his spirits with a dram. "Here's one thing on board
+that isn't horrible," he retorted briskly, as he screwed on the
+stopper of the flask; "and here's another," he added, as he took
+a cigar from his case and lit it. "Three o'clock!" he went on,
+looking at his watch, and settling himself comfortably on deck
+with his back against the bulwark. "Daybreak isn't far off; we
+shall have the piping of the birds to cheer us up before long. I
+say, Midwinter, you seem to have quite got over that unlucky
+fainting fit. How you do keep walking! Come here and have a
+cigar, and make yourself comfortable. What's the good of tramping
+backward and forward in that restless way?"
+
+"I am waiting," said Midwinter.
+
+"Waiting! What for?"
+
+"For what is to happen to you or to me--or to both of us--before
+we are out of this ship."
+
+"With submission to your superior judgment, my dear fellow, I
+think quite enough has happened already. The adventure will do
+very well as it stands now; more of it is more than I want." He
+took another dram of whisky, and rambled on, between the puffs of
+his cigar, in his usual easy way. "I've not got your fine
+imagination, old boy; and I hope the next thing that happens will
+be the appearance of the workmen's boat. I suspect that queer
+fancy of yours has been running away with you while you were down
+here all by yourself. Come, now, what were you thinking of while
+I was up in the mizzen-top frightening the cows?"
+
+Midwinter suddenly stopped. "Suppose I tell you?" he said.
+
+"Suppose you do?"
+
+The torturing temptation to reveal the truth, roused once already
+by his companion's merciless gayety of spirit, possessed itself
+of Midwinter for the second time. He leaned back in the dark
+against the high side of the ship, and looked down in silence at
+Allan's figure, stretched comfortably on the deck. "Rouse him,"
+the fiend whispered, subtly, "from that ignorant self-possession
+and that pitiless repose. Show him the place where the deed was
+done; let him know it with your knowledge, and fear it with your
+dread. Tell him of the letter you burned, and of the words no
+fire can destroy which are living in your memory now. Let him see
+your mind as it was yesterday, when it roused your sinking faith
+in your own convictions, to look back on your life at sea, and to
+cherish the comforting remembrance that, in all your voyages, you
+had never fallen in with this ship. Let him see your mind as it
+is now, when the ship has got you at the turning-point of your
+new life, at the outset of your friendship with the one man of
+all men whom your father warned you to avoid. Think of those
+death-bed words, and whisper them in his ear, that he may think
+of them, too: 'Hide yourself from him under an assumed name. Put
+the mountains and the seas between you; be ungrateful, be
+unforgiving; be all that is most repellent to your own gentler
+nature, rather than live under the same roof and breathe the same
+air with that man.' " So the tempter counseled. So, like a
+noisome exhalation from the father's grave, the father's
+influence rose and poisoned the mind of the son.
+
+The sudden silence surprised Allan; he looked back drowsily over
+his shoulder. "Thinking again!" he exclaimed, with a weary yawn.
+
+Midwinter stepped out from the shadow, and came nearer to Allan
+than he had come yet. "Yes," he said, "thinking of the past and
+the future."
+
+"The past and the future?" repeated Allan, shifting himself
+comfortably into a new position. "For my part, I'm dumb about the
+past. It's a sore subject with me: the past means the loss of the
+doctor's boat. Let's talk about the future. Have you been taking
+a practical view? as dear old Brock calls it. Have you been
+considering the next serious question that concerns us both when
+we get back to the hotel--the question of breakfast?"
+
+After an instant's hesitation, Midwinter took a step nearer. "I
+have been thinking of your future and mine," he said; "I have
+been thinking of the time when your way in life and my way in
+life will be two ways instead of one."
+
+"Here's the daybreak!" cried Allan. "Look up at the masts;
+they're beginning to get clear again already. I beg your pardon.
+What were you saying?"
+
+Midwinter made no reply. The struggle between the hereditary
+superstition that was driving him on, and the unconquerable
+affection for Allan that was holding him back, suspended the next
+words on his lips. He turned aside his face in speechless
+suffering. "Oh, my father!" he thought, "better have killed me on
+that day when I lay on your bosom, than have let me live for
+this."
+
+"What's that about the future?" persisted Allan. "I was looking
+for the daylight; I didn't hear."
+
+Midwinter controlled himself, and answered: "You have treated me
+with your usual kin dness," he said, "in planning to take me with
+you to Thorpe Ambrose. I think, on reflection, I had better not
+intrude myself where I am not known and not expected." His voice
+faltered, and he stopped again. The more he shrank from it, the
+clearer the picture of the happy life that he was resigning rose
+on his mind.
+
+Allan's thoughts instantly reverted to the mystification about
+the new steward which he had practiced on his friend when they
+were consulting together in the cabin of the yacht. "Has he been
+turning it over in his mind?" wondered Allan; "and is he
+beginning at last to suspect the truth? I'll try him.--Talk as
+much nonsense, my dear fellow, as you like," he rejoined, "but
+don't forget that you are engaged to see me established at Thorpe
+Ambrose, and to give me your opinion of the new steward."
+
+Midwinter suddenly stepped forward again, close to Allan.
+
+"I am not talking about your steward or your estate," he burst
+out passionately; "I am talking about myself. Do you hear?
+Myself! I am not a fit companion for you. You don't know who I
+am." He drew back into the shadowy shelter of the bulwark as
+suddenly as he had come out from it. "O God! I can't tell him,"
+he said to himself, in a whisper.
+
+For a moment, and for a moment only, Allan was surprised. "Not
+know who you are?" Even as he repeated the words, his easy
+goodhumor got the upper-hand again. He took up the whisky flask,
+and shook it significantly. "I say," he resumed, "how much of the
+doctor's medicine did you take while I was up in the mizzen-top?"
+
+The light tone which he persisted in adopting stung Midwinter to
+the last pitch of exasperation. He came out again into the light,
+and stamped his foot angrily on the deck. "Listen to me!" he
+said. "You don't know half the low things I have done in my
+lifetime. I have been a tradesman's drudge; I have swept out the
+shop and put up the shutters; I have carried parcels through the
+street, and waited for my master's money at his customers'
+doors."
+
+"I have never done anything half as useful," returned Allan,
+composedly. "Dear old boy, what an industrious fellow you have
+been in your time!"
+
+"I've been a vagabond and a blackguard in my time," returned the
+other, fiercely; "I've been a street tumbler, a tramp, a gypsy's
+boy! I've sung for half-pence with dancing dogs on the high-road!
+I've worn a foot-boy's livery, and waited at table! I've been a
+common sailors' cook, and a starving fisherman's
+Jack-of-all-trades! What has a gentleman in your position in
+common with a man in mine? Can you take _me_ into the society at
+Thorpe Ambrose? Why, my very name would be a reproach to you.
+Fancy the faces of your new neighbors when their footmen announce
+Ozias Midwinter and Allan Armadale in the same breath!" He burst
+into a harsh laugh, and repeated the two names again, with a
+scornful bitterness of emphasis which insisted pitilessly on the
+marked contrast between them.
+
+Something in the sound of his laughter jarred painfully even on
+Allan's easy nature. He raised himself on the deck and spoke
+seriously for the first time. "A joke's a joke, Midwinter," he
+said, "as long as you don't carry it too far. I remember your
+saying something of the same sort to me once before when I was
+nursing you in Somersetshire. You forced me to ask you if I
+deserved to be kept at arms-length by _you_ of all the people in
+the world. Don't force me to say so again. Make as much fun of me
+as you please, old fellow, in any other way. _That_ way hurts
+me."
+
+Simple as the words were, and simply as they had been spoken,
+they appeared to work an instant revolution in Midwinter's mind.
+His impressible nature recoiled as from some sudden shock.
+Without a word of reply, he walked away by himself to the forward
+part of the ship. He sat down on some piled planks between the
+masts, and passed his hand over his head in a vacant, bewildered
+way. Though his father's belief in fatality was his own belief
+once more--though there was no longer the shadow of a doubt in
+his mind that the woman whom Mr. Brock had met in Somersetshire,
+and the woman who had tried to destroy herself in London, were
+one and the same--though all the horror that mastered him when he
+first read the letter from Wildbad had now mastered him again,
+Allan's appeal to their past experience of each other had come
+home to his heart, with a force more irresistible than the force
+of his superstition itself. In the strength of that very
+superstition, he now sought the pretext which might encourage him
+to sacrifice every less generous feeling to the one predominant
+dread of wounding the sympathies of his friend. "Why distress
+him?" he whispered to himself. "We are not the end here: there is
+the Woman behind us in the dark. Why resist him when the
+mischief's done , and the caution comes too late? What _ is_ to
+be _will_ be. What have I to do with the future? and what has
+he?"
+
+He went back to Allan, sat down by his side, and took his hand.
+"Forgive me," he said, gently; "I have hurt you for the last
+time." Before it was possible to reply, he snatched up the whisky
+flask from the deck. "Come!" he exclaimed, with a sudden effort
+to match his friend's cheerfulness, "you have been trying the
+doctor's medicine, why shouldn't I?"
+
+Allan was delighted. "This is something like a change for the
+better," he said; "Midwinter is himself again. Hark! there are
+the birds. Hail, smiling morn! smiling morn!" He sang the words
+of the glee in his old, cheerful voice, and clapped Midwinter on
+the shoulder in his old, hearty way. "How did you manage to clear
+your head of those confounded megrims? Do you know you were quite
+alarming about something happening to one or other of us before
+we were out of this ship?"
+
+"Sheer nonsense!" returned Midwinter, contemptuously. "I don't
+think my head has ever been quite right since that fever; I've
+got a bee in my bonnet, as they say in the North. Let's talk of
+something else. About those people you have let the cottage to? I
+wonder whether the agent's account of Major Milroy's family is to
+be depended on? There might be another lady in the household
+besides his wife and his daughter."
+
+"Oho!" cried Allan, "_you're_ beginning to think of nymphs among
+the trees, and flirtations in the fruit-garden, are you? Another
+lady, eh? Suppose the major's family circle won't supply another?
+We shall have to spin that half-crown again, and toss up for
+which is to have the first chance with Miss Milroy."
+
+For once Midwinter spoke as lightly and carelessly as Allan
+himself. "No, no," he said, "the major's landlord has the first
+claim to the notice of the major's daughter. I'll retire into the
+background, and wait for the next lady who makes her appearance
+at Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+"Very good. I'll have an address to the women of Norfolk posted
+in the park to that effect," said Allan. "Are you particular to a
+shade about size or complexion? What's your favorite age?"
+
+Midwinter trifled with his own superstition, as a man trifles
+with the loaded gun that may kill him, or with the savage animal
+that may maim him for life. He mentioned the age (as he had
+reckoned it himself) of the woman in the black gown and the red
+Paisley shawl.
+
+"Five-and-thirty, " he said.
+
+As the words passed his lips, his factitious spirits deserted
+him. He left his seat, impenetrably deaf to all Allan's efforts
+at rallying him on his extraordinary answer, and resumed his
+restless pacing of the deck in dead silence. Once more the
+haunting thought which had gone to and fro with him in the hour
+of darkness went to and fro with him now in the hour of daylight.
+
+Once more the conviction possessed itself of his mind that
+something was to happen to Allan or to himself before they left
+the wreck.
+
+Minute by minute the light strengthened in the eastern sky; and
+the shadowy places on the deck of the timber-ship revealed their
+barren emptiness under the eye of day. As the breeze rose again,
+the sea began to murmur wakefully in the morning light. Even the
+cold bubbling of the broken water changed its cheerless note, and
+softened on the ear as the mellowing flood of daylight poured
+warm over it from the rising sun. Midwinter paused near the
+forward part of the
+ ship, and recalled his wandering attention to the passing time.
+The cheering influences of the hour were round him, look where he
+might. The happy morning smile of the summer sky, so brightly
+merciful to the old and weary earth, lavished its all-embracing
+beauty even on the wreck. The dew that lay glittering on the
+inland fields lay glittering on the deck, and the worn and rusted
+rigging was gemmed as brightly as the fresh green leaves on
+shore. Insensibly, as he looked round, Midwinter's thoughts
+reverted to the comrade who had shared with him the adventure of
+the night. He returned to the after-part of the ship, spoke to
+Allan as he advanced. Receiving no answer, he approached the
+recumbent figure and looked closer at it. Left to his own
+resources, Allan had let the fatigues of the night take their own
+way with him. His head had sunk back; his hat had fallen off; he
+lay stretched at full length on the deck of the timber-ship,
+deeply and peacefully asleep.
+
+Midwinter resumed his walk; his mind lost in doubt; his own past
+thoughts seeming suddenly to have grown strange to him. How
+darkly his forebodings had distrusted the coming time, and how
+harmlessly that time had come! The sun was mounting in the
+heavens, the hour of release was drawing nearer and nearer, and
+of the two Armadales imprisoned in the fatal ship, one was
+sleeping away the weary time, and the other was quietly watching
+the growth of the new day.
+
+The sun climbed higher; the hour wore on. With the latent
+distrust of the wreck which still clung to him, Midwinter looked
+inquiringly on either shore for signs of awakening human life.
+The land was still lonely. The smoke wreaths that were soon to
+rise from cottage chimneys had not risen yet.
+
+After a moment's thought he went back again to the after-part of
+the vessel, to see if there might be a fisherman's boat within
+hail astern of them. Absorbed for the moment by the new idea, he
+passed Allan hastily, after barely noticing that he still lay
+asleep. One step more would have brought him to the taffrail,
+when that step was suspended by a sound behind him, a sound like
+a faint groan. He turned, and looked at the sleeper on the deck.
+He knelt softly, and looked closer.
+
+"It has come!" he whispered to himself. "Not to _me_--but to
+_him._ "
+
+It had come, in the bright freshness of the morning; it had come,
+in the mystery and terror of a Dream. The face which Midwinter
+had last seen in perfect repose was now the distorted face of a
+suffering man. The perspiration stood thick on Allan's forehead,
+and matted his curling hair. His partially opened eyes showed
+nothing but the white of the eyeball gleaming blindly. His
+outstretched hands scratched and struggled on the deck. From
+moment to moment he moaned and muttered helplessly; but the words
+that escaped him were lost in the grinding and gnashing of his
+teeth. There he lay--so near in the body to the friend who bent
+over him; so far away in the spirit, that the two might have been
+in different worlds--there he lay, with the morning sunshine on
+his face, in the torture of his dream.
+
+One question, and one only, rose in the mind of the man who was
+looking at him. What had the fatality which had imprisoned him in
+the wreck decreed that he should see?
+
+Had the treachery of Sleep opened the gates of the grave to that
+one of the two Armadales whom the other had kept in ignorance of
+the truth? Was the murder of the father revealing itself to the
+son--there, on the very spot where the crime had been
+committed--in the vision of a dream?
+
+With that question overshadowing all else in his mind, the son of
+the homicide knelt on the deck, and looked at the son of the man
+whom his father's hand had slain.
+
+The conflict between the sleeping body and the waking mind was
+strengthening every moment. The dreamer's helpless groaning for
+deliverance grew louder; his hands raised themselves, and
+clutched at the empty air. Struggling with the all-mastering
+dread that still held him, Midwinter laid his hand gently on
+Allan's forehead. Light as the touch was, there were mysterious
+sympathies in the dreaming man that answered it. His groaning
+ceased, and his hands dropped slowly. There was an instant of
+suspense and Midwinter looked closer. His breath just fluttered
+over the sleeper's face. Before the next breath had risen to his
+lips, Allan suddenly sprang up on his knees--sprang up, as if the
+call of a trumpet had rung on his ear, awake in an instant.
+
+"You have been dreaming," said Midwinter, as the other looked at
+him wildly, in the first bewilderment of waking.
+
+Allan's eyes began to wander about the wreck, at first vacantly,
+then with a look of angry surprise. "Are we here still?" he said,
+as Midwinter helped him to his feet. "Whatever else I do on board
+this infernal ship," he added, after a moment, "I won't go to
+sleep again!"
+
+As he said those words, his friend's eyes searched his face in
+silent inquiry. They took a turn together on the deck.
+
+"Tell me your dream," said Midwinter, with a strange tone of
+suspicion in his voice, and a strange appearance of abruptness in
+his manner.
+
+"I can't tell it yet," returned Allan. "Wait a little till I'm my
+own man again."
+
+They took another turn on the deck. Midwinter stopped, and spoke
+once more.
+
+"Look at me for a moment, Allan," he said.
+
+There was something of the trouble left by the dream, and
+something of natural surprise at the strange request just
+addressed to him, in Allan's face, as he turned it full on the
+speaker; but no shadow of ill-will, no lurking lines of distrust
+anywhere. Midwinter turned aside quickly, and hid, as he best
+might, an irrepressible outburst of relief.
+
+"Do I look a little upset?" asked Allan, taking his arm, and
+leading him on again. "Don't make yourself nervous about me if I
+do. My head feels wild and giddy, but I shall soon get over it."
+
+For the next few minutes they walked backward and forward in
+silence, the one bent on dismissing the terror of the dream from
+his thoughts, the other bent on discovering what the terror of
+the dream might be. Relieved of the dread that had oppressed it,
+the superstitious nature of Midwinter had leaped to its next
+conclusion at a bound. What if the sleeper had been visited by
+another revelation than the revelation of the Past? What if the
+dream had opened those unturned pages in the book of the Future
+which told the story of his life to come? The bare doubt that it
+might be so strengthened tenfold Midwinter's longing to penetrate
+the mystery which Allan's silence still kept a secret from him.
+
+"Is your head more composed?" he asked. "Can you tell me your
+dream now?"
+
+While he put the question, a last memorable moment in the
+Adventure of the Wreck was at hand.
+
+They had reached the stern, and were just turning again when
+Midwinter spoke. As Allan opened his lips to answer, he looked
+out mechanically to sea. Instead of replying, he suddenly ran to
+the taffrail, and waved his hat over his head, with a shout of
+exultation.
+
+Midwinter joined him, and saw a large six-oared boat pulling
+straight for the channel of the Sound. A figure, which they both
+thought they recognized, rose eagerly in the stern-sheets and
+returned the waving of Allan's hat. The boat came nearer, the
+steersman called to them cheerfully, and they recognized the
+doctor's voice.
+
+"Thank God you're both above water!" said Mr. Hawbury, as they
+met him on the deck of the timber-ship. "Of all the winds of
+heaven, which wind blew you here?"
+
+He looked at Midwinter as he made the inquiry, but it was Allan
+who told him the story of the night, and Allan who asked the
+doctor for information in return. The one absorbing interest in
+Midwinter's mind--the interest of penetrating the mystery of the
+dream--kept him silent throughout. Heedless of all that was said
+or done about him, he watched Allan, and followed Allan, like a
+dog, until the time came for getting down into the boat. Mr.
+Hawbury's professional eye rested on him curiously, noting his
+varying color, and the incessant restlessness of his hands. "I
+wouldn't change nervous systems with that man for the largest
+fortune that could be offered me," thought  the doctor as he took
+the boat's t iller, and gave the oarsmen their order to push off
+from the wreck.
+
+Having reserved all explanations on his side until they were on
+their way back to Port St. Mary, Mr. Hawbury next addressed
+himself to the gratification of Allan's curiosity. The
+circumstances which had brought him to the rescue of his two
+guests of the previous evening were simple enough. The lost boat
+had been met with at sea by some fishermen of Port Erin, on the
+western side of the island, who at once recognized it as the
+doctor's property, and at once sent a messenger to make inquiry,
+at the doctor's house. The man's statement of what had happened
+had naturally alarmed Mr. Hawbury for the safety of Allan and his
+friend. He had immediately secured assistance, and, guided by the
+boatman's advice, had made first for the most dangerous place on
+the coast--the only place, in that calm weather, in which an
+accident could have happened to a boat sailed by experienced
+men--the channel of the Sound. After thus accounting for his
+welcome appearance on the scene, the doctor hospitably insisted
+that his guests of the evening should be his guests of the
+morning as well. It would still be too early when they got back
+for the people at the hotel to receive them, and they would find
+bed and breakfast at Mr. Hawbury's house.
+
+At the first pause in the conversation between Allan and the
+doctor, Midwinter, who had neither joined in the talk nor
+listened to the talk, touched his friend on the arm. "Are you
+better?" he asked, in a whisper. "Shall you soon be composed
+enough to tell me what I want to know?"
+
+Allan's eyebrows contracted impatiently; the subject of the
+dream, and Midwinter's obstinacy in returning to it, seemed to be
+alike distasteful to him. He hardly answered with his usual good
+humor. "I suppose I shall have no peace till I tell you," he
+said, "so I may as well get it over at once."
+
+"No!" returned Midwinter, with a look at the doctor and his
+oarsmen. "Not where other people can hear it--not till you and I
+are alone."
+
+"If you wish to see the last, gentlemen, of your quarters for the
+night," interposed the doctor, "now is your time! The coast will
+shut the vessel out in a minute more."
+
+In silence on the one side and on the other, the two Armadales
+looked their last at the fatal ship. Lonely and lost they had
+found the wreck in the mystery of the summer night; lonely and
+lost they left the wreck in the radiant beauty of the summer
+morning.
+
+An hour later the doctor had seen his guests established in their
+bedrooms, and had left them to take their rest until the
+breakfast hour arrived.
+
+Almost as soon as his back was turned, the doors of both rooms
+opened softly, and Allan and Midwinter met in the passage.
+
+"Can you sleep after what has happened?" asked Allan.
+
+Midwinter shook his head. "You were coming to my room, were you
+not?" he said. "What for?"
+
+"To ask you to keep me company. What were you coming to _my_ room
+for?"
+
+"To ask you to tell me your dream."
+
+"Damn the dream! I want to forget all about it."
+
+"And _I_ want to know all about it."
+
+Both paused; both refrained instinctively from saying more. For
+the first time since the beginning of their friendship they were
+on the verge of a disagreement, and that on the subject of the
+dream. Allan's good temper just stopped them on the brink.
+
+"You are the most obstinate fellow alive," he said; "but if you
+will know all about it, you must know all about it, I suppose.
+Come into my room, and I'll tell you."
+
+He led the way, and Midwinter followed. The door closed and shut
+them in together.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE.
+
+WHEN Mr. Hawbury joined his guests in the breakfast-room, the
+strange contrast of character between them which he had noticed
+already was impressed on his mind more strongly than ever. One of
+them sat at the well-spread table, hungry and happy, ranging from
+dish to dish, and declaring that he had never made such a
+breakfast in his life. The other sat apart at the window; his cup
+thanklessly deserted before it was empty, his meat left
+ungraciously half-eaten on his plate. The doctor's morning
+greeting to the two accurately expressed the differing
+impressions which they had produced on his mind.
+
+He clapped Allan on the shoulder, and saluted him with a joke. He
+bowed constrainedly to Midwinter, and said, "I am afraid you have
+not recovered the fatigues of the night."
+
+"It's not the night, doctor, that has damped his spirits," said
+Allan. "It's something I have been telling him. It is not my
+fault, mind. If I had only known beforehand that he believed in
+dreams, I wouldn't have opened my lips."
+
+"Dreams?" repeated the doctor, looking at Midwinter directly, and
+addressing him under a mistaken impression of the meaning of
+Allan's words. "With your constitution, you ought to be well used
+to dreaming by this time."
+
+"This way, doctor; you have taken the wrong turning!" cried
+Allan. "I'm the dreamer, not he. Don't look astonished; it wasn't
+in this comfortable house; it was on board that confounded
+timber-ship. The fact is, I fell asleep just before you took us
+off the wreck; and it's not to be denied that I had a very ugly
+dream. Well, when we got back here--"
+
+"Why do you trouble Mr. Hawbury about a matter that cannot
+possibly interest him?" asked Midwinter, speaking for the first
+time, and speaking very impatiently.
+
+"I beg your pardon," returned the doctor, rather sharply; "so far
+as I have heard, the matter does interest me."
+
+"That's right, doctor!" said Allan. "Be interested, I beg and
+pray; I want you to clear his head of the nonsense he has got in
+it now. What do you think? He will have it that my dream is a
+warning to me to avoid certain people; and he actually persists
+in saying that one of those people is--himself! Did you ever hear
+the like of it? I took great pains; I explained the whole thing
+to him. I said, warning be hanged; it's all indigestion! You
+don't know what I ate and drank at the doctor's supper-table; I
+do. Do you think he would listen to me? Not he. You try him next;
+you're a professional man, and he must listen to you. Be a good
+fellow, doctor, and give me a certificate of indigestion; I'll
+show you my tongue with pleasure."
+
+"The sight of your face is quite enough," said Mr. Hawbury. "I
+certify, on the spot, that you never had such a thing as an
+indigestion in your life. Let's hear about the dream, and see
+what we can make of it, if you have no objection, that is to
+say."
+
+Allan pointed at Midwinter with his fork.
+
+"Apply to my friend, there," he said; "he has got a much better
+account of it than I can give you. If you'll believe me, he took
+it all down in writing from my own lips; and he made me sign it
+at the end, as if it was my 'last dying speech and confession'
+before I went to the gallows. Out with it, old boy--I saw you put
+it in your pocket-book--out with it!"
+
+"Are you really in earnest?" asked Midwinter, producing his
+pocketbook with a reluctance which was almost offensive under the
+circumstances, for it implied distrust of the doctor in the
+doctor's own house.
+
+Mr. Hawbury's color rose. "Pray don't show it to me, if you feel
+the least unwillingness," he said, with the elaborate politeness
+of an offended man.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Allan. "Throw it over here!"
+
+Instead of complying with that characteristic request, Midwinter
+took the paper from the pocket-book, and, leaving his place,
+approached Mr. Hawbury. "I beg your pardon," he said, as he
+offered the doctor the manuscript with his own hand. His eyes
+dropped to the ground, and his face darkened, while he made the
+apology. "A secret, sullen fellow," thought the doctor, thanking
+him with formal civility; "his friend is worth ten thousand of
+him." Midwinter went back to the window, and sat down again in
+silence, with the old impenetrable resignation which had once
+puzzled Mr. Brock.
+
+"Read that, doctor," said Allan, as Mr. Hawbury opened the
+written paper. "It's not told in my roundabout way; but there's
+nothing added to it, and nothing taken away. It's exactly what I
+dreamed, and exactly what I should have written myself, if I had
+thought the thing worth putting down on paper, and if I had had
+the knack of writing--which," concluded Allan, composedly
+stirring his coffee, "I haven't, except it's letters; and I
+rattle _them_ off in no time."
+
+Mr. Hawbury spread the manuscript before him on the
+breakfast-table, and read these lines:
+
+                       "ALLAN ARMADALE'S DREAM.
+
+"Early on the morning of June the first, eighteen hundred and
+fifty-one, I found myself (through circumstances which it is not
+important to mention in this place) left alone with a friend of
+mine--a young man about my own age--on board the French
+timber-ship named _La Grace de Dieu,_ which ship then lay wrecked
+in the channel of the Sound between the main-land of the Isle of
+Man and the islet called the Calf. Having not been in bed the
+previous night, and feeling overcome by fatigue, I fell asleep on
+the deck of the vessel. I was in my usual good health at the
+time, and the morning was far enough advanced for the sun to have
+risen. Under these circumstances, and at that period of the day,
+I passed from sleeping to dreaming. As clearly as I can recollect
+it, after the lapse of a few hours, this was the succession of
+events presented to me by the dream:
+
+"1. The first event of which I was conscious was the appearance
+of my father. He took me silently by the hand; and we found
+ourselves in the cabin of a ship.
+
+"2. Water rose slowly over us in the cabin; and I and my father
+sank through the water together.
+
+"3. An interval of oblivion followed; and then the sense came to
+me of being left alone in the darkness.
+
+"4. I waited.
+
+"5. The darkness opened, and showed me the vision--as in a
+picture--of a broad, lonely pool, surrounded by open ground.
+Above the farther margin of the pool I saw the cloudless western
+sky, red with the light of sunset.
+
+"6. On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of a
+Woman.
+
+"7. It was the shadow only. No indication was visible to me by
+which I could identify it, or compare it with any living
+creature. The long robe showed me that it was the shadow of a
+woman, and showed me nothing more.
+
+"8. The darkness closed again--remained with me for an
+interval--and opened for the second time.
+
+"9. I found myself in a room, standing before. a long window. The
+only object of furniture or of ornament that I saw (or that I can
+now remember having seen) was a little statue placed near me. The
+window opened on a lawn and flower-garden; and the rain was
+pattering heavily against the glass.
+
+"10. I was not alone in the room. Standing opposite to me at the
+window was the Shadow of a Man.
+
+"11. I saw no more of it; I knew no more of it than I saw and
+knew of the shadow of the woman. But the shadow of the man moved.
+It stretched out its arm toward the statue; and the statue fell
+in fragments on the floor.
+
+"12. With a confused sensation in me, which was partly anger and
+partly distress, I stooped to look at the fragments. When I rose
+again, the Shadow had vanished, and I saw no more.
+
+"13. The darkness opened for the third time, and showed me the
+Shadow of the Woman and the Shadow of the Man together.
+
+"14. No surrounding scene (or none that I can now call to mind)
+was visible to me.
+
+"15. The Man-Shadow was the nearest; the Woman-Shadow stood back.
+From where she stood, there came a sound as of the pouring of a
+liquid softly. I saw her touch the shadow of the man with one
+hand, and with the other give him a glass. He took the glass, and
+gave it to me. In the moment when I put it to my lips, a deadly
+faintness mastered me from head to foot. When I came to my senses
+again, the Shadows had vanished, and the third vision was at an
+end.
+
+"16. The darkness closed over me again; and the interval of
+oblivion followed.
+
+"17. I was conscious of nothing more, till I felt the morning sun
+shine on my face, and heard my friend tell me that I had awakened
+from a dream." . . . .
+
+
+After reading the narrative attentively to the last line (under
+which appeared Allan's signature), the doctor looked across the
+breakfast-table at Midwinter, and tapped his fingers on the
+manuscript with a satirical smile.
+
+"Many men, many opinions," he said. "I don't agree with either of
+you about this dream. Your theory," he added, looking at Allan,
+with a smile, "we have disposed of already: the supper that _you_
+can't digest is a supper which has yet to be discovered. My
+theory we will come to presently; your friend's theory claims
+attention first." He turned again to Midwinter, with his
+anticipated triumph over a man whom he disliked a little too
+plainly visible in his face and manner. "If I understand
+rightly," he went on, "you believe that this dream is a warning!
+supernaturally addressed to Mr. Armadale, of dangerous events
+that are threatening him, and of dangerous people connected with
+those events whom he would do wisely to avoid. May I inquire
+whether you have arrived at this conclusion as an habitual
+believer in dreams, or as having reasons of your own for
+attaching especial importance to this one dream in particular?"
+
+"You have stated what my conviction is quite accurately,"
+returned Midwinter, chafing under the doctor's looks and tones.
+"Excuse me if I ask you to be satisfied with that admission, and
+to let me keep my reasons to myself."
+
+"That's exactly what he said to me," interposed Allan. "I don't
+believe he has got any reasons at all."
+
+"Gently! gently!" said Mr. Hawbury. "We can discuss the subject
+without intruding ourselves into anybody's secrets. Let us come
+to my own method of dealing with the dream next. Mr. Midwinter
+will probably not be surprised to hear that I look at this matter
+from an essentially practical point of view."
+
+"I shall not be at all surprised," retorted Midwinter. "The view
+of a medical man, when he has a problem in humanity to solve,
+seldom ranges beyond the point of his dissecting-knife."
+
+The doctor was a little nettled on his side. "Our limits are not
+quite so narrow as that," he said; "but I willingly grant you
+that there are some articles of your faith in which we doctors
+don't believe. For example, we don't believe that a reasonable
+man is justified in attaching a supernatural interpretation to
+any phenomenon which comes within the range of his senses, until
+he has certainly ascertained that there is no such thing as a
+natural explanation of it to be found in the first instance."
+
+"Come; that's fair enough, I'm sure," exclaimed Allan. "He hit
+you hard with the 'dissecting-knife,' doctor; and now you have
+hit him back again with your 'natural explanation.' Let's have
+it."
+
+"By all means," said Mr. Hawbury. "Here it is. There is nothing
+at all extraordinary in my theory of dreams: it is the theory
+accepted by the great mass of my profession. A dream is the
+reproduction, in the sleeping state of the brain, of images and
+impressions produced on it in the waking state; and this
+reproduction is more or less involved, imperfect, or
+contradictory, as the action of certain faculties in the dreamer
+is controlled more or less completely by the influence of sleep.
+Without inquiring further into this latter part of the subject--a
+very curious and interesting part of it--let us take the theory,
+roughly and generally, as I have just stated it, and apply it at
+once to the dream now under consideration." He took up the
+written paper from the table, and dropped the formal tone (as of
+a lecturer addressing an audience) into which he had insensibly
+fallen. "I see one event already in this dream," he resumed,
+"which I know to be the reproduction of a waking impression
+produced on Mr. Armadale in my own presence. If he will only help
+me by exerting his memory, I don't despair of tracing back the
+whole succession of events set down here to something that he has
+said or thought, or seen or done, in the four-and-twenty hours,
+or less, which preceded his falling asleep on the deck of the
+timber-ship."
+
+"I'll exert my memory with the greatest pleasure," said Allan.
+"Where shall we start from?"
+
+"Start by telling me what you did yesterday, before I met you and
+your friend on the road to this place," replied Mr. Hawbury. "We
+will say, you got up and had your breakfast. What next?"
+
+"We took a carriage next," said Allan, "and drove from Castletown
+to Douglas to see
+ my old friend, Mr. Brock, off by the steamer to Liverpool. We
+came back to Castletown. and separated at the hotel door.
+Midwinter went into the house, and I went on to my yacht in the
+harbor.--By-the-bye, doctor; remember you have promised to go
+cruising with us before we leave the Isle of Man."
+
+"Many thanks; but suppose we keep to the matter in hand. What
+next?"
+
+Allan hesitated. In both senses of the word his mind was at sea
+already.
+
+"What did you do on board the yacht?"
+
+"Oh, I know! I put the cabin to rights--thoroughly to rights. I
+give you my word of honor, I turned every blessed thing
+topsy-turvy. And my friend there came off in a shore-boat and
+helped me.--Talking of boats, I have never asked you yet whether
+your boat came to any harm last night. If there's any damage
+done, I insist on being allowed to repair it."
+
+The doctor abandoned all further attempts at the cultivation of
+Allan's memory in despair.
+
+"I doubt if we shall be able to reach our object conveniently in
+this way," he said. "It will be better to take the events of the
+dream in their regular order, and to ask the questions that
+naturally suggest themselves as we go on. Here are the first two
+events to begin with. You dream that your father appears to
+you--that you and he find yourselves in the cabin of a ship--that
+the water rises over you, and that you sink in it together. Were
+you down in the cabin of the wreck, may I ask?"
+
+"I couldn't be down there," replied Allan, "as the cabin was full
+of water. I looked in and saw it, and shut the door again."
+
+"Very good," said Mr. Hawbury. "Here are the waking impressions
+clear enough, so far. You have had the cabin in your mind; and
+you have had the water in your mind; and the sound of the channel
+current (as I well know without asking) was the last sound in
+your ears when you went to sleep. The idea of drowning comes too
+naturally out of such impressions as these to need dwelling on.
+Is there anything else before we go on? Yes; there is one more
+circumstance left to account for."
+
+"The most important circumstance of all," remarked Midwinter,
+joining in the conversation, without stirring from his place at
+the window.
+
+"You mean the appearance of Mr. Armadale's father? I was just
+coming to that," answered Mr. Hawbury. "Is your father alive?" he
+added, addressing himself to Allan once more.
+
+"My father died before I was born."
+
+The doctor started. "This complicates it a little," he said. "How
+did you know that the figure appearing to you in the dream was
+the figure of your father?"
+
+Allan hesitated again. Midwinter drew his chair a little away
+from the window, and looked at the doctor attentively for the
+first time.
+
+"Was your father in your thoughts before you went to sleep?"
+pursued Mr. Hawbury. "Was there any description of him--any
+portrait of him at home--in your mind?"
+
+"Of course there was!" cried Allan, suddenly seizing the lost
+recollection. "Midwinter! you remember the miniature you found on
+the floor of the cabin when we were putting the yacht to rights?
+You said I didn't seem to value it; and I told you I did, because
+it was a portrait of my father--"
+
+"And was the face in the dream like the face in the miniature?"
+asked Mr. Hawbury.
+
+"Exactly like! I say, doctor, this is beginning to get
+interesting!"
+
+"What do you say now?" asked Mr. Hawbury, turning toward the
+window again.
+
+Midwinter hurriedly left his chair, and placed himself at the
+table with Allan. Just as he had once already taken refuge from
+the tyranny of his own superstition in the comfortable common
+sense of Mr. Brock, so, with the same headlong eagerness, with
+the same straightforward sincerity of purpose, he now took refuge
+in the doctor's theory of dreams. "I say what my friend says," he
+answered, flushing with a sudden enthusiasm; "this is beginning
+to get interesting. Go on; pray go on."
+
+The doctor looked at his strange guest more indulgently than he
+had looked yet. "You are the only mystic I have met with," he
+said, "who is willing to give fair evidence fair play. I don't
+despair of converting you before our inquiry comes to an end. Let
+us get on to the next set of events," he resumed, after referring
+for a moment to the manuscript. "The interval of oblivion which
+is described as succeeding the first of the appearances in the
+dream may be easily disposed of. It means, in plain English, the
+momentary cessation of the brain's intellectual action, while a
+deeper wave of sleep flows over it, just as the sense of being
+alone in the darkness, which follows, indicates the renewal of
+that action, previous to the reproduction of another set of
+impressions. Let us see what they are. A lonely pool, surrounded
+by an open country; a sunset sky on the further side of the pool;
+and the shadow of a woman on the near side. Very good; now for
+it, Mr. Armadale! How did that pool get into your head? The open
+country you saw on your way from Castletown to this place But we
+have no pools or lakes hereabouts; and you can have seen none
+recently elsewhere, for you came here after a cruise at sea. Must
+we fall back on a picture, or a book, or a conversation with your
+friend?"
+
+Allan looked at Midwinter. "I don't remember talking about pools
+or lakes," he said. "Do you?"
+
+Instead of answering the question, Midwinter suddenly appealed to
+the doctor.
+
+"Have you got the last number of the Manx newspaper?" he asked.
+
+The doctor produced it from the sideboard. Midwinter turned to
+the page containing those extracts from the recently published
+"Travels in Australia," which had roused Allan's, interest on the
+previous evening, and the reading of which had ended by sending
+his friend to sleep. There--in the passage describing the
+sufferings of the travelers from thirst, and the subsequent
+discovery which saved their lives--there, appearing at the climax
+of the narrative, was the broad pool of water which had figured
+in Allan's dream!
+
+"Don't put away the paper," said the doctor, when Midwinter had
+shown it to him, with the necessary explanation. "Before we are
+at the end of the inquiry, it is quite possible we may want that
+extract again. We have got at the pool. How about the sunset?
+Nothing of that sort is referred to in the newspaper extract.
+Search your memory again, Mr. Armadale; we want your waking
+impression of a sunset, if you please."
+
+Once more, Allan was at a loss for an answer; and, once more,
+Midwinter's ready memory helped him through the difficulty.
+
+"I think I can trace our way back to this impression, as I traced
+our way back to the other," he said, addressing the doctor.
+"After we got here yesterday afternoon, my friend and I took a
+long walk over the hills--"
+
+"That's it!" interposed Allan. "I remember. The sun was setting
+as we came back to the hotel for supper, and it was such a
+splendid red sky, we both stopped to look at it. And then we
+talked about Mr. Brock, and wondered how far he had got on his
+journey home. My memory may be a slow one at starting, doctor;
+but when it's once set going, stop it if you can! I haven't half
+done yet."
+
+"Wait one minute, in mercy to Mr. Midwinter's memory and mine,"
+said the doctor. "We have traced back to your waking impressions
+the vision of the open country, the pool, and the sunset. But the
+Shadow of the Woman has not been accounted for yet. Can you find
+us the original of this mysterious figure in the dream
+landscape?"
+
+Allan relapsed into his former perplexity, and Midwinter waited
+for what was to come, with his eyes fixed in breathless interest
+on the doctor's face. For the first time there was unbroken
+silence in the room. Mr. Hawbury looked interrogatively from
+Allan to Allan's friend. Neither of them answered him. Between
+the shadow and the shadow's substance there was a great gulf of
+mystery, impenetrable alike to all three of them.
+
+"Patience," said the doctor, composedly. "Let us leave the figure
+by the pool for the present and try if we can't pick her up again
+as we go on. Allow me to observe, Mr. Midwinter, that it is not
+very easy to identify a shadow; but we won't despair. This
+impalpable lady of the lake may take some consistency when we
+next meet with her."
+
+Midwinter made no reply. From that moment his interest in the
+inquiry began to flag.
+
+"What is the next scene in the dream?" pursued Mr. Hawbury,
+referring to the manuscript. "Mr. Armadale finds himself in a
+room. He is standing before a long window opening on a lawn and
+flower-garden, and the rain is pattering against the glass. The
+only thing he sees in the room is a little statue; and the only
+company he has is the Shadow of a Man standing opposite to him.
+The Shadow stretches out its arm, and the statue falls in
+fragments on the floor; and the dreamer, in anger and distress at
+the catastrophe (observe, gentlemen, that here the sleeper's
+reasoning faculty wakes up a little, and the dream passes
+rationally, for a moment, from cause to effect), stoops to look
+at the broken pieces. When he looks up again, the scene has
+vanished. That is to say, in the ebb and flow of sleep, it is the
+turn of the flow now, and the brain rests a little. What's the
+matter, Mr. Armadale? Has that restive memory of yours run away
+with you again?"
+
+"Yes," said Allan. "I'm off at full gallop. I've run the broken
+statue to earth; it's nothing more nor less than a china
+shepherdess I knocked off the mantel-piece in the hotel
+coffee-room, when I rang the bell for supper last night. I say,
+how well we get on; don't we? It's like guessing a riddle. Now,
+then, Midwinter! your turn next."
+
+"No!" said the doctor. "My turn, if you please. I claim the long
+window, the garden, and the lawn, as my property. You will find
+the long window, Mr. Armadale, in the next room. If you look out,
+you'll see the garden and lawn in front of it; and, if you'll
+exert that wonderful memory of yours, you will recollect that you
+were good enough to take special and complimentary notice of my
+smart French window and my neat garden, when I drove you and your
+friend to Port St. Mary yesterday."
+
+"Quite right," rejoined Allan; "so I did. But what about the rain
+that fell in the dream? I haven't seen a drop of rain for the
+last week."
+
+Mr. Hawbury hesitated. The Manx newspaper which had been left on
+the table caught his eye. "If we can think of nothing else," he
+said, "let us try if we can't find the idea of the rain where we
+found the idea of the pool." He looked through the extract
+carefully. "I have got it!" he exclaimed. "Here is rain described
+as having fallen on these thirsty Australian travelers, before
+they discovered the pool. Behold the shower, Mr. Armadale, which
+got into your mind when you read the extract to your friend last
+night! And behold the dream, Mr. Midwinter, mixing up separate
+waking impressions just as usual!"
+
+"Can you find the waking impression which accounts for the human
+figure at the window?" asked Midwinter; "or are we to pass over
+the Shadow of the Man as we have passed over the Shadow of the
+Woman already?"
+
+He put the question with scrupulous courtesy of manner, but with
+a tone of sarcasm in his voice which caught the doctor's ear, and
+set up the doctor's controversial bristles on the instant.
+
+"When you are picking up shells on the beach, Mr. Midwinter, you
+usually begin with the shells that lie nearest at hand," he
+rejoined. "We are picking up facts now; and those that are
+easiest to get at are the facts we will take first. Let the
+Shadow of the Man and the Shadow of the Woman pair off together
+for the present; we won't lose sight of them, I promise you. All
+in good time, my dear sir; all in good time!"
+
+He, too, was polite, and he, too, was sarcastic. The short truce
+between the opponents was at an end already. Midwinter returned
+significantly to his former place by the window. The doctor
+instantly turned his back on the window more significantly still.
+Allan, who never quarreled with anybody's opinion, and never
+looked below the surface of anybody's conduct, drummed cheerfully
+on the table with the handle of his knife. "Go on, doctor!" he
+called out; "my wonderful memory is as fresh as ever."
+
+"Is it?" said Mr. Hawbury, referring again to the narrative of
+the dream. "Do you remember what happened when you and I were
+gossiping with the landlady at the bar of the hotel last night?"
+
+"Of course I do! You were kind enough to hand me a glass of
+brandy-and-water, which the landlady had just mixed for your own
+drinking. And I was obliged to refuse it because, as I told you,
+the taste of brandy always turns me sick and faint, mix it how
+you please."
+
+"Exactly so," returned the doctor. "And here is the incident
+reproduced in the dream. You see the man's shadow and the woman's
+shadow together this time. You hear the pouring out of liquid
+(brandy from the hotel bottle, and water from the hotel jug); the
+glass is handed by the woman-shadow (the landlady) to the
+man-shadow (myself); the man-shadow hands it to you (exactly what
+I did); and the faintness (which you had previously described to
+me) follows in due course. I am shocked to identify these
+mysterious appearances, Mr. Midwinter, with such miserably
+unromantic originals as a woman who keeps a hotel, and a man who
+physics a country district. But your friend himself will tell you
+that the glass of brandy-and-water was prepared by the landlady,
+and that it reached him by passing from her hand to mine. We have
+picked up the shadows, exactly as I anticipated; and we have only
+to account now--which may be done in two words--for the manner of
+their appearance in the dream. After having tried to introduce
+the waking impression of the doctor and the landlady separately,
+in connection with the wrong set of circumstances, the dreaming
+mind comes right at the third trial, and introduces the doctor
+and the landlady together, in connection with the right set of
+circumstances. There it is in a nutshell!--Permit me to hand you
+back the manuscript, with my best thanks for your very complete
+and striking confirmation of the rational theory of dreams."
+Saying those words, Mr. Hawbury returned the written paper to
+Midwinter, with the pitiless politeness of a conquering man.
+
+"Wonderful! not a point missed anywhere from beginning to end! By
+Jupiter!" cried Allan, with the ready reverence of intense
+ignorance. "What a thing science is!"
+
+"Not a point missed, as you say," remarked the doctor,
+complacently. "And yet I doubt if we have succeeded in convincing
+your friend."
+
+"You have _not_ convinced me," said Midwinter. "But I don't
+presume on that account to say that you are wrong."
+
+He spoke quietly, almost sadly. The terrible conviction of the
+supernatural origin of the dream, from which he had tried to
+escape, had possessed itself of him again. All his interest in
+the argument was at an end; all his sensitiveness to its
+irritating influences was gone. In the case of any other man, Mr.
+Hawbury would have been mollified by such a concession as his
+adversary had now made to him; but he disliked Midwinter too
+cordially to leave him in the peaceable enjoyment of an opinion
+of his own.
+
+"Do you admit," asked the doctor, more pugnaciously than ever,
+"that I have traced back every event of the dream to a waking
+impression which preceded it in Mr. Armadale's mind?"
+
+"I have no wish to deny that you have done so," said Midwinter,
+resignedly.
+
+"Have I identified the shadows with their living originals?"
+
+"You have identified them to your own satisfaction, and to my
+friend's satisfaction. Not to mine."
+
+"Not to yours? Can _you_ identify them?"
+
+"No. I can only wait till the living originals stand revealed in
+the future."
+
+"Spoken like an oracle, Mr. Midwinter! Have you any idea at
+present of who those living originals may be?"
+
+"I have. I believe that coming events will identify the Shadow of
+the Woman with a person whom my friend has not met with yet; and
+the Shadow of the Man with myself."
+
+Allan attempted to speak. The doctor stopped him. "Let us clearly
+understand this," he said to Midwinter. "Leaving your own case
+out of the question for the moment, may I ask how a shadow, which
+has no distinguishing mark about it, is to be identified with a
+living woman whom your friend doesn't know?"
+
+Midwinter's color rose a little. He began to feel the lash of the
+doctor's logic.
+
+"The landscape picture of the dream has its distinguishing
+marks," he replied; "and in that landscape the living woma n will
+appear when the living woman is first seen."
+
+"The same thing will happen, I suppose," pursued the doctor,
+"with the man-shadow which you persist in identifying with
+yourself. You will be associated in the future with a statue
+broken in your friend's presence, with a long window looking out
+on a garden, and with a shower of rain pattering against the
+glass? Do you say that?"
+
+"I say that."
+
+"And so again, I presume, with the next vision? You and the
+mysterious woman will be brought together in some place now
+unknown, and will present to Mr. Armadale some liquid yet
+unnamed, which will turn him faint?--Do you seriously tell me you
+believe this?"
+
+"I seriously tell you I believe it."
+
+"And, according to your view, these fulfillments of the dream
+will mark the progress of certain coming events, in which Mr.
+Armadale's happiness, or Mr. Armadale's safety, will be
+dangerously involved?"
+
+"That is my firm conviction."
+
+The doctor rose, laid aside his moral dissecting-knife,
+considered for a moment, and took it up again.
+
+"One last question," he said. "Have you any reason to give for
+going out of your way to adopt such a mystical view as this, when
+an unanswerably rational explanation of the dream lies straight
+before you?"
+
+"No reason," replied Midwinter, "that I can give, either to you
+or to my friend."
+
+The doctor looked at his watch with the air of a man who is
+suddenly reminded that he has been wasting his time.
+
+"We have no common ground to start from," he said; "and if we
+talk till doomsday, we should not agree. Excuse my leaving you
+rather abruptly. It is later than I thought; and my morning's
+batch of sick people are waiting for me in the surgery. I have
+convinced _your_ mind, Mr. Armadale, at any rate; so the time we
+have given to this discussion has not been altogether lost. Pray
+stop here, and smoke your cigar. I shall be at your service again
+in less than an hour." He nodded cordially to Allan, bowed
+formally to Midwinter, and quitted the room.
+
+As soon as the doctor's back was turned, Allan left his place at
+the table, and appealed to his friend, with that irresistible
+heartiness of manner which had always found its way to
+Midwinter's sympathies, from the first day when they met at the
+Somersetshire inn.
+
+"Now the sparring-match between you and the doctor is over," said
+Allan, "I have got two words to say on my side. Will you do
+something for my sake which you won't do for your own?"
+
+Midwinter's face brightened instantly. "I will do anything you
+ask me," he said.
+
+"Very well. Will you let the subject of the dream drop out of our
+talk altogether from this time forth?"
+
+"Yes, if you wish it."
+
+"Will you go a step further? Will you leave off thinking about
+the dream?"
+
+"It's hard to leave off thinking about it, Allan. But I will
+try."
+
+"That's a good fellow! Now give me that trumpery bit of paper,
+and let's tear it up, and have done with it."
+
+He tried to snatch the manuscript out of his friend's hand; but
+Midwinter was too quick for him, and kept it beyond his reach.
+
+"Come! come!" pleaded Allan. "I've set my heart on lighting my
+cigar with it."
+
+Midwinter hesitated painfully. It was hard to resist Allan; but
+he did resist him. "I'll wait a little," he said, "before you
+light your cigar with it."
+
+"How long? Till to-morrow?"
+
+"Longer."
+
+"Till we leave the Isle of Man?"
+
+"Longer."
+
+"Hang it--give me a plain answer to a plain question! How long
+_will_ you wait?"
+
+Midwinter carefully restored the paper to its place in his
+pocketbook.
+
+"I'll wait," he said, "till we get to Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+
+THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK.
+
+                              ---------
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+LURKING MISCHIEF.
+
+1. _From Ozias Midwinter to Mr. Brock._
+
+"Thorpe Ambrose, June 15, 1851.
+
+"DEAR MR. BROCK--Only an hour since we reached this house, just
+as the servants were locking up for the night. Allan has gone to
+bed, worn out by our long day's journey, and has left me in the
+room they call the library, to tell you the story of our journey
+to Norfolk. Being better seasoned than he is to fatigues of all
+kinds, my eyes are quite wakeful enough for writing a letter,
+though the clock on the chimney-piece points to midnight, and we
+have been traveling since ten in the morning.
+
+"The last news you had of us was news sent by Allan from the Isle
+of Man. If I am not mistaken, he wrote to tell you of the night
+we passed on board the wrecked ship. Forgive me, dear Mr. Brock,
+if I say nothing on that subject until time has helped me to
+think of it with a quieter mind. The hard fight against myself
+must all be fought over again; but I will win it yet, please God;
+I will, indeed.
+
+"There is no need to trouble you with any account of our
+journeyings about the northern and western districts of the
+island, or of the short cruises we took when the repairs of the
+yacht were at last complete. It will be better if I get on at
+once to the morning of yesterday, the fourteenth. We had come in
+with the night-tide to Douglas Harbor, and, as soon as the
+post-office was open; Allan, by my advice, sent on shore for
+letters. The messenger returned with one letter only, and the
+writer of it proved to be the former mistress of Thorpe
+Ambrose--Mrs. Blanchard.
+
+"You ought to be informed, I think, of the contents of this
+letter, for it has seriously influenced Allan's plans. He loses
+everything, sooner or later, as you know, and he has lost the
+letter already. So I must give you the substance of what Mrs.
+Blanchard wrote to him, as plainly as I can.
+
+"The first page announced the departure of the ladies from Thorpe
+Ambrose. They left on the day before yesterday, the thirteenth,
+having, after much hesitation, finally decided on going abroad,
+to visit some old friends settled in Italy, in the neighborhood
+of Florence. It appears to be quite possible that Mrs. Blanchard
+and her niece may settle there, too, if they can find a suitable
+house and grounds to let. They both like the Italian country and
+the Italian people, and they are well enough off to please
+themselves. The elder lady has her jointure, and the younger is
+in possession of all her father's fortune.
+
+"The next page of the letter was, in Allan's opinion, far from a
+pleasant page to read.
+
+"After referring, in the most grateful terms, to the kindness
+which had left her niece and herself free to leave their old home
+at their own time, Mrs. Blanchard added that Allan's considerate
+conduct had produced such a strongly favorable impression among
+the friends and dependents of the family that they were desirous
+of giving him a public reception on his arrival among them. A
+preliminary meeting of the tenants on the estate and the
+principal persons in the neighboring town had already been held
+to discuss the arrangements, and a letter might be expected
+shortly from the clergyman inquiring when it would suit Mr.
+Armadale's convenience to take possession personally and publicly
+of his estates in Norfolk.
+
+"You will now be able to guess the cause of our sudden departure
+from the Isle of Man. The first and foremost idea in your old
+pupil's mind, as soon as he had read Mrs. Blanchard's account of
+the proceedings at the meeting, was the idea of escaping the
+public reception, and the one certain way he could see of
+avoiding it was to start for Thorpe Ambrose before the
+clergyman's letter could reach him.
+
+"I tried hard to make him think a little before he acted an his
+first impulse in this matter; but he only went on packing his
+portmanteau in his own impenetrably good-humored way. In ten
+minutes his luggage was ready, and in five minutes more he had
+given the crew their directions for taking the yacht back to
+Somersetshire. The steamer to Liverpool was alongside of us in
+the harbor, and I had really no choice but to go on board with
+him or to let him go by himself. I spare you the account of our
+stormy voyage, of our detention at Liverpool, and of the trains
+we missed on our journey across the country. You know that we
+have got here safely, and that is enough. What the servants think
+of the new squire's sudden appearance among them, without a word
+of warning, is of no great consequence. What  the committee for
+arranging the publi c reception may think of it when the news
+flies abroad to-morrow is, I am afraid, a more serious matter.
+
+"Having already mentioned the servants, I may proceed to tell you
+that the latter part of Mrs. BlanchardÕs letter was entirely
+devoted to instructing Allan on the subject of the domestic
+establishment which she has left behind her. It seems that all
+the servants, indoors and out (with three exceptions), are
+waiting here, on the chance that Allan will continue them in
+their places. Two of these exceptions are readily accounted for:
+Mrs. Blanchard's maid and Miss Blanchard's maid go abroad with
+their mistresses. The third exceptional case is the case of the
+upper housemaid; and here there is a little hitch. In plain
+words, the housemaid has been sent away at a moment's notice, for
+what Mrs. Blanchard rather mysteriously describes as 'levity of
+conduct with a stranger.'
+
+"I am afraid you will laugh at me, but I must confess the truth.
+I have been made so distrustful (after what happened to us in the
+Isle of Man) of even the most trifling misadventures which
+connect themselves in any way with Allan's introduction to his
+new life and prospects, that I have already questioned one of the
+men-servants here about this apparently unimportant matter of the
+housemaid's going away in disgrace.
+
+"All I can learn is that a strange man had been noticed hanging
+suspiciously about the grounds; that the housemaid was so ugly a
+woman as to render it next to a certainty that he had some
+underhand purpose to serve in making himself agreeable to her;
+and that he has not as yet been seen again in the neighborhood
+since the day of her dismissal. So much for the one servant who
+has been turned out at Thorpe Ambrose. I can only hope there is
+no trouble for Allan brewing in that quarter. As for the other
+servants who remain, Mrs. Blanchard describes them, both men and
+women, as perfectly trustworthy, and they will all, no doubt,
+continue to occupy their present places.
+
+"Having now done with Mrs. Blanchard's letter, my next duty is to
+beg you, in Allan's name and with Allan's love, to come here and
+stay with him at the earliest moment when you can leave
+Somersetshire. Although I cannot presume to think that my own
+wishes will have any special influence in determining you to
+accept this invitation, I must nevertheless acknowledge that I
+have a reason of my own for earnestly desiring to see you here.
+Allan has innocently caused me a new anxiety about my future
+relations with him, and I sorely need your advice to show me the
+right way of setting that anxiety at rest.
+
+"The difficulty which now perplexes me relates to the steward's
+place at Thorpe Ambrose. Before to-day I only knew that Allan had
+hit on some plan of his own for dealing with this matter, rather
+strangely involving, among other results, the letting of the
+cottage which was the old steward's place of abode, in
+consequence of the new steward's contemplated residence in the
+great house. A chance word in our conversation on the journey
+here led Allan into speaking out more plainly than he had spoken
+yet, and I heard to my unutterable astonishment that the person
+who was at the bottom of the whole arrangement about the steward
+was no other than myself!
+
+"It is needless to tell you how I felt this new instance of
+Allan's kindness. The first pleasure of hearing from his own lips
+that I had deserved the strongest proof he could give of his
+confidence in me was soon dashed by the pain which mixes itself
+with all pleasure--at least, with all that I have ever known.
+Never has my past life seemed so dreary to look back on as it
+seems now, when I feel how entirely it has unfitted me to take
+the place of all others that I should have liked to occupy in my
+friend's service. I mustered courage to tell him that I had none
+of the business knowledge and business experience which his
+steward ought to possess. He generously met the objection by
+telling me that I could learn; and he has promised to send to
+London for the person who has already been employed for the time
+being in the steward's office, and who will, therefore, be
+perfectly competent to teach me.
+
+"Do you, too, think I can learn? If you do, I will work day and
+night to instruct myself. But if (as I am afraid) the steward's
+duties are of far too serious a kind to be learned off-hand by a
+man so young and so inexperienced as I am, then pray hasten your
+journey to Thorpe Ambrose, and exert your influence over Allan
+personally. Nothing less will induce him to pass me over, and to
+employ a steward who is really fit to take the place. Pray, pray
+act in this matter as you think best for Allan's interests.
+Whatever disappointment I may feel, _he_ shall not see it.
+
+"Believe me, dear Mr. Brock,
+
+"Gratefuly yours,
+
+"OZIAS MIDWINTER.
+
+"P.S.--I open the envelope again to add one word more. If you
+have heard or seen anything since your return to Somersetshire of
+the woman in the black dress and the red shawl, I hope you will
+not forget, when you write, to let me know it.
+
+O. M."
+
+2. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Ladies' Toilet Repository, Diana Street, Pimlico,
+
+Wednesday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--To save the post, I write to you, after a long
+day's worry at my place of business, on the business
+letter-paper, having news since we last met which it seems
+advisable to send you at the earliest opportunity.
+
+"To begin at the beginning. After carefully considering the
+thing, I am quite sure you will do wisely with young Armadale if
+you hold your tongue about Madeira and all that happened there.
+Your position was, no doubt, a very strong one with his mother.
+You had privately helped her in playing a trick on her own
+father; you had been ungratefully dismissed, at a pitiably tender
+age, as soon as you had served her purpose; and, when you came
+upon her suddenly, after a separation of more than twenty years,
+you found her in failing health, with a grown-up son, whom she
+had kept in total ignorance of the true story of her marriage.
+
+"Have you any such advantages as these with the young gentleman
+who has survived her? If he is not a born idiot he will decline
+to believe your shocking aspersions on the memory of his mother;
+and--seeing that you have no proofs at this distance of time to
+meet him with--there is an end of your money-grubbing in the
+golden Armadale diggings. Mind, I don't dispute that the old
+lady's heavy debt of obligation, after what you did for her in
+Madeira, is not paid yet; and that the son is the next person to
+settle with you, now the mother has slipped through your fingers.
+Only squeeze him the right way, my dear, that's what I venture to
+suggest--squeeze him the right way.
+
+"And which is the right way? That question brings me to my news.
+
+"Have you thought again of that other notion of yours of trying
+your hand on this lucky young gentleman, with nothing but your
+own good looks and your own quick wits to help you? The idea hung
+on my mind so strangely after you were gone that it ended in my
+sending a little note to my lawyer, to have the will under which
+young Armadale has got his fortune examined at Doctor's Commons.
+The result turns out to be something infinitely more encouraging
+than either you or I could possibly have hoped for. After the
+lawyer's report to me, there cannot be a moment's doubt of what
+you ought to do. In two words, Lydia, take the bull by the
+horns--and marry him!
+
+"I am quite serious. He is much better worth the venture than you
+suppose. Only persuade him to make you Mrs. Armadale, and you may
+set all after-discoveries at flat defiance. As long as he lives,
+you can make your own terms with him; and, if he dies, the will
+entitles you, in spite of anything he can say or do--with
+children or without them--to an income chargeable on his estate
+of _twelve hundred a year for life._ There is no doubt about
+this; the lawyer himself has looked at the will. Of course, Mr.
+Blanchard had his son and his son's widow in his eye when he made
+the provision. But, as it is not limited to any one heir by name,
+and not revoked anywhere, it now holds as good with young
+Armadale as it would have held under other circumstances with Mr.
+Blanchard's son. W hat a chance for you, after all the miseries
+and the dangers you have gone through, to be mistress of Thorpe
+Ambrose, if he lives; to have an income for life, if he dies!
+Hook him, my poor dear; hook him at any sacrifice.
+
+"I dare say you will make the same objection when you read this
+which you made when we were talking about it the other day; I
+mean the objection of your age.
+
+"Now, my good creature, just listen to me. The question is--not
+whether you were five-and-thirty last birthday; we will own the
+dreadful truth, and say you were--but whether you do look, or
+don't look, your real age. My opinion on this matter ought to be,
+and is, one of the best opinions in London. I have had twenty
+years experience among our charming sex in making up battered old
+faces and wornout old figures to look like new, and I say
+positively you don't look a day over thirty, if as much. If you
+will follow my advice about dressing, and use one or two of my
+applications privately, I guarantee to put you back three years
+more. I will forfeit all the money I shall have to advance for
+you in this matter, if, when I have ground you young again in my
+wonderful mill, you look more than seven-and-twenty in any man's
+eyes living--except, of course, when you wake anxious in the
+small hours of the morning; and then, my dear, you will be old
+and ugly in the retirement of your own room, and it won't matter.
+
+" 'But,' you may say, 'supposing all this, here I am, even with
+your art to help me, looking a good six years older than he is;
+and that is against me at starting.' Is it? Just think again.
+Surely, your own experience must have shown you that the
+commonest of all common weaknesses, in young fellows of this
+Armadale's age, is to fall in love with women older than
+themselves. Who are the men who really appreciate us in the bloom
+of our youth (I'm sure I have cause to speak well of the bloom of
+youth; I made fifty guineas to-day by putting it on the spotted
+shoulders of a woman old enough to be your mother)--who are the
+men, I say, who are ready to worship us when we are mere babies
+of seventeen? The gay young gentlemen in the bloom of their own
+youth? No! The cunning old wretches who are on the wrong side of
+forty.
+
+"And what is the moral of this, as the story-books say?
+
+"The moral is that the chances, with such a head as you have got
+on your shoulders, are all in your favor. If you feel your
+present forlorn position, as I believe you do; if you know what a
+charming woman (in the men's eyes) you can still be when you
+please; and if all your resolution has really come back, after
+that shocking outbreak of desperation on board the steamer
+(natural enough, I own, under the dreadful provocation laid on
+you), you will want no further persuasion from me to try this
+experiment. Only to think of how things turn out! If the other
+young booby had not jumped into the river after you, _this_ young
+booby would never have had the estate. It really looks as if fate
+had determined that you were to be Mrs. Armadale, of Thorpe
+Ambrose; and who can control his fate, as the poet says?
+
+"Send me one line to say Yes or No; and believe me your attached
+old friend,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+3. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw._
+
+Richmond, Thursday.
+
+'YOU OLD WRETCH--I won't say Yes or No till I have had a long,
+long look at my glass first. If you had any real regard for
+anybody but your wicked old self, you would know that the bare
+idea of marrying again (after what I have gone through) is an
+idea that makes my flesh creep.
+
+"But there can be no harm in your sending me a little more
+information while I am making up my mind. You have got twenty
+pounds of mine still left out of those things you sold for me;
+send ten pounds here for my expenses, in a post-office order, and
+use the other ten for making private inquiries at Thorpe Ambrose.
+I want to know when the two Blanchard women go away, and when
+young Armadale stirs up the dead ashes in the family fire-place.
+Are you quite sure he will turn out as easy to manage as you
+think? If he takes after his hypocrite of a mother, I can tell
+you this--Judas Iscariot has come to life again.
+
+"I am very comfortable in this lodging. There are lovely flowers
+in the garden, and the birds wake me in the morning delightfully.
+I have hired a reasonably good piano. The only man I care two
+straws about--don't be alarmed; he was laid in his grave many a
+long year ago, under the name of BEETHOVEN--keeps me company, in
+my lonely hours. The landlady would keep me company, too, if I
+would only let her. I hate women. The new curate paid a visit to
+the other lodger yesterday, and passed me on the lawn as he came
+out. My eyes have lost nothing yet, at any rate, though I _am_
+five-and-thirty; the poor man actually blushed when I looked at
+him! What sort of color do you think he would have turned, if one
+of the little birds in the garden had whispered in his ear, and
+told him the true story of the charming Miss Gwilt?
+
+"Good-by, Mother Oldershaw. I rather doubt whether I am yours, or
+anybody's, affectionately; but we all tell lies at the bottoms of
+our letters, don't we? If you are my attached old friend, I must,
+of course, be yours affectionately.
+
+"LYDIA GWILT.
+
+"P.S.--Keep your odious powders and paints and washes for the
+spotted shoulders of your customers; not one of them shall touch
+my skin, I promise you. If you really want to be useful, try and
+find out some quieting draught to keep me from grinding my teeth
+in my sleep. I shall break them one of these nights; and then
+what will become of my beauty, I wonder?"
+
+4. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Ladies' Toilet Repository, Tuesday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--It is a thousand pities your letter was not
+addressed to Mr. Armadale; your graceful audacity would have
+charmed him. It doesn't affect me; I am so well used to audacity
+in my way of life, you know. Why waste your sparkling wit, my
+love, on your own impenetrable Oldershaw? It only splutters and
+goes out. Will you try and be serious this next time? I have news
+for you from Thorpe Ambrose, which is beyond a joke, and which
+must not be trifled with.
+
+"An hour after I got your letter I set the inquiries on foot. Not
+knowing what consequences they might lead to, I thought it safest
+to begin in the dark. Instead of employing any of the people whom
+I have at my own disposal (who know you and know me), I went to
+the Private Inquiry Office in Shadyside Place, and put the matter
+in the inspector's hands, in the character of a perfect stranger,
+and without mentioning you at all. This was not the cheapest way
+of going to work, I own; but it was the safest way, which is of
+much greater consequence.
+
+"The inspector and I understood each other in ten minutes; and
+the right person for the purpose--the most harmless looking young
+man you ever saw in your life--was produced immediately. He left
+for Thorpe Ambrose an hour after I saw him. I arranged to call at
+the office on the afternoons of Saturday, Monday, and to-day for
+news. There was no news till to-day; and there I found our
+confidential agent just returned to town, and waiting to favor me
+with a full account of his trip to Norfolk.
+
+"First of all, let me quiet your mind about those two questions
+of yours; I have got answers to both the one and the other. The
+Blanchard women go away to foreign parts on the thirteenth, and
+young Armadale is at this moment cruising somewhere at sea in his
+yacht. There is talk at Thorpe Ambrose of giving him a public
+reception, and of calling a meeting of the local grandees to
+settle it all. The speechifying and fuss on these occasions
+generally wastes plenty of time, and the public reception is not
+thought likely to meet the new squire much before the end of the
+month.
+
+"If our messenger had done no more for us than this, I think he
+would have earned his money. But the harmless young man is a
+regular Jesuit at a private inquiry, with this great advantage
+over all the Popish priests I have ever seen, that he has not got
+his slyness written in his face.
+
+"Having to get his information through the female servants in the
+usual way, he addressed himself, with admirable discretion, to
+the ugliest woma n in the house. 'When they are nice-looking, and
+can pick and choose,' as he neatly expressed it to me, 'they
+waste a great deal of valuable time in deciding on a sweetheart.
+When they are ugly, and haven't got the ghost of a chance of
+choosing, they snap at a sweetheart, if he comes their way, like
+a starved dog at a bone.' Acting on these excellent principles,
+our confidential agent succeeded, after certain unavoidable
+delays, in addressing himself to the upper housemaid at Thorpe
+Ambrose, and took full possession of her confidence at the first
+interview. Bearing his instructions carefully in mind, he
+encouraged the woman to chatter, and was favored, of course, with
+all the gossip of the servants' hall. The greater part of it (as
+repeated to me) was of no earthly importance. But I listened
+patiently, and was rewarded by a valuable discovery at last. Here
+it is.
+
+"It seems there is an ornamental cottage in the grounds at Thorpe
+Ambrose. For some reason unknown, young Armadale has chosen to
+let it, and a tenant has come in already. He is a poor half-pay
+major in the army, named Milroy, a meek sort of man, by all
+accounts, with a turn for occupying himself in mechanical
+pursuits, and with a domestic incumbrance in the shape of a
+bedridden wife, who has not been seen by anybody. Well, and what
+of all this? you will ask, with that sparkling impatience which
+becomes you so well. My dear Lydia, don't sparkle! The man's
+family affairs seriously concern us both, for, as ill luck will
+have it, the man has got a daughter!
+
+"You may imagine how I questioned our agent, and how our agent
+ransacked his memory, when I stumbled, in due course, on such a
+discovery as this. If Heaven is responsible for women's
+chattering tongues, Heaven be praised! From Miss Blanchard to
+Miss Blanchard's maid; from Miss Blanchard's maid to Miss
+Blanchard's aunt's maid; from Miss Blanchard's aunt's maid, to
+the ugly housemaid; from the ugly housemaid to the
+harmless-looking young man--so the stream of gossip trickled into
+the right reservoir at last, and thirsty Mother Oldershaw has
+drunk it all up.
+
+"In plain English, my dear, this is how it stands. The major's
+daughter is a minx just turned sixteen; lively and nice-looking
+(hateful little wretch!), dowdy in her dress (thank Heaven!) and
+deficient in her manners (thank Heaven again!). She has been
+brought up at home. The governess who last had charge of her left
+before her father moved to Thorpe Ambrose. Her education stands
+woefully in want of a finishing touch, and the major doesn't
+quite know what to do next. None of his friends can recommend him
+a new governess and he doesn't like the notion of sending the
+girl to school. So matters rest at present, on the major's own
+showing; for so the major expressed himself at a morning call
+which the father and daughter paid to the ladies at the great
+house.
+
+"You have now got my promised news, and you will have little
+difficulty, I think, in agreeing with me that the Armadale
+business must be settled at once, one way or the other. If, with
+your hopeless prospects, and with what I may call your family
+claim on this young fellow, you decide on giving him up, I shall
+have the pleasure of sending you the balance of your account with
+me (seven-and-twenty shillings), and shall then be free to devote
+myself entirely to my own proper business. If, on the contrary,
+you decide to try your luck at Thorpe Ambrose, then (there being
+no kind of doubt that the major's minx will set her cap at the
+young squire) I should be glad to hear how you mean to meet the
+double difficulty of inflaming Mr. Armadale and extinguishing
+Miss Milroy.
+
+"Affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW.
+
+5. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+(First Answer.)_
+
+"Richmond, Wednesday Morning.
+
+"MRS. OLDERSHAW--Send me my seven-and-twenty shillings, and
+devote yourself to your own proper business. Yours, L. G."
+
+6. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+(Second Answer.)_
+
+"Richmond, Wednesday Night.
+
+"DEAR OLD LOVE--Keep the seven-and-twenty shillings, and burn my
+other letter. I have changed my mind.
+
+"I wrote the first time after a horrible night. I write this time
+after a ride on horseback, a tumbler of claret, and the breast of
+a chicken. Is that explanation enough? Please say Yes, for I want
+to go back to my piano.
+
+"No; I can't go back yet; I must answer your question first. But
+are you really so very simple as to suppose that I don't see
+straight through you and your letter? You know that the major's
+difficulty is our opportunity as well as I do; but you want me to
+take the responsibility of making the first proposal, don't you?
+Suppose I take it in your own roundabout way? Suppose I say,
+'Pray don't ask me how I propose inflaming Mr. Armadale and
+extinguishing Miss Milroy; the question is so shockingly abrupt I
+really can't answer it. Ask me, instead, if it is the modest
+ambition of my life to become Miss Milroy's governess?' Yes, if
+you please, Mrs. Oldershaw, and if you will assist me by becoming
+my reference.
+
+"There it is for you! If some serious disaster happens (which is
+quite possible), what a comfort it will be to remember that it
+was all my fault!
+
+"Now I have done this for you, will you do something for me. I
+want to dream away the little time I am likely to have left here
+in my own way. Be a merciful Mother Oldershaw, and spare me the
+worry of looking at the Ins and Outs, and adding up the chances
+For and Against, in this new venture of mine. Think for me, in
+short, until I am obliged to think for myself.
+
+"I had better not write any more, or I shall say something savage
+that you won't like. I am in one of my tempers to-night. I want a
+husband to vex, or a child to beat, or something of that sort. Do
+you ever like to see the summer insects kill themselves in the
+candle? I do, sometimes. Good-night, Mrs. Jezebel The longer you
+can leave me here the better. The air agrees with me, and I am
+looking charmingly.
+
+"L. G."
+
+7. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Thursday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--Some persons in my situation might be a little
+offended at the tone of your last letter. But I am so fondly
+attached to you! And when I love a person, it is so very hard, my
+dear, for that person to offend me! Don't ride quite so far, and
+only drink half a tumblerful of claret next time. I say no more.
+
+"Shall we leave off our fencing-match and come to serious matters
+now? How curiously hard it always seems to be for women to
+understand each other, especially when they have got their pens
+in their hands! But suppose we try.
+
+"Well, then, to begin with: I gather from your letter that you
+have wisely decided to try the Thorpe Ambrose experiment, and to
+secure, if you can, an excellent position at starting by becoming
+a member of Major Milroy's household. If the circumstances turn
+against you, and some other woman gets the governess's place
+(about which I shall have something more to say presently), you
+will then have no choice but to make Mr. Armadale's acquaintance
+in some other character. In any case, you will want my
+assistance; and the first question, therefore, to set at rest
+between us is the question of what I am willing to do, and what I
+can do, to help you.
+
+"A woman, my dear Lydia, with your appearance, your manners, your
+abilities, and your education, can make almost any excursions
+into society that she pleases if she only has money in her pocket
+and a respectable reference to appeal to in cases of emergency.
+As to the money, in the first place. I will engage to find it, on
+condition of your remembering my assistance with adequate
+pecuniary gratitude if you win the Armadale prize. Your promise
+so to remember me, embodying the terms in plain figures, shall be
+drawn out on paper by my own lawyer, so that we can sign and
+settle at once when I see you in London.
+
+"Next, as to the reference.
+
+"Here, again, my services are at your disposal, on another
+condition. It is this: that you present yourself at Thorpe
+Ambrose, under the name to which you have returned ever since
+that dreadful business of your marriage; I mean your own maiden
+name of Gwilt. I have only one motive in insisting on this; I
+wish to run no needless risks . My experience, as confidential
+adviser of my customers, in various romantic cases of private
+embarrassment, has shown me that an assumed name is, nine times
+out of ten, a very unnecessary and a very dangerous form of
+deception. Nothing could justify your assuming a name but the
+fear of young Armadale's detecting you--a fear from which we are
+fortunately relieved by his mother's own conduct in keeping your
+early connection with her a profound secret from her son and from
+everybody.
+
+"The next, and last, perplexity to settle relates, my dear, to
+the chances for and against your finding your way, in the
+capacity of governess, into Major Milroy's house. Once inside the
+door, with your knowledge of music and languages, if you can keep
+your temper, you may be sure of keeping the place. The only
+doubt, as things are now, is whether you can get it.
+
+"In the major's present difficulty about his daughter's
+education, the chances are, I think, in favor of his advertising
+for a governess. Say he does advertise, what address will he give
+for applicants to write to?
+
+"If he gives an address in London, good-by to all chances in your
+favor at once; for this plain reason, that we shall not be able
+to pick out his advertisement from the advertisements of other
+people who want governesses, and who will give them addresses in
+London as well. If, on the other hand, our luck helps us, and he
+refers his correspondents to a shop, post-office, or what not _at
+Thorpe Ambrose,_ there we have our advertiser as plainly picked
+out for us as we can wish. In this last case, I have little or no
+doubt--with me for your reference--of your finding your way into
+the major's family circle. We have one great advantage over the
+other women who will answer the advertisement. Thanks to my
+inquiries on the spot, I know Major Milroy to be a poor man; and
+we will fix the salary you ask at a figure that is sure to tempt
+him. As for the style of the letter, if you and I together can't
+write a modest and interesting application for the vacant place,
+I should like to know who can?
+
+"All this, however, is still in the future. For the present my
+advice is, stay where you are, and dream to your heart's content,
+till you hear from me again. I take in _The Times_ regularly, and
+you may trust my wary eye not to miss the right advertisement. We
+can luckily give the major time, without doing any injury to our
+own interests; for there is no fear just yet of the girl's
+getting the start of you. The public reception, as we know, won't
+be ready till near the end of the month; and we may safely trust
+young Armadale's vanity to keep him out of his new house until
+his flatterers are all assembled to welcome him.
+
+"It's odd, isn't it, to think how much depends on this half-pay
+officer's decision? For my part, I shall wake every morning now
+with the same question in my mind: If the major's advertisment
+appears, which will the major say--Thorpe Ambrose, or London?
+
+"Ever, my dear Lydia, affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ALLAN AS A LANDED GENTLEMAN.
+
+EARLY on the morning after his first night's rest at Thorpe
+Ambrose, Allan rose and surveyed the prospect from his bedroom
+window, lost in the dense mental bewilderment of feeling himself
+to be a stranger in his own house.
+
+The bedroom looked out over the great front door, with its
+portico, its terrace and flight of steps beyond, and, further
+still, the broad sweep of the well-timbered park to close the
+view. The morning mist nestled lightly about the distant trees;
+and the cows were feeding sociably, close to the iron fence which
+railed off the park from the drive in front of the house. "All
+mine!" thought Allan, staring in blank amazement at the prospect
+of his own possessions. "Hang me if I can beat it into my head
+yet. All mine!"
+
+He dressed, left his room, and walked along the corridor which
+led to the staircase and hall, opening the doors in succession as
+he passed them.
+
+The rooms in this part of the house were bedrooms and
+dressing-rooms, light, spacious, perfectly furnished; and all
+empty, except the one bed-chamber next to Allan's, which had been
+appropriated to Midwinter. He was still sleeping when his friend
+looked in on him, having sat late into the night writing his
+letter to Mr. Brock. Allan went on to the end of the first
+corridor, turned at right angles into a second, and, that passed,
+gained the head of the great staircase. "No romance here," he
+said to himself, looking down the handsomely carpeted stone
+stairs into the bright modern hall. "Nothing to startle
+Midwinter's fidgety nerves in this house." There was nothing,
+indeed; Allan's essentially superficial observation had not
+misled him for once. The mansion of Thorpe Ambrose (built after
+the pulling down of the dilapidated old manor-house) was barely
+fifty years old. Nothing picturesque, nothing in the slightest
+degree suggestive of mystery and romance, appeared in any part of
+it. It was a purely conventional country house--the product of
+the classical idea filtered judiciously through the commercial
+English mind. Viewed on the outer side, it presented the
+spectacle of a modern manufactory trying to look like an ancient
+temple. Viewed on the inner side, it was a marvel of luxurious
+comfort in every part of it, from basement to roof. "And quite
+right, too," thought Allan, sauntering contentedly down the
+broad, gently graduated stairs. "Deuce take all mystery and
+romance! Let's be clean and comfortable, that's what I say."
+
+Arrived in the hall, the new master of Thorpe Ambrose hesitated,
+and looked about him, uncertain which way to turn next.
+
+The four reception-rooms on the ground-floor opened into the
+hall, two on either side. Allan tried the nearest door on his
+right hand at a venture, and found himself in the drawing-room.
+Here the first sign of life appeared, under life's most
+attractive form. A young girl was in solitary possession of the
+drawing-room. The duster in her hand appeared to associate her
+with the domestic duties of the house; but at that particular
+moment she was occupied in asserting the rights of nature over
+the obligations of service. In other words, she was attentively
+contemplating her own face in the glass over the mantelpiece.
+
+"There! there! don't let me frighten you," said Allan, as the
+girl started away from the glass, and stared at him in
+unutterable confusion. "I quite agree with you, my dear; your
+face is well worth looking at. Who are you? Oh, the housemaid.
+And what's your name? Susan, eh? Come! I like your name, to begin
+with. Do you know who I am, Susan? I'm your master, though you
+may not think it. Your character? Oh, yes! Mrs. Blanchard gave
+you a capital character. You shall stop here; don't be afraid.
+And you'll be a good girl, Susan, and wear smart little caps and
+aprons and bright ribbons, and you'll look nice and pretty, and
+dust the furniture, won't you?" With this summary of a
+housemaid's duties, Allan sauntered back into the hall, and found
+more signs of life in that quarter. A man-servant appeared on
+this occasion, and bowed, as became a vassal in a linen jacket,
+before his liege lord in a wide-awake hat.
+
+"And who may you be?" asked Allan. "Not the man who let us in
+last night? Ah, I thought not. The second footman, eh? Character?
+Oh, yes; capital character. Stop here, of course. You can valet
+me, can you? Bother valeting me! I like to put on my own clothes,
+and brush them, too, when they _are_ on; and, if I only knew how
+to black my own boots, by George, I should like to do it! What
+room's this? Morning-room, eh? And here's the dining-room, of
+course. Good heavens, what a table! it's as long as my yacht, and
+longer. I say, by-the-by, what's your name? Richard, is it? Well,
+Richard, the vessel I sail in is a vessel of my own building?
+What do you think of that? You look to me just the right sort of
+man to be my steward on board. If you're not sick at sea--oh, you
+_are_ sick at sea? Well, then, we'll say nothing more about it.
+And what room is this? Ah, yes; the library, of course--more in
+Mr. Midwinter's way than mine. Mr. Midwinter is the gentleman who
+came here with me last night; and mind this, Richard, you're al l
+to show him as much attention as you show me. Where are we now?
+What's this door at the back? Billiard-room and smoking-room, eh?
+Jolly. Another door! and more stairs! Where do they go to? and
+who's this coming up? Take your time, ma'am; you're not quite so
+young as you were once--take your time."
+
+The object of Allan's humane caution was a corpulent elderly
+woman of the type called "motherly." Fourteen stairs were all
+that separated her from the master of the house; she ascended
+them with fourteen stoppages and fourteen sighs. Nature, various
+in all things, is infinitely various in the female sex. There are
+some women whose personal qualities reveal the Loves and the
+Graces; and there are other women whose personal qualities
+suggest the Perquisites and the Grease Pot. This was one of the
+other women.
+
+"Glad to see you looking so well, ma'am," said Allan, when the
+cook, in the majesty of her office, stood proclaimed before him.
+"Your name is Gripper, is it? I consider you, Mrs. Gripper, the
+most valuable person in the house. For this reason, that nobody
+in the house eats a heartier dinner every day than I do.
+Directions? Oh, no; I've no directions to give. I leave all that
+to you. Lots of strong soup, and joints done with the gravy in
+them--there's my notion of good feeding, in two words. Steady!
+Here's somebody else. Oh, to be sure--the butler! Another
+valuable person. We'll go right through all the wine in the
+cellar, Mr. Butler; and if I can't give you a sound opinion after
+that, we'll persevere boldly, and go right through it again.
+Talking of wine--halloo! here are more of them coming up stairs.
+There! there! don't trouble yourselves. You've all got capital
+characters, and you shall all stop here along with me. What was I
+saying just now? Something about wine; so it was. I'll tell you
+what, Mr. Butler, it isn't every day that a new master comes to
+Thorpe Ambrose; and it's my wish that we should all start
+together on the best possible terms. Let the servants have a
+grand jollification downstairs to celebrate my arrival, and give
+them what they like to drink my health in. It's a poor heart,
+Mrs. Gripper, that never rejoices, isn't it? No; I won't look at
+the cellar now: I want to go out, and get a breath of fresh air
+before breakfast. Where's Richard? I say, have I got a garden
+here? Which side of the house is it! That side, eh? You needn't
+show me round. I'll go alone, Richard, and lose myself, if I can,
+in my own property."
+
+With those words Allan descended the terrace steps in front of
+the house, whistling cheerfully. He had met the serious
+responsibility of settling his domestic establishment to his own
+entire satisfaction. "People talk of the difficulty of managing
+their servants," thought Allan. "What on earth do they mean? I
+don't see any difficulty at all." He opened an ornamental gate
+leading out of the drive at the side of the house, and, following
+the footman's directions, entered the shrubbery that sheltered
+the Thorpe Ambrose gardens. "Nice shady sort of place for a
+cigar," said Allan, as he sauntered along with his hands in his
+pockets "I wish I could beat it into my head that it really
+belongs to _me._"
+
+The shrubbery opened on the broad expanse of a flower garden,
+flooded bright in its summer glory by the light of the morning
+sun.
+
+On one side, an archway, broken through, a wall, led into the
+fruit garden. On the other, a terrace of turf led to ground on a
+lower level, laid out as an Italian garden. Wandering past the
+fountains and statues, Allan reached another shrubbery, winding
+its way apparently to some remote part of the grounds. Thus far,
+not a human creature had been visible or audible anywhere; but,
+as he approached the end of the second shrubbery, it struck him
+that he heard something on the other side of the foliage. He
+stopped and listened. There were two voices speaking
+distinctly--an old voice that sounded very obstinate, and a young
+voice that sounded very angry.
+
+"It's no use, miss," said the old voice. "I mustn't allow it, and
+I won't allow it. What would Mr. Armadale say?"
+
+"If Mr. Armadale is the gentleman I take him for, you old brute!"
+replied the young voice, "he would say, 'Come into my garden,
+Miss Milroy, as often as you like, and take as many nosegays as
+you please.' " Allan's bright blue eyes twinkled mischievously.
+Inspired by a sudden idea, he stole softly to the end of the
+shrubbery, darted round the corner of it, and, vaulting over a
+low ring fence, found himself in a trim little paddock, crossed
+by a gravel walk. At a short distance down the wall stood a young
+lady, with her back toward him, trying to force her way past an
+impenetrable old man, with a rake in his hand, who stood
+obstinately in front of her, shaking his head.
+
+"Come into my garden, Miss Milroy, as often as you like, and take
+as many nosegays as you please," cried Allan, remorselessly
+repeating her own words.
+
+The young lady turned round, with a scream; her muslin dress,
+which she was holding up in front, dropped from her hand, and a
+prodigious lapful of flowers rolled out on the gravel walk.
+
+Before another word could be said, the impenetrable old man
+stepped forward, with the utmost composure, and entered on the
+question of his own personal interests, as if nothing whatever
+had happened, and nobody was present but his new master and
+himself.
+
+"I bid you humbly welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir," said this
+ancient of the gardens. "My name is Abraham Sage. I've been
+employed in the grounds for more than forty years; and I hope
+you'll be pleased to continue me in my place."
+
+So, with vision inexorably limited to the horizon of his own
+prospects, spoke the gardener, and spoke in vain. Allan was down
+on his knees on the gravel walk, collecting the fallen flowers,
+and forming his first impressions of Miss Milroy from the feet
+upward.
+
+She was pretty; she was not pretty; she charmed, she
+disappointed, she charmed again. Tried by recognized line and
+rule, she was too short and too well developed for her age. And
+yet few men's eyes would have wished her figure other than it
+was. Her hands were so prettily plump and dimpled that it was
+hard to see how red they were with the blessed exuberance of
+youth and health. Her feet apologized gracefully for her old and
+ill fitting shoes; and her shoulders made ample amends for the
+misdemeanor in muslin which covered them in the shape of a dress.
+Her dark-gray eyes were lovely in their clear softness of color,
+in their spirit, tenderness, and sweet good humor of expression;
+and her hair (where a shabby old garden hat allowed it to be
+seen) was of just that lighter shade of brown which gave value by
+contrast to the darker beauty of her eyes. But these attractions
+passed, the little attendant blemishes and imperfections of this
+self-contradictory girl began again. Her nose was too short, her
+mouth was too large, her face was too round and too rosy. The
+dreadful justice of photography would have had no mercy on her;
+and the sculptors of classical Greece would have bowed her
+regretfully out of their studios. Admitting all this, and more,
+the girdle round Miss Milroy's waist was the girdle of Venus
+nevertheless; and the passkey that opens the general heart was
+the key she carried, if ever a girl possessed it yet. Before
+Allan had picked up his second handful of flowers, Allan was in
+love with her.
+
+"Don't! pray don't, Mr. Armadale!" she said, receiving the
+flowers under protest, as Allan vigorously showered them back
+into the lap of her dress. "I am so ashamed! I didn't mean to
+invite myself in that bold way into your garden; my tongue ran
+away with me--it did, indeed! What can I say to excuse myself?
+Oh, Mr. Armadale, what must you think of me?"
+
+Allan suddenly saw his way to a compliment, and tossed it up to
+her forthwith, with the third handful of flowers.
+
+"I'll tell you what I think, Miss Milroy," he said, in his blunt,
+boyish way. "I think the luckiest walk I ever took in my life was
+the walk this morning that brought me here."
+
+He looked eager and handsome. He was not addressing a woman worn
+out with admiration, but a girl just beginning a woman's life;
+and it did him no harm, at any rate, to speak in the character of
+master of Thorpe Ambrose. The penitential expression on Miss
+Milroy's face gently melted away; she looked down, demure and
+smiling, at the flowers in her lap.
+
+"I deserve a good scolding," she said. "I don't deserve
+compliments, Mr. Armadale--least of all from _you._"
+
+"Oh, yes, you do!" cried the headlong Allan, getting briskly on
+his legs. "Besides, it isn't a compliment; it's true. You are the
+prettiest--I beg your pardon, Miss Milroy! _my_ tongue ran away
+with me that time."
+
+Among the heavy burdens that are laid on female human nature,
+perhaps the heaviest, at the age of sixteen, is the burden of
+gravity. Miss Milroy struggled, tittered, struggled again, and
+composed herself for the time being.
+
+The gardener, who still stood where he had stood from the first,
+immovably waiting for his next opportunity, saw it now, and
+gently pushed his personal interests into the first gap of
+silence that had opened within his reach since Allan's appearance
+on the scene.
+
+"I humbly bid you welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir," said Abraham
+Sage, beginning obstinately with his little introductory speech
+for the second time. "My name--"
+
+Before he could deliver himself of his name, Miss Milroy looked
+accidentally in the horticulturist's pertinacious face, and
+instantly lost her hold on her gravity beyond recall. Allan,
+never backward in following a boisterous example of any sort,
+joined in her laughter with right goodwill. The wise man of the
+gardens showed no surprise, and took no offense. He waited for
+another gap of silence, and walked in again gently with his
+personal interests the moment the two young people stopped to
+take breath.
+
+"I have been employed in the grounds," proceeded Abraham Sage,
+irrepressibly, "for more than forty years--"
+
+"You shall be employed in the grounds for forty more, if you'll
+only hold your tongue and take yourself off!" cried Allan, as
+soon as he could speak.
+
+"Thank you kindly, sir," said the gardener, with the utmost
+politeness, but with no present signs either of holding his
+tongue or of taking himself off.
+
+"Well?" said Allan.
+
+Abraham Sage carefully cleared his throat, and shifted his rake
+from one hand to the other. He looked down the length of his own
+invaluable implement, with a grave interest and attention,
+seeing, apparently, not the long handle of a rake, but the long
+perspective of a vista, with a supplementary personal interest
+established at the end of it. "When more convenient, sir,"
+resumed this immovable man, "I should wish respectfully to speak
+to you about my son. Perhaps it may be more convenient in the
+course of the day? My humble duty, sir, and my best thanks. My
+son is strictly sober. He is accustomed to the stables, and he
+belongs to the Church of England--without incumbrances." Having
+thus planted his offspring provisionally in his master's
+estimation, Abraham Sage shouldered his invaluable rake, and
+hobbled slowly out of view.
+
+"If that's a specimen of a trustworthy old servant," said Allan,
+"I think I'd rather take my chance of being cheated by a new one.
+_You_ shall not be troubled with him again, Miss Milroy, at any
+rate. All the flower-beds in the garden are at your disposal, and
+all the fruit in the fruit season, if you'll only come here and
+eat it."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Armadale, how very, very kind you are. How can I thank
+you?"
+
+Allan saw his way to another compliment--an elaborate compliment,
+in the shape of a trap, this time.
+
+"You can do me the greatest possible favor," he said. "You can
+assist me in forming an agreeable impression of my own grounds."
+
+"Dear me! how?" asked Miss Milroy, innocently.
+
+Allan judiciously closed the trap on the spot in these words: "By
+taking me with you, Miss Milroy, on your morning walk." He spoke,
+smiled, and offered his arm.
+
+She saw the way, on her side, to a little flirtation. She rested
+her hand on his arm, blushed, hesitated, and suddenly took it
+away again.
+
+"I don't think it's quite right, Mr. Armadale," she said,
+devoting herself with the deepest attention to her collection of
+flowers. "Oughtn't we to have some old lady here? Isn't it
+improper to take your arm until I know you a little better than I
+do now? I am obliged to ask; I have had so little instruction; I
+have seen so little of society, and one of papa's friends once
+said my manners were too bold for my age. What do _you_ think?"
+
+"I think it's a very good thing your papa's friend is not here
+now," answered the outspoken Allan; "I should quarrel with him to
+a dead certainty. As for society, Miss Milroy, nobody knows less
+about it than I do; but if we _had_ an old lady here, I must say
+myself I think she would be uncommonly in the way. Won't you?"
+concluded Allan, imploringly offering his arm for the second
+time. "Do!"
+
+Miss Milroy looked up at him sidelong from her flowers "You are
+as bad as the gardener, Mr. Armadale!" She looked down again in a
+flutter of indecision. "I'm sure it's wrong," she said, and took
+his arm the instant afterward without the slightest hesitation.
+
+They moved away together over the daisied turf of the paddock,
+young and bright and happy, with the sunlight of the summer
+morning shining cloudless over their flowery path.
+
+"And where are we going to, now?" asked Allan. "Into another
+garden?"
+
+She laughed gayly. "How very odd of you, Mr. Armadale, not to
+know, when it all belongs to you! Are you really seeing Thorpe
+Ambrose this morning for the first time? How indescribably
+strange it must feel! No, no; don't say any more complimentary
+things to me just yet. You may turn my head if you do. We haven't
+got the old lady with us; and I really must take care of myself.
+Let me be useful; let me tell you all about your own grounds. We
+are going out at that little gate, across one of the drives in
+the park, and then over the rustic bridge, and then round the
+corner of the plantation--where do you think? To where I live,
+Mr. Armadale; to the lovely little cottage that you have let to
+papa. Oh, if you only knew how lucky we thought ourselves to get
+it!'
+
+She paused, looked up at her companion, and stopped another
+compliment on the incorrigible Allan's lips.
+
+"I'll drop your arm," she said coquettishly, "if you do! We
+_were_ lucky to get the cottage, Mr. Armadale. Papa said he felt
+under an obligation to you for letting it, the day we got in. And
+_I_ said I felt under an obligation, no longer ago than last
+week."
+
+"You, Miss Milroy!" exclaimed Allan.
+
+"Yes. It may surprise you to hear it; but if you hadn't let the
+cottage to papa, I believe I should have suffered the indignity
+and misery of being sent to school."
+
+Allan's memory reverted to the half-crown that he had spun on the
+cabin-table of the yacht, at Castletown. "If she only knew that I
+had tossed up for it!" he thought, guiltily.
+
+"I dare say you don't understand why I should feel such a horror
+of going to school," pursued Miss Milroy, misinterpreting the
+momentary silence on her companion's side. "If I had gone to
+school in early life--I mean at the age when other girls go--I
+shouldn't have minded it now. But I had no such chance at the
+time. It was the time of mamma's illness and of papa's
+unfortunate speculation; and as papa had nobody to comfort him
+but me, of course I stayed at home. You needn't laugh; I was of
+some use, I can tell you. I helped papa over his trouble, by
+sitting on his knee after dinner, and asking him to tell me
+stories of all the remarkable people he had known when he was
+about in the great world, at home and abroad. Without me to amuse
+him in the evening, and his clock to occupy him in the daytime--"
+
+"His clock?" repeated Allan.
+
+"Oh, yes! I ought to have told you. Papa is an extraordinary
+mechanical genius. You will say so, too, when you see his clock.
+It's nothing like so large, of course, but it's on the model of
+the famous clock at Strasbourg. Only think, he began it when I
+was eight years old; and (though I was sixteen last birthday) it
+isn't finished yet! Some of our friends were quite surprised he
+should take to such a thing when his troubles began. But papa
+himself set that right in no time; he reminded them that Louis
+the Sixteenth took to lock-making when _his_ troubl es began, and
+then everybody was perfectly satisfied." She stopped, and changed
+color confusedly. "Oh, Mr. Armadale," she said, in genuine
+embarrassment this time, "here is my unlucky tongue running away
+with me again! I am talking to you already as if I had known you
+for years! This is what papa's friend meant when he said my
+manners were too bold. It's quite true; I have a dreadful way of
+getting familiar with people, if--" She checked herself suddenly,
+on the brink of ending the sentence by saying, "if I like them."
+
+"No, no; do go on!" pleaded Allan. "It's a fault of mine to be
+familiar, too. Besides, we _must_ be familiar; we are such near
+neighbors. I'm rather an uncultivated sort of fellow, and I don't
+know quite how to say it; but I want your cottage to be jolly and
+friendly with my house, and my house to be jolly and friendly
+with your cottage. There's my meaning, all in the wrong words. Do
+go on, Miss Milroy; pray go on!"
+
+She smiled and hesitated. "I don't exactly remember where I was,"
+she replied, "I only remember I had something I wanted to tell
+you. This comes, Mr. Armadale, of my taking your arm. I should
+get on so much better, if you would only consent to walk
+separately. You won't? Well, then, will you tell me what it was I
+wanted to say? Where was I before I went wandering off to papa's
+troubles and papa's clock?"
+
+"At school!" replied Allan, with a prodigious effort of memory.
+
+"_Not_ at school, you mean," said Miss Milroy; "and all through
+_you._ Now I can go on again, which is a great comfort. I am
+quite serious, Mr. Armadale, in saying that I should have been
+sent to school, if you had said No when papa proposed for the
+cottage. This is how it happened. When we began moving in, Mrs.
+Blanchard sent us a most kind message from the great house to say
+that her servants were at our disposal, if we wanted any
+assistance. The least papa and I could do, after that, was to
+call and thank her. We saw Mrs. Blanchard and Miss Blanchard.
+Mistress was charming, and miss looked perfectly lovely in her
+mourning. I'm sure you admire her? She's tall and pale and
+graceful--quite your idea of beauty, I should think?"
+
+"Nothing like it," began Allan. "My idea of beauty at the present
+moment--"
+
+Miss Milroy felt it coming, and instantly took her hand off his
+arm.
+
+"I mean I have never seen either Mrs. Blanchard or her niece,"
+added Allan, precipitately correcting himself.
+
+Miss Milroy tempered justice with mercy, and put her hand back
+again.
+
+"How extraordinary that you should never have seen them!" she
+went on. "Why, you are a perfect stranger to everything and
+everybody at Thorpe Ambrose! Well, after Miss Blanchard and I had
+sat and talked a little while, I heard my name on Mrs.
+Blanchard's lips and instantly held my breath. She was asking
+papa if I had finished my education. Out came papa's great
+grievance directly. My old governess, you must know, left us to
+be married just before we came here, and none of our friends
+could produce a new one whose terms were reasonable. 'I'm told,
+Mrs. Blanchard, by people who understand it better than I do,'
+says papa, 'that advertising is a risk. It all falls on me, in
+Mrs. Milroy's state of health, and I suppose I must end in
+sending my little girl to school. Do you happen to know of a
+school within the means of a poor man?' Mrs. Blanchard shook her
+head; I could have kissed her on the spot for doing it. 'All my
+experience, Major Milroy,' says this perfect angel of a woman,
+'is in favor of advertising. My niece's governess was originally
+obtained by an advertisement, and you may imagine her value to us
+when I tell you she lived in our family for more than ten years.'
+I could have gone down on both my knees and worshipped Mrs.
+Blanchard then and there; and I only wonder I didn't! Papa was
+struck at the time--I could see that--and he referred to it again
+on the way home. 'Though I have been long out of the world, my
+dear,' says papa, 'I know a highly-bred woman and a sensible
+woman when I see her. Mrs. Blanchard's experience puts
+advertising in a new light; I must think about it.' He has
+thought about it, and (though he hasn't openly confessed it to
+me) I know that he decided to advertise, no later than last
+night. So, if papa thanks you for letting the cottage, Mr.
+Armadale, I thank you, too. But for you, we should never have
+known darling Mrs. Blanchard; and but for darling Mrs. Blanchard,
+I should have been sent to school."
+
+Before Allan could reply, they turned the corner of the
+plantation, and came in sight of the cottage. Description of it
+is needless; the civilized universe knows it already. It was the
+typical cottage of the drawing-master's early lessons in neat
+shading and the broad pencil touch--with the trim thatch, the
+luxuriant creepers, the modest lattice-windows, the rustic porch,
+and the wicker bird-cage, all complete.
+
+"Isn't it lovely?" said Miss Milroy. "Do come in!"
+
+"May I?" asked Allan. "Won't the major think it too early?"
+
+"Early or late, I am sure papa will be only too glad to see you."
+
+She led the way briskly up the garden path, and opened the parlor
+door. As Allan followed her into the little room, he saw, at the
+further end of it, a gentleman sitting alone at an old-fashioned
+writing-table, with his back turned to his visitor.
+
+"Papa! a surprise for you!" said Miss Milroy, rousing him from
+his occupation. "Mr. Armadale has come to Thorpe Ambrose; and I
+have brought him here to see you."
+
+The major started; rose, bewildered for the moment; recovered
+himself immediately, and advanced to welcome his young landlord,
+with hospitable, outstretched hand.
+
+A man with a larger experience of the world and a finer
+observation of humanity than Allan possessed would have seen the
+story of Major Milroy's life written in Major Milroy's face. The
+home troubles that had struck him were plainly betrayed in his
+stooping figure and his wan, deeply wrinkled cheeks, when he
+first showed himself on rising from his chair. The changeless
+influence of one monotonous pursuit and one monotonous habit of
+thought was next expressed in the dull, dreamy self-absorption of
+his manner and his look while his daughter was speaking to him.
+The moment after, when he had roused himself to welcome his
+guest, was the moment which made the self-revelation complete.
+Then there flickered in the major's weary eyes a faint reflection
+of the spirit of his happier youth. Then there passed over the
+major's dull and dreamy manner a change which told unmistakably
+of social graces and accomplishments, learned at some past time
+in no ignoble social school; a man who had long since taken his
+patient refuge from trouble in his own mechanical pursuit; a man
+only roused at intervals to know himself again for what he once
+had been. So revealed to all eyes that could read him aright,
+Major Milroy now stood before Allan, on the first morning of an
+acquaintance which was destined to be an event in Allan's life.
+
+"I am heartily glad to see you, Mr. Armadale," he said, speaking
+in the changeless quiet, subdued tone peculiar to most men whose
+occupations are of the solitary and monotonous kind. "You have
+done me one favor already by taking me as your tenant, and you
+now do me another by paying this friendly visit. If you have not
+breakfasted already, let me waive all ceremony on my side, and
+ask you to take your place at our little table."
+
+"With the greatest pleasure, Major Milroy, if I am not in the
+way," replied Allan, delighted at his reception. "I was sorry to
+hear from Miss Milroy that Mrs. Milroy is an invalid. Perhaps my
+being here unexpectedly; perhaps the sight of a strange face--"
+
+"I understand your hesitation, Mr. Armadale," said the major;
+"but it is quite unnecessary. Mrs. Milroy's illness keeps her
+entirely confined to her own room.--Have we got everything we
+want on the table, my love?" he went on, changing the subject so
+abruptly that a closer observer than Allan might have suspected
+it was distasteful to him. "Will you come and make tea?"
+
+Miss Milroy's attention appeared to be already pre-engaged; she
+made no reply. While her father and Allan had been exchanging
+civilities, she had been putting the writing-table
+ in order, and examining the various objects scattered on it with
+the unrestrained curiosity of a spoiled child. The moment after
+the major had spoken to her, she discovered a morsel of paper
+hidden between the leaves of the blotting-book, snatched it up,
+looked at it, and turned round instantly, with an exclamation of
+surprise.
+
+"Do my eyes deceive me, papa?" she asked. "Or were you really and
+truly writing the advertisement when I came in?"
+
+"I had just finished it," replied her father. "But, my dear, Mr.
+Armadale is here--we are waiting for breakfast."
+
+"Mr. Armadale knows all about it," rejoined Miss Milroy. "I told
+him in the garden."
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Allan. "Pray, don't make a stranger of me, major!
+If it's about the governess, I've got something (in an indirect
+sort of way) to do with it too."
+
+Major Milroy smiled. Before he could answer, his daughter, who
+had been reading the advertisement, appealed to him eagerly, for
+the second time.
+
+"Oh, papa," she said, "there's one thing here I don't like at
+all! Why do you put grandmamma's initials at the end? Why do you
+tell them to write to grandmamma's house in London?"
+
+"My dear! your mother can do nothing in this matter, as you know.
+And as for me (even if I went to London), questioning strange
+ladies about their characters and accomplishments is the last
+thing in the world that I am fit to do. Your grandmamma is on the
+spot; and your grandmamma is the proper person to receive the
+letters, and to make all the necessary inquires."
+
+"But I want to see the letters myself," persisted the spoiled
+child. "Some of them are sure to be amusing--"
+
+"I don't apologize for this very unceremonious reception of you,
+Mr. Armadale," said the major, turning to Allan, with a quaint
+and quiet humor. "It may be useful as a warning, if you ever
+chance to marry and have a daughter, not to begin, as I have
+done, by letting her have her own way."
+
+Allan laughed, and Miss Milroy persisted.
+
+"Besides," she went on, "I should like to help in choosing which
+letters we answer, and which we don't. I think I ought to have
+some voice in the selection of my own governess. Why not tell
+them, papa, to send their letters down here--to the post-office
+or the stationer's, or anywhere you like? When you and I have
+read them, we can send up the letters we prefer to grandmamma;
+and she can ask all the questions, and pick out the best
+governess, just as you have arranged already, without leaving ME
+entirely in the dark, which I consider (don't you, Mr. Armadale?)
+to be quite inhuman. Let me alter the address, papa; do, there's
+a darling!"
+
+"We shall get no breakfast, Mr. Armadale, if I don't say Yes,"
+said the major good-humoredly. "Do as you like, my dear," he
+added, turning to his daughter. "As long as it ends in your
+grandmamma's managing the matter for us, the rest is of very
+little consequence."
+
+Miss Milroy took up her father's pen, drew it through the last
+line of the advertisement, and wrote the altered address with her
+own hand as follows:
+
+"_Apply, by letter, to M., Post-office, Thorpe Ambrose,
+Norfolk._"
+
+"There!" she said, bustling to her place at the breakfast-table.
+"The advertisement may go to London now; and, if a governess
+_does_ come of it, oh, papa, who in the name of wonder will she
+be?--Tea or coffee, Mr. Armadale? I'm really ashamed of having
+kept you waiting. But it is such a comfort," she added, saucily,
+"to get all one's business off one's mind before breakfast!"
+
+Father, daughter, and guest sat down together sociably at the
+little round table, the best of good neighbors and good friends
+already.
+
+
+Three days later, one of the London newsboys got _his_ business
+off his mind before breakfast. His district was Diana Street,
+Pimlico; and the last of the morning's newspapers which he
+disposed of was the newspaper he left at Mrs. Oldershaw's door.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE CLAIMS OF SOCIETY.
+
+MORE than an hour after Allan had set forth on his exploring
+expedition through his own grounds, Midwinter rose, and enjoyed,
+in his turn, a full view by daylight of the magnificence of the
+new house.
+
+Refreshed by his long night's rest, he descended the great
+staircase as cheerfully as Allan himself One after another, he,
+too, looked into the spacious rooms on the ground floor in
+breathless astonishment at the beauty and the luxury which
+surrounded him. "The house where I lived in service when I was a
+boy, was a fine one," he thought, gayly; "but it was nothing to
+this! I wonder if Allan is as surprised and delighted as I am?"
+The beauty of the summer morning drew him out through the open
+hall door, as it had drawn his friend out before him. He ran
+briskly down the steps, humming the burden of one of the old
+vagabond tunes which he had danced to long since in the old
+vagabond time. Even the memories of his wretched childhood took
+their color, on that happy morning. from the bright medium
+through which he looked back at them. "If I was not out of
+practice," he thought to himself, as he leaned on the fence and
+looked over at the park, "I could try some of my old tumbling
+tricks on that delicious grass." He turned, noticed two of the
+servants talking together near the shrubbery, and asked for news
+of the master of the house.
+
+The men pointed with a smile in the direction of the gardens; Mr.
+Armadale had gone that way more than an hour since, and had met
+(as had been reported) with Miss Milroy in the grounds. Midwinter
+followed the path through the shrubbery, but, on reaching the
+flower garden, stopped, considered a little, and retraced his
+steps. "If Allan has met with the young lady," he said to
+himself, "Allan doesn't want me." He laughed as he drew that
+inevitable inference, and turned considerately to explore the
+beauties of Thorpe Ambrose on the other side of the house.
+
+Passing the angle of the front wall of the building, he descended
+some steps, advanced along a paved walk, turned another angle,
+and found himself in a strip of garden ground at the back of the
+house.
+
+Behind him was a row of small rooms situated on the level of the
+servants' offices. In front of him, on the further side of the
+little garden, rose a wall, screened by a laurel hedge, and
+having a door at one end of it, leading past the stables to a
+gate that opened on the high-road. Perceiving that he had only
+discovered thus far the shorter way to the house, used by the
+servants and trades-people, Midwinter turned back again, and
+looked in at the window of one of the rooms on the basement story
+as he passed it. Were these the servants' offices? No; the
+offices were apparently in some other part of the ground-floor;
+the window he had looked in at was the window of a lumber-room.
+The next two rooms in the row were both empty. The fourth window,
+when he approached it, presented a little variety. It served also
+as a door; and it stood open to the garden at that moment.
+
+Attracted by the book-shelves which he noticed on one of the
+walls, Midwinter stepped into the room.
+
+The books, few in number, did not detain him long; a glance at
+their backs was enough without taking them down. The Waverley
+Novels, Tales by Miss Edgeworth, and by Miss Edgeworth's many
+followers, the Poems of Mrs. Hemans, with a few odd volumes of
+the illustrated gift-books of the period, composed the bulk of
+the little library. Midwinter turned to leave the room, when an
+object on one side of the window, which he had not previously
+noticed, caught his attention and stopped him. It was a statuette
+standing on a bracket--a reduced copy of the famous Niobe of the
+Florence Museum. He glanced from the statuette to the window,
+with a sudden doubt which set his heart throbbing fast. It was a
+French window. He looked out with a suspicion which he had not
+felt yet. The view before him was the view of a lawn and garden.
+For a moment his mind struggled blindly to escape the conclusion
+which had seized it, and struggled in vain. Here, close round him
+and close before him--here, forcing him mercilessly back from the
+happy present to the horrible past, was the room that Allan had
+seen in the Second Vision of the Dream.
+
+He waited, thinking and looking round him  while he thought. There
+was wonderfully li ttle disturbance in his face and manner; he
+looked steadily from one to the other of the few objects in the
+room, as if the discovery of it had saddened rather than
+surprised him. Matting of some foreign sort covered the floor.
+Two cane chairs and a plain table comprised the whole of the
+furniture. The walls were plainly papered, and bare--broken to
+the eye in one place by a door leading into the interior of the
+house; in another, by a small stove; in a third, by the
+book-shelves which Midwinter had already noticed. He returned to
+the books, and this time he took some of them down from the
+shelves.
+
+The first that he opened contained lines in a woman's
+handwriting, traced in ink that had faded with time. He read the
+inscription--"Jane Armadale, from her beloved father. Thorpe
+Ambrose, October, 1828." In the second, third, and fourth volumes
+that he opened, the same inscription re-appeared. His previous
+knowledge of dates and persons helped him to draw the true
+inference from what he saw. The books must have belonged to
+Allan's mother; and she must have inscribed them with her name,
+in the interval of time between her return to Thorpe Ambrose from
+Madeira and the birth of her son. Midwinter passed on to a volume
+on another shelf--one of a series containing the writings of Mrs.
+Hemans. In this case, the blank leaf at the beginning of the book
+was filled on both sides with a copy of verses, the writing being
+still in Mrs. Armadale's hand. The verses were headed "Farewell
+to Thorpe Ambrose," and were dated "March, 1829"--two months only
+after Allan had been born.
+
+Entirely without merit in itself, the only interest of the little
+poem was in the domestic story that it told.
+
+The very room in which Midwinter then stood was described--with
+the view on the garden, the window made to open on it, the
+bookshelves, the Niobe, and other more perishable ornaments which
+Time had destroyed. Here, at variance with her brothers,
+shrinking from her friends, the widow of the murdered man had, on
+her own acknowledgment, secluded herself, without other comfort
+than the love and forgiveness of her father, until her child was
+born. The father's mercy and the father's recent death filled
+many verses, happily too vague in their commonplace expression of
+penitence and despair to give any hint of the marriage story in
+Madeira to any reader who looked at them ignorant of the truth. A
+passing reference to the writer's estrangement from her surviving
+relatives, and to her approaching departure from Thorpe Ambrose,
+followed. Last came the assertion of the mother's resolution to
+separate herself from all her old associations; to leave behind
+her every possession, even to the most trifling thing she had,
+that could remind her of the miserable past; and to date her new
+life in the future from the birthday of the child who had been
+spared to console her--who was now the one earthly object that
+could still speak to her of love and hope. So the old story of
+passionate feeling that finds comfort in phrases rather than not
+find comfort at all was told once again. So the poem in the faded
+ink faded away to its end.
+
+Midwinter put the book back with a heavy sigh, and opened no
+other volume on the shelves. "Here in the country house, or there
+on board the wreck," he said, bitterly, "the traces of my
+father's crime follow me, go where I may." He advanced toward the
+window, stopped, and looked back into the lonely, neglected
+little room. "Is _this_ chance?" he asked himself. "The place
+where his mother suffered is the place he sees in the Dream; and
+the first morning in the new house is the morning that reveals
+it, not to _him,_ but to me. Oh, Allan! Allan! how will it end?"
+
+
+The thought had barely passed through his mind before he heard
+Allan's voice, from the paved walk at the side of the house,
+calling to him by his name. He hastily stepped out into the
+garden. At the same moment Allan came running round the corner,
+full of voluble apologies for having forgotten, in the society of
+his new neighbors, what was due to the laws of hospitality and
+the claims of his friend.
+
+"I really haven't missed you," said Midwinter; "and I am very,
+very glad to hear that the new neighbors have produced such a
+pleasant impression on you already."
+
+He tried, as he spoke, to lead the way back by the outside of the
+house; but Allan's flighty attention had been caught by the open
+window and the lonely little room. He stepped in immediately.
+Midwinter followed, and watched him in breathless anxiety as he
+looked round. Not the slightest recollection of the Dream
+troubled Allan's easy mind. Not the slightest reference to it
+fell from the silent lips of his friend.
+
+"Exactly the sort of place I should have expected you to hit on!"
+exclaimed Allan, gayly. "Small and snug and unpretending. I know
+you, Master Midwinter! You'll be slipping off here when the
+county families come visiting, and I rather think on those
+dreadful occasions you won't find me far behind you. What's the
+matter? You look ill and out of spirits. Hungry? Of course you
+are! unpardonable of me to have kept you waiting. This door leads
+somewhere, I suppose; let's try a short cut into the house. Don't
+be afraid of my not keeping you company at breakfast. I didn't
+eat much at the cottage; I feasted my eyes on Miss Milroy, as the
+poets say. Oh, the darling! the darling! she turns you
+topsy-turvy the moment you look at her. As for her father, wait
+till you see his wonderful clock! It's twice the size of the
+famous clock at Strasbourg, and the most tremendous striker ever
+heard yet in the memory of man!"
+
+Singing the praises of his new friends in this strain at the top
+of his voice, Allan hurried Midwinter along the stone passages on
+the basement floor, which led, as he had rightly guessed, to a
+staircase communicating with the hall. They passed the servants'
+offices on the way. At the sight of the cook and the roaring
+fire, disclosed through the open kitchen door, Allan's mind went
+off at a tangent, and Allan's dignity scattered itself to the
+four winds of heaven, as usual.
+
+"Aha, Mrs. Gripper, there you are with your pots and pans, and
+your burning fiery furnace! One had need be Shadrach, Meshach,
+and the other fellow to stand over that. Breakfast as soon as
+ever you like. Eggs, sausages, bacon, kidneys, marmalade,
+water-cresses, coffee, and so forth. My friend and I belong to
+the select few whom it's a perfect privilege to cook for.
+Voluptuaries, Mrs. Gripper, voluptuaries, both of us. You'll
+see," continued Allan, as they went on toward the stairs, "I
+shall make that worthy creature young again; I'm better than a
+doctor for Mrs. Gripper. When she laughs, she shakes her fat
+sides, and when she shakes her fat sides, she exerts her muscular
+system; and when she exerts her muscular system-- Ha! here's
+Susan again. Don't squeeze yourself flat against the banisters,
+my dear; if you don't mind hustling _me_ on the stairs, I rather
+like hustling _you._ She looks like a full-blown rose when she
+blushes, doesn't she? Stop, Susan! I've orders to give. Be very
+particular with Mr. Midwinter's room: shake up his bed like mad,
+and dust his furniture till those nice round arms of yours ache
+again. Nonsense, my dear fellow! I'm not too familiar with them;
+I'm only keeping them up to their work. Now, then, Richard! where
+do we breakfast? Oh, here. Between ourselves, Midwinter, these
+splendid rooms of mine are a size too large for me; I don't feel
+as if I should ever be on intimate terms with my own furniture.
+My views in life are of the snug and slovenly sort--a kitchen
+chair, you know, and a low ceiling. Man wants but little here
+below, and wants that little long. That's not exactly the right
+quotation; but it expresses my meaning, and we'll let alone
+correcting it till the next opportunity."
+
+"I beg your pardon," interposed Midwinter, "here is something
+waiting for you which you have not noticed yet."
+
+As he spoke, he pointed a little impatiently to a letter lying on
+the breakfast-table. He could conceal the ominous discovery which
+he had made that morning, from Allan's knowledge; but he could
+not conquer the latent distrust of circumstances which was now
+ raised again in his superstitious nature--the instinctive
+suspicion of everything that happened, no matter how common or
+how trifling the event, on the first memorable day when the new
+life began in the new house.
+
+Allan ran his eye over the letter, and tossed it across the table
+to his friend. "I can't make head or tail of it," he said, "can
+you?"
+
+Midwinter read the letter, slowly, aloud. "Sir--I trust you will
+pardon the liberty I take in sending these few lines to wait your
+arrival at Thorpe Ambrose. In the event of circumstances not
+disposing you to place your law business in the hands of Mr.
+Darch--" He suddenly stopped at that point, and considered a
+little.
+
+"Darch is our friend the lawyer," said Allan, supposing Midwinter
+had forgotten the name. "Don't you remember our spinning the
+half-crown on the cabin table, when I got the two offers for the
+cottage? Heads, the major; tails, the lawyer. This is the
+lawyer."
+
+Without making any reply, Midwinter resumed reading the letter.
+"In the event of circumstances not disposing you to place your
+law business in the hands of Mr. Darch, I beg to say that I shall
+be happy to take charge of your interests, if you feel willing to
+honor me with your confidence. Inclosing a reference (should you
+desire it) to my agents in London, and again apologizing for this
+intrusion, I beg to remain, sir, respectfully yours, A. PEDGIFT,
+Sen."
+
+"Circumstances?" repeated Midwinter, as he laid the letter down.
+"What circumstances can possibly indispose you to give your law
+business to Mr. Darch?"
+
+"Nothing can indispose me," said Allan. "Besides being the family
+lawyer here, Darch was the first to write me word at Paris of my
+coming in for my fortune; and, if I have got any business to
+give, of course he ought to have it."
+
+Midwinter still looked distrustfully at the open letter on the
+table. "I am sadly afraid, Allan, there is something wrong
+already," he said. "This man would never have ventured on the
+application he has made to you, unless he had some good reason
+for believing he would succeed. If you wish to put yourself right
+at starting, you will send to Mr. Darch this morning to tell him
+you are here, and you will take no notice for the present of Mr.
+Pedgift's letter."
+
+Before more could be said on either side, the footman made his
+appearance with the breakfast tray. He was followed, after an
+interval, by the butler, a man of the essentially confidential
+kind, with a modulated voice, a courtly manner, and a bulbous
+nose. Anybody but Allan would have seen in his face that he had
+come into the room having a special communication to make to his
+master. Allan, who saw nothing under the surface, and whose head
+was running on the lawyer's letter, stopped him bluntly with the
+point-blank question: "Who's Mr. Pedgift?"
+
+The butler's sources of local knowledge opened confidentially on
+the instant. Mr. Pedgift was the second of the two lawyers in the
+town. Not so long established, not so wealthy, not so universally
+looked up to as old Mr. Darch. Not doing the business of the
+highest people in the county, and not mixing freely with the best
+society, like old Mr. Darch. A very sufficient man, in his way,
+nevertheless. Known as a perfectly competent and respectable
+practitioner all round the neighborhood. In short, professionally
+next best to Mr. Darch; and personally superior to him (if the
+expression might be permitted) in this respect--that Darch was a
+Crusty One, and Pedgift wasn't.
+
+Having imparted this information, the butler, taking a wise
+advantage of his position, glided, without a moment's stoppage,
+from Mr. Pedgift's character to the business that had brought him
+into the breakfast-room. The Midsummer Audit was near at hand;
+and the tenants were accustomed to have a week's notice of the
+rent-day dinner. With this necessity pressing, and with no orders
+given as yet, and no steward in office at Thorpe Ambrose, it
+appeared desirable that some confidential person should bring the
+matter forward. The butler was that confidential person; and he
+now ventured accordingly to trouble his master on the subject.
+
+At this point Allan opened his lips to interrupt, and was himself
+interrupted before he could utter a word.
+
+"Wait!" interposed Midwinter, seeing in Allan's face that he was
+in danger of being publicly announced in the capacity of steward.
+"Wait!" he repeated, eagerly, "till I can speak to you first."
+
+The butler's courtly manner remained alike unruffled by
+Midwinter's sudden interference and by his own dismissal from the
+scene. Nothing but the mounting color in his bulbous nose
+betrayed the sense of injury that animated him as he withdrew.
+Mr. Armadale's chance of regaling his friend and himself that day
+with the best wine in the cellar trembled in the balance, as the
+butler took his way back to the basement story.
+
+"This is beyond a joke, Allan," said Midwinter, when they were
+alone. "Somebody must meet your tenants on the rent-day who is
+really fit to take the steward's place. With the best will in the
+world to learn, it is impossible for _me_ to master the business
+at a week's notice. Don't, pray don't let your anxiety for my
+welfare put you in a false position with other people! I should
+never forgive myself if I was the unlucky cause--"
+
+"Gently gently!' cried Allan, amazed at his friend's
+extraordinary earnestness. "If I write to London by to-night's
+post for the man who came down here before, will that satisfy
+you?"
+
+Midwinter shook his head. "Our time is short," he said; "and the
+man may not be at liberty. Why not try in the neighborhood first?
+You were going to write to Mr. Darch. Send at once, and see if he
+can't help us between this and post-time."
+
+Allan withdrew to a side-table on which writing materials were
+placed. "You shall breakfast in peace, you old fidget," he
+replied, and addressed himself forthwith to Mr. Darch, with his
+usual Spartan brevity of epistolary expression. "Dear Sir--Here I
+am, bag and baggage. Will you kindly oblige me by being my
+lawyer? I ask this, because I want to consult you at once. Please
+look in in the course of the day, and stop to dinner if you
+possibly can. Yours truly. ALLAN ARMADALE." Having read this
+composition aloud with unconcealed admiration of his own rapidity
+of literary execution, Allan addressed the letter to Mr. Darch,
+and rang the bell. "Here, Richard, take this at once, and wait
+for an answer. And, I say, if there's any news stirring in the
+town, pick it up and bring it back with you. See how I manage my
+servants!" continued Allan, joining his friend at the
+breakfast-table. "See how I adapt myself to my new duties! I
+haven't been down here one clear day yet, and I'm taking an
+interest in the neighborhood already."
+
+Breakfast over, the two friends went out to idle away the morning
+under the shade of a tree in the park. Noon came, and Richard
+never appeared. One o'clock struck, and still there were no signs
+of an answer from Mr. Darch. Midwinter's patience was not proof
+against the delay. He left Allan dozing on the grass, and went to
+the house to make inquiries. The town was described as little
+more than two miles distant; but the day of the week happened to
+be market day, and Richard was being detained no doubt by some of
+the many acquaintances whom he would be sure to meet with on that
+occasion.
+
+Half an hour later the truant messenger returned, and was sent
+out to report himself to his master under the tree in the park.
+
+"Any answer from Mr. Darch?" asked Midwinter, seeing that Allan
+was too lazy to put the question for himself.
+
+"Mr. Darch was engaged, sir. I was desired to say that he would
+send an answer."
+
+"Any news in the town?" inquired Allan, drowsily, without
+troubling himself to open his eyes.
+
+"No, sir; nothing in particular."
+
+Observing the man suspiciously as he made that reply, Midwinter
+detected in his face that he was not speaking the truth. He was
+plainly embarrassed, and plainly relieved when his master's
+silence allowed him to withdraw. After a little consideration,
+Midwinter followed, and overtook the retreating servant on the
+drive before the house.
+
+"Richard," he said, quietly, "if I was to guess that there _is_
+some news in the town, and that you don't like telling it to your
+master, should I be guessing the truth?"
+
+The man started and changed color. "I don't know how you have
+found it out," he said; "but I can't deny you have guessed
+right."
+
+"If you let me hear what the news is, I will take the
+responsibility on myself of telling Mr. Armadale."
+
+After some little hesitation, and some distrustful consideration,
+on his side, of Midwinter's face, Richard at last prevailed on
+himself to repeat what he had heard that day in the town.
+
+The news of Allan's sudden appearance at Thorpe Ambrose had
+preceded the servant's arrival at his destination by some hours.
+Wherever he went, he found his master the subject of public
+discussion. The opinion of Allan's conduct among the leading
+townspeople, the resident gentry of the neighborhood, and the
+principal tenants on the estate was unanimously unfavorable. Only
+the day before, the committee for managing the pubic reception of
+the new squire had sketched the progress of the procession; had
+settled the serious question of the triumphal arches; and had
+appointed a competent person to solicit subscriptions for the
+flags, the flowers, the feasting, the fireworks, and the band. In
+less than a week more the money could have been collected, and
+the rector would have written to Mr. Armadale to fix the day. And
+now, by Allan's own act, the public welcome waiting to honor him
+had been cast back contemptuously in the public teeth! Everybody
+took for granted (what was unfortunately true) that he had
+received private information of the contemplated proceedings.
+Everybody declared that he had purposely stolen into his own
+house like a thief in the night (so the phrase ran) to escape
+accepting the offered civilities of his neighbors. In brief, the
+sensitive self-importance of the little town was wounded to the
+quick, and of Allan's once enviable position in the estimation of
+the neighborhood not a vestige remained.
+
+For a moment, Midwinter faced the messenger of evil tidings in
+silent distress. That moment past, the sense of Allan's critical
+position roused him, now the evil was known, to seek the remedy.
+
+"Has the little you have seen of your master, Richard, inclined
+you to like him?" he asked.
+
+This time the man answered without hesitation, "A pleasanter and
+kinder gentleman than Mr. Armadale no one could wish to serve."
+
+"If you think that," pursued Midwinter, "you won't object to give
+me some information which will help your master to set himself
+right with his neighbors. Come into the house."
+
+He led the way into the library, and, after asking the necessary
+questions, took down in writing a list of the names and addresses
+of the most influential persons living in the town and its
+neighborhood. This done, he rang the bell for the head footman,
+having previously sent Richard with a message to the stables
+directing an open carriage to be ready in an hour's time.
+
+"When the late Mr. Blanchard went out to make calls in the
+neighborhood, it was your place to go with him, was it not?" he
+asked, when the upper servant appeared. "Very well. Be ready in
+an hour's time, if you please, to go out with Mr. Armadale."
+Having given that order, he left the house again on his way back
+to Allan, with the visiting list in his hand. He smiled a little
+sadly as he descended the steps. "Who would have imagined," he
+thought, "that my foot-boy's experience of the ways of
+gentlefolks would be worth looking back at one day for Allan's
+sake?"
+
+The object of the popular odium lay innocently slumbering on the
+grass, with his garden hat over his nose, his waistcoat
+unbuttoned, and his trousers wrinkled half way up his
+outstretched legs. Midwinter roused him without hesitation, and
+remorselessly repeated the servant's news.
+
+Allan accepted the disclosure thus forced on him without the
+slightest disturbance of temper. "Oh, hang 'em!" was all he said.
+"Let's have another cigar." Midwinter took the cigar out of his
+hand, and, insisting on his treating the matter seriously, told
+him in plain words that he must set himself right with his
+offended neighbors by calling on them personally to make his
+apologies. Allan sat up on the grass in astonishment; his eyes
+opened wide in incredulous dismay. Did Midwinter positively
+meditate forcing him into a "chimney-pot hat," a nicely brushed
+frock-coat, and a clean pair of gloves? Was it actually in
+contemplation to shut him up in a carriage, with his footman on
+the box and his card-case in his hand, and send him round from
+house to house, to tell a pack of fools that he begged their
+pardon for not letting them make a public show of him? If
+anything so outrageously absurd as this was really to be done, it
+could not be done that day, at any rate. He had promised to go
+back to the charming Milroy at the cottage and to take Midwinter
+with him. What earthly need had he of the good opinion of the
+resident gentry? The only friends he wanted were the friends he
+had got already. Let the whole neighborhood turn its back on him
+if it liked; back or face, the Squire of Thorpe Ambrose didn't
+care two straws about it.
+
+After allowing him to run on in this way until his whole stock of
+objections was exhausted, Midwinter wisely tried his personal
+influence next. He took Allan affectionately by the hand. "I am
+going to ask a great favor," he said. "If you won't call on these
+people for your own sake, will you call on them to please _me?_"
+
+Allan delivered himself of a groan of despair, stared in mute
+surprise at the anxious face of his friend, and good-humoredly
+gave way. As Midwinter took his arm, and led him back to the
+house, he looked round with rueful eyes at the cattle hard by,
+placidly whisking their tails in the pleasant shade. "Don't
+mention it in the neighborhood," he said; "I should like to
+change places with one of my own cows."
+
+Midwinter left him to dress, engaging to return when the carriage
+was at the door. Allan's toilet did not promise to be a speedy
+one. He began it by reading his own visiting cards; and he
+advanced it a second stage by looking into his wardrobe, and
+devoting the resident gentry to the infernal regions. Before he
+could discover any third means of delaying his own proceedings,
+the necessary pretext was unexpectedly supplied by Richard's
+appearance with a note in his hand. The messenger had just called
+with Mr. Darch's answer. Allan briskly shut up the wardrobe, and
+gave his whole attention to the lawyer's letter. The lawyer's
+letter rewarded him by the following lines:
+
+
+"SIR--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your favor of to-day's
+date, honoring me with two proposals; namely, ONE inviting me to
+act as your legal adviser, and ONE inviting me to pay you a visit
+at your house. In reference to the first proposal, I beg
+permission to decline it with thanks. With regard to the second
+proposal, I have to inform you that circumstances have come to my
+knowledge relating to the letting of the cottage at Thorpe
+Ambrose which render it impossible for me (in justice to myself)
+to accept your invitation. I have ascertained, sir, that my offer
+reached you at the same time as Major Milroy's; and that, with
+both proposals thus before you, you gave the preference to a
+total stranger, who addressed you through a house agent, over a
+man who had faithfully served your relatives for two generations,
+and who had been the first person to inform you of the most
+important event in your life. After this specimen of your
+estimate of what is due to the claims of common courtesy and
+common justice, I cannot flatter myself that I possess any of the
+qualities which would fit me to take my place on the list of your
+friends.
+
+"I remain, sir, your obedient servant,
+
+"JAMES DARCH."
+
+
+"Stop the messenger!" cried Allan, leaping to his feet, his ruddy
+face aflame with indignation. "Give me pen, ink, and paper! By
+the Lord Harry, they're a nice set of people in these parts; the
+whole neighborhood is in a conspiracy to bully me!" He snatched
+up the pen in a fine frenzy of epistolary inspiration. "Sir--I
+despise you and your letter.--" At that point the pen made a
+blot, and the writer was seized  with a momentary hesitation. "Too
+strong," h e thought; "I'll give it to the lawyer in his own cool
+and cutting style." He began again on a clean sheet of paper.
+"Sir--You remind me of an Irish bull. I mean that story in 'Joe
+Miller' where Pat remarked, in the hearing of a wag hard by, that
+'the reciprocity was all on one side.' _Your_ reciprocity is all
+on one side. You take the privilege of refusing to be my lawyer,
+and then you complain of my taking the privilege of refusing to
+be your landlord." He paused fondly over those last words.
+"Neat!" he thought. "Argument and hard hitting both in one. I
+wonder where my knack of writing comes from?" He went on, and
+finished the letter in two more sentences. "As for your casting
+my invitation back in my teeth, I beg to inform you my teeth are
+none the worse for it. I am equally glad to have nothing to say
+to you, either in the capacity of a friend or a tenant.--ALLAN
+ARMADALE." He nodded exultantly at his own composition, as he
+addressed it and sent it down to the messenger. "Darch's hide
+must be a thick one," he said, "if he doesn't feel _that!_"
+
+The sound of the wheels outside suddenly recalled him to the
+business of the day. There was the carriage waiting to take him
+on his round of visits; and there was Midwinter at his post,
+pacing to and fro on the drive.
+
+"Read that," cried Allan, throwing out the lawyer's letter; "I've
+written him back a smasher."
+
+He bustled away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a
+wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay
+the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth
+had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting
+himself in the neighborhood. "Whatever else they may say of me,
+they shan't say I was afraid to face them." Heated red-hot with
+that idea, he seized his hat and gloves, and hurrying out of the
+room, met Midwinter in the corridor with the lawyer's letter in
+his hand.
+
+"Keep up your spirits!" cried Allan, seeing the anxiety in his
+friend's face, and misinterpreting the motive of it immediately.
+"If Darch can't be counted on to send us a helping hand into the
+steward's office, Pedgift can."
+
+"My dear Allan, I was not thinking of that; I was thinking of Mr.
+Darch's letter. I don't defend this sour-tempered man; but I am
+afraid we must admit he has some cause for complaint. Pray don't
+give him another chance of putting you in the wrong. Where is
+your answer to his letter?"
+
+"Gone!" replied Allan. "I always strike while the iron's hot--a
+word and a blow, and the blow first, that's my way. Don't,
+there's a good fellow, don't fidget about the steward's books and
+the rent-day. Here! here's a bunch of keys they gave me last
+night: one of them opens the room where the steward's books are;
+go in and read them till I come back. I give you my sacred word
+of honor I'll settle it all with Pedgift before you see me
+again."
+
+"One moment," interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on
+his way out to the carriage. "I say nothing against Mr. Pedgift's
+fitness to possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify
+me in distrusting him. But he has not introduced himself to your
+notice in a very delicate way; and he has not acknowledged (what
+is quite clear to my mind) that he knew of Mr. Darch's unfriendly
+feeling toward you when he wrote. Wait a little before you go to
+this stranger; wait till we can talk it over together to-night."
+
+"Wait!" replied Allan. "Haven't I told you that I always strike
+while the iron's hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy, I'll
+look Pedgift through and through, and act accordingly. Don't keep
+me any longer, for Heaven's sake. I'm in a fine humor for
+tackling the resident gentry; and if I don't go at once, I'm
+afraid it may wear off."
+
+With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan
+boisterously broke away. Before it was possible to stop him
+again, he had jumped into the carriage and had left the house.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MARCH OF EVENTS.
+
+MIDWINTER'S face darkened when the last trace of the carriage had
+disappeared from view. "I have done my best," he said, as he
+turned back gloomily into the house "If Mr. Brock himself were
+here, Mr. Brock could do no more!"
+
+He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his
+hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the
+steward's books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting
+nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various
+movables of the steward's office had been provisionally placed
+after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and
+tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the
+business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result exposed
+his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers
+bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the
+correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could
+understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted
+bitterly as he left the room again to his two years' solitary
+self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller's shop. "If I
+could only have worked at a business!" he thought. "If I could
+only have known that the company of poets and philosophers was
+company too high for a vagabond like me!"
+
+He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell
+heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it
+exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. "Curse
+the place!" he said, snatching up his hat and stick. "I like the
+bleakest hillside I ever slept on better than I like this house!"
+
+He impatiently descended the door-steps, and stopped on the
+drive, considering, by which direction he should leave the park
+for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the
+carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting
+him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own
+nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the
+dream without entering it again. But one other way remained: the
+way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning.
+There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major's daughter
+now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the
+gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.
+
+Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was
+full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable
+self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous
+and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the
+poor. "The heather-bell costs nothing!" he thought, looking
+contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that
+surrounded him; "and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as
+the best of you!" He followed the artfully contrived ovals and
+squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the
+symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design.
+"How many pounds a foot did _you_ cost?" he said, looking back
+with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. "Wind away
+over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain side, if
+you can!"
+
+He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him;
+crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached the
+major's cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion at
+the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate, to
+look at the trim little residence which would never have been
+empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan's ill-advised
+resolution to force the steward's situation on his friend.
+
+The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and
+still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the
+windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the
+sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park
+as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden inclosure.
+The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining--a
+voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with
+nothing but the hard power of it left--was the discordantly
+predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled
+the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the
+voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow
+Midwinter to disti nguish the words that were spoken, he felt the
+impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at
+once stepped forward to continue his walk.
+
+At the same moment, the face of a young girl (easily recognizable
+as the face of Miss Milroy, from Allan's description of her)
+appeared at the open window of the room. In spite of himself,
+Midwinter paused to look at her. The expression of the bright
+young face, which had smiled so prettily on Allan, was weary and
+disheartened. After looking out absently over the park, she
+suddenly turned her head back into the room, her attention having
+been apparently struck by something that had just been said in
+it. "Oh, mamma, mamma," she exclaimed, indignantly, "how _can_
+you say such things!" The words were spoken close to the window;
+they reached Midwinter's ears, and hurried him away before he
+heard more. But the self-disclosure of Major Milroy's domestic
+position had not reached its end yet. As Midwinter turned the
+corner of the garden fence, a tradesman's boy was handing a
+parcel in at the wicket gate to the woman servant. "Well," said
+the boy, with the irrepressible impudence of his class, "how is
+the missus?" The woman lifted her hand to box his ears. "How is
+the missus?" she repeated, with an angry toss of her head, as the
+boy ran off. "If it would only please God to take the missus, it
+would be a blessing to everybody in the house."
+
+No such ill-omened shadow as this had passed over the bright
+domestic picture of the inhabitants of the cottage, which Allan's
+enthusiasm had painted for the contemplation of his friend. It
+was plain that the secret of the tenants had been kept from the
+landlord so far. Five minutes more of walking brought Midwinter
+to the park gates. "Am I fated to see nothing and hear nothing
+to-day, which can give me heart and hope for the future?" he
+thought, as he angrily swung back the lodge gate. "Even the
+people Allan has let the cottage to are people whose lives are
+imbittered by a household misery which it is _my_ misfortune to
+have found out!"
+
+He took the first road that lay before him, and walked on,
+noticing little, immersed in his own thoughts.
+
+More than an hour passed before the necessity of turning back
+entered his mind. As soon as the idea occurred to him, he
+consulted his watch, and determined to retrace his steps, so as
+to be at the house in good time to meet Allan on his return. Ten
+minutes of walking brought him back to a point at which three
+roads met, and one moment's observation of the place satisfied
+him that he had entirely failed to notice at the time by which of
+the three roads he had advanced. No sign-post was to be seen; the
+country on either side was lonely and flat, intersected by broad
+drains and ditches. Cattle were grazing here and there, and a
+windmill rose in the distance above the pollard willows that
+fringed the low horizon. But not a house was to be seen, and not
+a human creature appeared on the visible perspective of any one
+of the three roads. Midwinter glanced back in the only direction
+left to look at--the direction of the road along which he had
+just been walking. There, to his relief, was the figure of a man,
+rapidly advancing toward him, of whom he could ask his way.
+
+The figure came on, clad from head to foot in dreary black--a
+moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened
+road. He was a lean, elderly, miserably respectable man. He wore
+a poor old black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no
+pretense of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers
+clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty
+black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet.
+Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness
+of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a
+stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard
+jaws. The one morsel of color he carried about him was a lawyer's
+bag of blue serge, as lean and limp as himself. The one
+attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary old face was a neat
+set of teeth--teeth (as honest as his wig) which said plainly to
+all inquiring eyes, "We pass our nights on his looking-glass, and
+our days in his mouth."
+
+All the little blood in the man's body faintly reddened his
+fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the
+way to Thorpe Ambrose. His weak, watery eyes looked hither and
+thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a
+lion instead of a man, and if the few words addressed to him had
+been words expressing a threat instead of a question, he could
+hardly have looked more confused and alarmed than he looked now.
+For the first time in his life, Midwinter saw his own shy
+uneasiness in the presence of strangers reflected, with tenfold
+intensity of nervous suffering, in the face of another man--and
+that man old enough to be his father.
+
+"Which do you please to mean, sir--the town or the house? I beg
+your pardon for asking, but they both go by the same name in
+these parts."
+
+He spoke with a timid gentleness of tone, an ingratiatory smile,
+and an anxious courtesy of manner, all distressingly suggestive
+of his being accustomed to receive rough answers in exchange for
+his own politeness from the persons whom he habitually addressed.
+
+"I was not aware that both the house and the town went by the
+same name," said Midwinter; "I meant the house." He instinctively
+conquered his own shyness as he answered in those words, speaking
+with a cordiality of manner which was very rare with him in his
+intercourse with strangers.
+
+The man of miserable respectability seemed to feel the warm
+return of his own politeness gratefully; he brightened and took a
+little courage. His lean forefinger pointed eagerly to the right
+road. "That way, sir," he said, "and when you come to two roads
+next, please take the left one of the two. I am sorry I have
+business the other way, I mean in the town. I should have been
+happy to go with you and show you. Fine summer weather, sir, for
+walking? You can't miss your way if you keep to the left. Oh,
+don't mention it! I'm afraid I have detained you, sir. I wish you
+a pleasant walk back, and--good-morning."
+
+By the time he had made an end of speaking (under an impression
+apparently that the more he talked the more polite he would be)
+he had lost his courage again. He darted away down his own road,
+as if Midwinter's attempt to thank him involved a series of
+trials too terrible to confront. In two minutes more, his black
+retreating figure had lessened in the distance till it looked
+again, what it had once looked already, a moving blot on the
+brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road.
+
+The man ran strangely in Midwinter's thoughts while he took his
+way back to the house. He was at a loss to account for it. It
+never occurred to him that he might have been insensibly reminded
+of himself, when he saw the plain traces of past misfortune and
+present nervous suffering in the poor wretch's face. He blindly
+resented his own perverse interest in this chance foot passenger
+on the high-road, as he had resented all else that had happened
+to him since the beginning of the day. "Have I made another
+unlucky discovery?" he asked himself, impatiently. "Shall I see
+this man again, I wonder? Who can he be?"
+
+Time was to answer both those questions before many days more had
+passed over the inquirer's head.
+
+
+Allan had not returned when Midwinter reached the house. Nothing
+had happened but the arrival of a message of apology from the
+cottage. "Major Milroy's compliments, and he was sorry that Mrs.
+Milroy's illness would prevent his receiving Mr. Armadale that
+day." It was plain that Mrs. Milroy's occasional fits of
+suffering (or of ill temper) created no mere transitory
+disturbance of the tranquillity of the household. Drawing this
+natural inference, after what he had himself heard at the cottage
+nearly three hours since, Midwinter withdrew into the library to
+wait patiently among the books until his friend came back.
+
+It was past six o'clock when the well-known hearty voice was
+heard again in the hall. Allan burst into the library, in a state
+of irrepressible excitement, and pushed
+ Midwinter back unceremoniously into the chair from which he was
+just rising, before he could utter a word
+
+"Here's a riddle for you, old boy!" cried Allan. "Why am I like
+the resident manager of the Augean stable, before Hercules was
+called in to sweep the litter out? Because I have had my place to
+keep up, and I've gone and made an infernal mess of it! Why don't
+you laugh? By George, he doesn't see the point! Let's try again.
+Why am I like the resident manager--"
+
+"For God's sake, Allan, be serious for a moment!" interposed
+Midwinter. "You don't know how anxious I am to hear if you have
+recovered the good opinion of your neighbors."
+
+"That's just what the riddle was intended to tell you!" rejoined
+Allan. "But if you will have it in so many words, my own
+impression is that you would have done better not to disturb me
+under that tree in the park. I've been calculating it to a
+nicety, and I beg to inform you that I have sunk exactly three
+degrees lower in the estimation of the resident gentry since I
+had the pleasure of seeing you last."
+
+"You _will_ have your joke out," said Midwinter, bitterly. "Well,
+if I can't laugh, I can wait."
+
+"My dear fellow, I'm not joking; I really mean what I say. You
+shall hear what happened; you shall have a report in full of my
+first visit. It will do, I can promise you, as a sample for all
+the rest. Mind this, in the first place, I've gone wrong with the
+best possible intentions. When I started for these visits, I own
+I was angry with that old brute of a lawyer, and I certainly had
+a notion of carrying things with a high hand. But it wore off
+somehow on the road; and the first family I called on, I went in,
+as I tell you, with the best possible intentions. Oh, dear, dear!
+there was the same spick-and-span reception-room for me to wait
+in, with the neat conservatory beyond, which I saw again and
+again and again at every other house I went to afterward. There
+was the same choice selection of books for me to look at--a
+religious book, a book about the Duke of Wellington, a book about
+sporting, and a book about nothing in particular, beautifully
+illustrated with pictures. Down came papa with his nice white
+hair, and mamma with her nice lace cap; down came young mister
+with the pink face and straw-colored whiskers, and young miss
+with the plump cheeks and the large petticoats. Don't suppose
+there was the least unfriendliness on my side; I always began
+with them in the same way--I insisted on shaking hands all round.
+That staggered them to begin with. When I came to the sore
+subject next--the subject of the public reception--I give you my
+word of honor I took the greatest possible pains with my
+apologies. It hadn't the slightest effect; they let my apologies
+in at one ear and out at the other, and then waited to hear more.
+Some men would have been disheartened: I tried another way with
+them; I addressed myself to the master of the house, and put it
+pleasantly next. 'The fact is,' I said, 'I wanted to escape the
+speechifying--my getting up, you know, and telling you to your
+face you're the best of men, and I beg to propose your health;
+and your getting up and telling me to my face I'm the best of
+men, and you beg to thank me; and so on, man after man, praising
+each other and pestering each other all round the table.' That's
+how I put it, in an easy, light-handed, convincing sort of way.
+Do you think any of them took it in the same friendly spirit? Not
+one! It's my belief they had got their speeches ready for the
+reception, with the flags and the flowers, and that they're
+secretly angry with me for stopping their open mouths just as
+they were ready to begin. Anyway, whenever we came to the matter
+of the speechifying (whether they touched it first or I), down I
+fell in their estimation the first of those three steps I told
+you of just now. Don't suppose I made no efforts to get up again!
+I made desperate efforts. I found they were all anxious to know
+what sort of life I had led before I came in for the Thorpe
+Ambrose property, and I did my best to satisfy them. And what
+came of that, do you think? Hang me, if I didn't disappoint them
+for the second time! When they found out that I had actually
+never been to Eton or Harrow, or Oxford or Cambridge, they were
+quite dumb with astonishment. I fancy they thought me a sort of
+outlaw. At any rate, they all froze up again; and down I fell the
+second step in their estimation. Never mind! I wasn't to be
+beaten; I had promised you to do my best, and I did it. I tried
+cheerful small-talk about the neighborhood next. The women said
+nothing in particular; the men, to my unutterable astonishment,
+all began to condole with me. I shouldn't be able to find a pack
+of hounds, they said, within twenty miles of my house; and they
+thought it only right to prepare me for the disgracefully
+careless manner in which the Thorpe Ambrose covers had been
+preserved. I let them go on condoling with me, and then what do
+you think I did? I put my foot in it again. 'Oh, don't take that
+to heart!' I said; 'I don't care two straws about hunting or
+shooting, either. When I meet with a bird in my walk, I can't for
+the life of me feel eager to kill it; I rather like to see the
+bird flying about and enjoying itself.' You should have seen
+their faces! They had thought me a sort of outlaw before; now
+they evidently thought me mad. Dead silence fell upon them all;
+and down I tumbled the third step in the general estimation. It
+was just the same at the next house, and the next and the next.
+The devil possessed us all, I think. It _would_ come out, now in
+one way, and now in another, that I couldn't make speeches--that
+I had been brought up without a university education--and that I
+could enjoy a ride on horseback without galloping after a
+wretched stinking fox or a poor distracted little hare. These
+three unlucky defects of mine are not excused, it seems, in a
+country gentleman (especially when he has dodged a public
+reception to begin with). I think I got on best, upon the whole,
+with the wives and daughters. The women and I always fell, sooner
+or later, on the subject of Mrs. Blanchard and her niece. We
+invariably agreed that they had done wisely in going to Florence;
+and the only reason we had to give for our opinion was that we
+thought their minds would be benefited after their sad
+bereavement, by the contemplation of the masterpieces of Italian
+art. Every one of the ladies--I solemnly declare it--at every
+house I went to, came sooner or later to Mrs. and Miss
+Blanchard's bereavement and the masterpieces of Italian art. What
+we should have done without that bright idea to help us, I really
+don't know. The one pleasant thing at any of the visits was when
+we all shook our heads together, and declared that the
+masterpieces would console them. As for the rest of it, there's
+only one thing more to be said. What I might be in other places I
+don't know: I'm the wrong man in the wrong place here. Let me
+muddle on for the future in my own way, with my own few friends;
+and ask me anything else in the world, as long as you don't ask
+me to make any more calls on my neighbors."
+
+With that characteristic request, Allan's report of his exploring
+expedition among the resident gentry came to a close. For a
+moment Midwinter remained silent. He had allowed Allan to run on
+from first to last without uttering a word on his side. The
+disastrous result of the visits--coming after what had happened
+earlier in the day; and threatening Allan, as it did, with
+exclusion from all local sympathies at the very outset of his
+local career--had broken down Midwinter's power of resisting the
+stealthily depressing influence of his own superstition. It was
+with an effort that he now looked up at Allan; it was with an
+effort that he roused himself to answer.
+
+"It shall be as you wish," he said, quietly. "I am sorry for what
+has happened; but I am not the less obliged to you, Allan, for
+having done what I asked you."
+
+His head sank on his breast, and the fatalist resignation which
+had once already quieted him on board the wreck now quieted him
+again. "What _must_ be, _will_ be," he thought once more. "What
+have I to do with the future, and what
+ has he?"
+
+"Cheer up!" said Allan. "_Your_ affairs are in a thriving
+condition, at any rate. I paid one pleasant visit in the town,
+which I haven't told you of yet. I've seen Pedgift, and Pedgift's
+son, who helps him in the office. They're the two jolliest
+lawyers I ever met with in my life; and, what's more, they can
+produce the very man you want to teach you the steward's
+business."
+
+Midwinter looked up quickly. Distrust of Allan's discovery was
+plainly written in his face already; but he said nothing.
+
+"I thought of you," Allan proceeded, "as soon as the two Pedgifts
+and I had had a glass of wine all round to drink to our friendly
+connection. The finest sherry I ever tasted in my life; I've
+ordered some of the same--but that's not the question just now.
+In two words I told these worthy fellows your difficulty, and in
+two seconds old Pedgift understood all about it. 'I have got the
+man in my office,' he said, 'and before the audit-day comes, I'll
+place him with the greatest pleasure at your friend's disposal.'
+"
+
+At this last announcement, Midwinter's distrust found its
+expression in words. He questioned Allan unsparingly.
+
+The man's name, it appeared was Bashwood. He had been some time
+(how long, Allan could not remember) in Mr. Pedgift's service. He
+had been previously steward to a Norfolk gentleman (name
+forgotten) in the westward district of the county. He had lost
+the steward's place, through some domestic trouble, in connection
+with his son, the precise nature of which Allan was not able to
+specify. Pedgift vouched for him, and Pedgift would send him to
+Thorpe Ambrose two or three days before the rent-day dinner. He
+could not be spared, for office reasons, before that time. There
+was no need to fidget about it; Pedgift laughed at the idea of
+there being any difficulty with the tenants. Two or three day's
+work over the steward's books with a man to help Midwinter who
+practically understood that sort of thing would put him all right
+for the audit; and the other business would keep till afterward.
+
+"Have you seen this Mr. Bashwood yourself, Allan?" asked
+Midwinter, still obstinately on his guard.
+
+"No," replied Allan "he was out--out with the bag, as young
+Pedgift called it. They tell me he's a decent elderly man. A
+little broken by his troubles, and a little apt to be nervous and
+confused in his manner with strangers; but thoroughly competent
+and thoroughly to be depended on--those are Pedgift's own words."
+
+Midwinter paused and considered a little, with a new interest in
+the subject. The strange man whom he had just heard described,
+and the strange man of whom he had asked his way where the three
+roads met, were remarkably like each other. Was this another link
+in the fast-lengthening chain of events? Midwinter grew doubly
+determined to be careful, as the bare doubt that it might be so
+passed through his mind.
+
+"When Mr. Bashwood comes," he said, "will you let me see him, and
+speak to him, before anything definite is done?"
+
+"Of course I will!" rejoined Allan. He stopped and looked at his
+watch. "And I'll tell you what I'll do for you, old boy, in the
+meantime," he added; "I'll introduce you to the prettiest girl in
+Norfolk! There's just time to run over to the cottage before
+dinner. Come along, and be introduced to Miss Milroy."
+
+"You can't introduce me to Miss Milroy today," replied Midwinter;
+and he repeated the message of apology which had been brought
+from the major that afternoon. Allan was surprised and
+disappointed; but he was not to be foiled in his resolution to
+advance himself in the good graces of the inhabitants of the
+cottage. After a little consideration he hit on a means of
+turning the present adverse circumstances to good account. "I'll
+show a proper anxiety for Mrs. Milroy's recovery," he said,
+gravely. "I'll send her a basket of strawberries, with my best
+respects, to-morrow morning."
+
+Nothing more happened to mark the end of that first day in the
+new house.
+
+
+The one noticeable event of the next day was another disclosure
+of Mrs. Milroy's infirmity of temper. Half an hour after Allan's
+basket of strawberries had been delivered at the cottage, it was
+returned to him intact (by the hands of the invalid lady's
+nurse), with a short and sharp message, shortly and sharply
+delivered. "Mrs. Milroy's compliments and thanks. Strawberries
+invariably disagreed with her." If this curiously petulant
+acknowledgment of an act of politeness was intended to irritate
+Allan, it failed entirely in accomplishing its object. Instead of
+being offended with the mother, he sympathized with the daughter.
+"Poor little thing," was all he said, "she must have a hard life
+of it with such a mother as that!"
+
+He called at the cottage himself later in the day, but Miss
+Milroy was not to be seen; she was engaged upstairs. The major
+received his visitor in his working apron--far more deeply
+immersed in his wonderful clock, and far less readily accessible
+to outer influences, than Allan had seen him at their first
+interview. His manner was as kind as before; but not a word more
+could be extracted from him on the subject of his wife than that
+Mrs. Milroy "had not improved since yesterday."
+
+The two next days passed quietly and uneventfully. Allan
+persisted in making his inquiries at the cottage; but all he saw
+of the major's daughter was a glimpse of her on one occasion at a
+window on the bedroom floor. Nothing more was heard from Mr.
+Pedgift; and Mr. Bashwood's appearance was still delayed.
+Midwinter declined to move in the matter until time enough had
+passed to allow of his first hearing from Mr. Brock, in answer to
+the letter which he had addressed to the rector on the night of
+his arrival at Thorpe Ambrose. He was unusually silent and quiet,
+and passed most of his hours in the library among the books. The
+time wore on wearily. The resident gentry acknowledged Allan's
+visit by formally leaving their cards. Nobody came near the house
+afterward; the weather was monotonously fine. Allan grew a little
+restless and dissatisfied. He began to resent Mrs. Milroy's
+illness; he began to think regretfully of his deserted yacht.
+
+The next day--the twentieth--brought some news with it from the
+outer world. A message was delivered from Mr. Pedgift, announcing
+that his clerk, Mr. Bashwood, would personally present himself at
+Thorpe Ambrose on the following day; and a letter in answer to
+Midwinter was received from Mr. Brock.
+
+The letter was dated the 18th, and the news which it contained
+raised not Allan's spirits only, but Midwinter's as well.
+
+On the day on which he wrote, Mr. Brock announced that he was
+about to journey to London; having been summoned thither on
+business connected with the interests of a sick relative, to whom
+he stood in the position of trustee. The business completed, he
+had good hope of finding one or other of his clerical friends in
+the metropolis who would be able and willing to do duty for him
+at the rectory; and, in that case, he trusted to travel on from
+London to Thorpe Ambrose in a week's' time or less. Under these
+circumstances, he would leave the majority of the subjects on
+which Midwinter had written to him to be discussed when they met.
+But as time might be of importance, in relation to the
+stewardship of the Thorpe Ambrose estate, he would say at once
+that he saw no reason why Midwinter should not apply his mind to
+learning the steward's duties, and should not succeed in
+rendering himself invaluably serviceable in that way to the
+interests of his friend.
+
+Leaving Midwinter reading and re-reading the rector's cheering
+letter, as if he was bent on getting every sentence in it by
+heart, Allan went out rather earlier than usual, to make his
+daily inquiry at the cottage--or, in plainer words, to make a
+fourth attempt at improving his acquaintance with Miss Milroy.
+The day had begun encouragingly, and encouragingly it seemed
+destined to go on. When Allan turned the corner of the second
+shrubbery, and entered the little paddock where he and the
+major's daughter had first met, there was Miss Milroy herself
+loitering to and fro on the grass, to all appearance on the watch
+for somebody.
+
+She gave a little start when Allan appeared, an d came forward
+without hesitation to meet him. She was not in her best looks.
+Her rosy complexion had suffered under confinement to the house,
+and a marked expression of embarrassment clouded her pretty face.
+
+"I hardly know how to confess it, Mr. Armadale," she said,
+speaking eagerly, before Allan could utter a word, "but I
+certainly ventured here this morning in the hope of meeting with
+you. I have been very much distressed; I have only just heard, by
+accident, of the manner in which mamma received the present of
+fruit you so kindly sent to her. Will you try to excuse her? She
+has been miserably ill for years, and she is not always quite
+herself. After your being so very, very kind to me (and to papa),
+I really could not help stealing out here in the hope of seeing
+you, and telling you how sorry I was. Pray forgive and forget,
+Mr. Armadale--pray do!" her voice faltered over the last words,
+and, in her eagerness to make her mother's peace with him, she
+laid her hand on his arm.
+
+Allan was himself a little confused. Her earnestness took him by
+surprise, and her evident conviction that he had been offended
+honestly distressed him. Not knowing what else to do, he followed
+his instincts, and possessed himself of her hand to begin with.
+
+"My dear Miss Milroy, if you say a word more you will distress
+_me_ next," he rejoined, unconsciously pressing her hand closer
+and closer, in the embarrassment of the moment. "I never was in
+the least offended; I made allowances--upon my honor I did--for
+poor Mrs. Milroy's illness. Offended!" cried Allan, reverting
+energetically to the old complimentary strain. "I should like to
+have my basket of fruit sent back every day--if I could only be
+sure of its bringing you out into the paddock the first thing in
+the morning."
+
+Some of Miss Milroy's missing color began to appear again in her
+cheeks. "Oh, Mr. Armadale, there is really no end to your
+kindness," she said; "you don't know how you relieve me! She
+paused; her spirits rallied with as happy a readiness of recovery
+as if they had been the spirits of a child; and her native
+brightness of temper sparkled again in her eyes, as she looked
+up, shyly smiling in Allan's face. "Don't you think," she asked,
+demurely, "that it is almost time now to let go of my hand?"
+
+Their eyes met. Allan followed his instincts for the second time.
+Instead of releasing her hand, he lifted it to his lips and
+kissed it. All the missing tints of the rosier sort returned to
+Miss Milroy's complexion on the instant. She snatched away her
+hand as if Allan had burned it.
+
+"I'm sure _that's_ wrong, Mr. Armadale," she said, and turned her
+head aside quickly, for she was smiling in spite of herself.
+
+"I meant it as an apology for--for holding your hand too long,"
+stammered Allan. "An apology can't be wrong--can it?"
+
+There are occasions, though not many, when the female mind
+accurately appreciates an appeal to the force of pure reason.
+This was one of the occasions. An abstract proposition had been
+presented to Miss Milroy, and Miss Milroy was convinced. If it
+was meant as an apology, that, she admitted, made all the
+difference. "I only hope," said the little coquet, looking at him
+slyly, "you're not misleading me. Not that it matters much now,"
+she added, with a serious shake of her head. "If we have
+committed any improprieties, Mr. Armadale, we are not likely to
+have the opportunity of committing many more."
+
+"You're not going away?" exclaimed Allan, in great alarm.
+
+"Worse than that, Mr. Armadale. My new governess is coming."
+
+"Coming?" repeated Allan. "Coming already?"
+
+"As good as coming, I ought to have said--only I didn't know you
+wished me to be so very particular. We got the answers to the
+advertisements this morning. Papa and I opened them and read them
+together half an hour ago; and we both picked out the same letter
+from all the rest. I picked it out, because it was so prettily
+expressed; and papa picked it out because the terms were so
+reasonable. He is going to send the letter up to grandmamma in
+London by today's post, and, if she finds everything satisfactory
+on inquiry, the governess is to be engaged You don't know how
+dreadfully nervous I am getting about it already; a strange
+governess is such an awful prospect. But it is not quite so bad
+as going to school; and I have great hopes of this new lady,
+because she writes such a nice letter! As I said to papa, it
+almost reconciles me to her horrid, unromantic name."
+
+"What is her name?" asked Allan. "Brown? Grubb? Scraggs? Anything
+of that sort?"
+
+"Hush! hush! Nothing quite so horrible as that. Her name is
+Gwilt. Dreadfully unpoetical, isn't it? Her reference must be a
+respectable person, though; for she lives in the same part of
+London as grandmamma. Stop, Mr. Armadale! we are going the wrong
+way. No; I can't wait to look at those lovely flowers of yours
+this morning, and, many thanks, I can't accept your arm. I have
+stayed here too long already. Papa is waiting for his breakfast;
+and I must run back every step of the way. Thank you for making
+those kind allowances for mamma; thank you again and again, and
+good-by! "
+
+"Won't you shake hands?" asked Allan.
+
+She gave him her hand. "No more apologies, if you please, Mr.
+Armadale," she said, saucily. Once more their eyes met, and once
+more the plump, dimpled little hand found its way to Allan's
+lips. "It isn't an apology this time!" cried Allan, precipitately
+defending himself. "It's--it's a mark of respect."
+
+She started back a few steps, and burst out laughing. "You won't
+find me in our grounds again, Mr. Armadale," she said, merrily,
+"till I have got Miss Gwilt to take care of me!" With that
+farewell, she gathered up her skirts, and ran back across the
+paddock at the top of her speed.
+
+Allan stood watching her in speechless admiration till she was
+out of sight. His second interview with Miss Milroy had produced
+an extraordinary effect on him. For the first time since he had
+become the master of Thorpe Ambrose, he was absorbed in serious
+consideration of what he owed to his new position in life. "The
+question is," pondered Allan, "whether I hadn't better set myself
+right with my neighbors by becoming a married man? I'll take the
+day to consider; and if I keep in the same mind about it, I'll
+consult Midwinter to-morrow morning."
+
+
+When the morning came, and when Allan descended to the
+breakfast-room, resolute to consult his friend on the obligations
+that he owed to his neighbors in general, and to Miss Milroy in
+particular, no Midwinter was to he seen. On making inquiry, it
+appeared that he had been observed in the hall; that he had taken
+from the table a letter which the morning's post had brought to
+him; and that he had gone back immediately to his own room. Allan
+at once ascended the stairs again, and knocked at his friend's
+door.
+
+"May I come in?" he asked.
+
+"Not just now," was the answer.
+
+"You have got a letter, haven't you?" persisted Allan. "Any bad
+news? Anything wrong?"
+
+"Nothing. I'm not very well this morning. Don't wait breakfast
+for me; I'll come down as soon as I can."
+
+No more was said on either side. Allan returned to the
+breakfast-room a little disappointed. He had set his heart on
+rushing headlong into his consultation with Midwinter, and here
+was the consultation indefinitely delayed. "What an odd fellow he
+is!" thought Allan. "What on earth can he be doing, locked in
+there by himself?"
+
+He was doing nothing. He was sitting by the window, with the
+letter which had reached him that morning open in his hand. The
+handwriting was Mr. Brock's, and the words written were these:
+
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--I have literally only two minutes before post
+time to tell you that I have just met (in Kensington Gardens)
+with the woman whom we both only know, thus far, as the woman
+with the red Paisley shawl. I have traced her and her companion
+(a respectable-looking elderly lady) to their residence--after
+having distinctly heard Allan's name mentioned between them.
+Depend on my not losing sight of the woman until I am satisfied
+that she means no mischief at Thorpe Ambrose; and expect to hear
+from me again as soon as I know how this strange discovery is to
+end.
+
+"Very truly yours, D ECIMUS BROCK."
+
+
+After reading the letter for the second time, Midwinter folded it
+up thoughtfully, and placed it in his pocket-book, side by side
+with the manuscript narrative of Allan's dream.
+
+"Your discovery will not end with _you,_ Mr. Brock," he said. "Do
+what you will with the woman, when the time comes the woman will
+be here."
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MOTHER OLDERSHAW ON HER GUARD.
+
+1. _From Mrs. Oldershaw (Diana Street, Pimlico) to Miss Gwilt
+(West Place, Old Brompton)._
+
+"Ladies' Toilet Repository, June 20th,
+
+Eight in the Evening.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--About three hours have passed, as well as I can
+remember, since I pushed you unceremoniously inside my house in
+West Place, and, merely telling you to wait till you saw me
+again, banged the door to between us, and left you alone in the
+hall. I know your sensitive nature, my dear, and I am afraid you
+have made up your mind by this time that never yet was a guest
+treated so abominably by her hostess as I have treated you.
+
+"The delay that has prevented me from explaining my strange
+conduct is, believe me, a delay for which I am not to blame. One
+of the many delicate little difficulties which beset so
+essentially confidential a business as mine occurred here (as I
+have since discovered) while we were taking the air this
+afternoon in Kensington Gardens. I see no chance of being able to
+get back to you for some hours to come, and I have a word of very
+urgent caution for your private ear, which has been too long
+delayed already. So I must use the spare minutes as they come,
+and write.
+
+"Here is caution the first. On no account venture outside the
+door again this evening, and be very careful, while the daylight
+lasts, not to show yourself at any of the front windows. I have
+reason to fear that a certain charming person now staying with me
+may possibly be watched. Don't be alarmed, and don't be
+impatient; you shall know why.
+
+"I can only explain myself by going back to our unlucky meeting
+in the Gardens with that reverend gentleman who was so obliging
+as to follow us both back to my house.
+
+"It crossed my mind, just as we were close to the door, that
+there might be a motive for the parson's anxiety to trace us
+home, far less creditable to his taste, and far more dangerous to
+both of us, than the motive you supposed him to have. In plainer
+words, Lydia, I rather doubted whether you had met with another
+admirer; and I strongly suspected that you had encountered
+another enemy instead . There was no time to tell you this. There
+was only time to see you safe into the house, and to make sure of
+the parson (in case my suspicions were right) by treating him as
+he had treated us; I mean, by following him in his turn.
+
+"I kept some little distance behind him at first, to turn the
+thing over in my mind, and to be satisfied that my doubts were
+not misleading me. We have no concealments from each other; and
+you shall know what my doubts were.
+
+"I was not surprised at _your_ recognizing _him;_ he is not at
+all a common-looking old man; and you had seen him twice in
+Somersetshire--once when you asked your way of him to Mrs.
+Armadale's house, and once when you saw him again on your way
+back to the railroad. But I was a little puzzled (considering
+that you had your veil down on both those occasions, and your
+veil down also when we were in the Gardens) at his recognizing
+_you._ I doubted his remembering your figure in a summer dress
+after he had only seen it in a winter dress; and though we were
+talking when he met us, and your voice is one among your many
+charms, I doubted his remembering your voice, either. And yet I
+felt persuaded that he knew you. 'How?' you will ask. My dear, as
+ill-luck would have it, we were speaking at the time of young
+Armadale. I firmly believe that the name was the first thing that
+struck him; and when he heard _that,_, your voice certainly and
+your figure perhaps, came back to his memory. 'And what if it
+did?' you may say. Think again, Lydia, and tell me whether the
+parson of the place where Mrs. Armadale lived was not likely to
+be Mrs. Armadale's friend? If he _was_ her friend, the very first
+person to whom she would apply for advice after the manner in
+which you frightened her, and after what you most injudiciously
+said on the subject of appealing to her son, would be the
+clergyman of the parish--and the magistrate, too, as the landlord
+at the inn himself told you.
+
+"You will now understand why I left you in that extremely uncivil
+manner, and I may go on to what happened next.
+
+"I followed the old gentleman till he turned into a quiet street,
+and then accosted him, with respect for the Church written (I
+flatter myself) in every line of my face.
+
+" 'Will you excuse me,' I said, 'if I venture to inquire, sir,
+whether you recognized the lady who was walking with me when you
+happened to pass us in the Gardens?'
+
+" 'Will you excuse my asking, ma'am, why you put that question?'
+was all the answer I got.
+
+" 'I will endeavor to tell you, sir,' I said. 'If my friend is
+not an absolute stranger to you, I should wish to request your
+attention to a very delicate subject, connected with a lady
+deceased, and with her son who survives her.'
+
+"He was staggered; I could see that. But he was sly enough at the
+same time to hold his tongue and wait till I said something more.
+
+" 'If I am wrong, sir, in thinking that you recognized my
+friend,' I went on, 'I beg to apologize. But I could hardly
+suppose it possible that a gentleman in your profession would
+follow a lady home who was a total stranger to him.'
+
+"There I had him. He colored up (fancy that, at his age!), and
+owned the truth, in defense of his own precious character.
+
+" 'I have met with the lady once before, and I acknowledge that I
+recognized her in the Gardens,' he said. 'You will excuse me if I
+decline entering into the question of whether I did or did not
+purposely follow her home. If you wish to be assured that your
+friend is not an absolute stranger to me, you now have that
+assurance; and if you have anything particular to say to me, I
+leave you to decide whether the time has come to say it.'
+
+"He waited, and looked about. I waited, and looked about. He said
+the street was hardly a fit place to speak of a delicate subject
+in. I said the street was hardly a fit place to speak of a
+delicate subject in. He didn't offer to take me to where he
+lived. I didn't offer to take him to where I lived. Have you ever
+seen two strange cats, my dear, nose to nose on the tiles? If you
+have, you have seen the parson and me done to the life.
+
+" 'Well, ma'am,' he said, at last, 'shall we go on with our
+conversation in spite of circumstances?'
+
+" 'Yes, sir,' I said; 'we are both of us, fortunately, of an age
+to set circumstances at defiance' (I had seen the old wretch
+looking at my gray hair, and satisfying himself that his
+character was safe if he _was_ seen with me).
+
+"After all this snapping and snarling, we came to the point at
+last. I began by telling him that I feared his interest in you
+was not of the friendly sort. He admitted that much--of course,
+in defense of his own character once more. I next repeated to him
+everything you had told me about your proceedings in
+Somersetshire, when we first found that he was following us home.
+Don't be alarmed my dear--I was acting on principle. If you want
+to make a dish of lies digestible, always give it a garnish of
+truth. Well, having appealed to the reverend gentleman's
+confidence in this matter, I next declared that you had become an
+altered woman since he had seen you last. I revived that dead
+wretch, your husband (without mentioning names, of course),
+established him (the first place I thought of) in business at the
+Brazils, and described a letter which he had written, offering to
+forgive his erring wife, if she would repent and go back to him.
+I assured the parson that your husband's noble conduct had
+softened your obdurate nature; and then, thinking I had produced
+the right impression, I came boldly to close quarters with him. I
+said, 'At the very time when you met us, sir, my unhappy friend
+was speaking in terms of touching, self-reproach of her conduct
+to the  late Mrs. Armadale. She confided to me her anxiety
+ to make some atonement, if possible, to Mrs. Armadale's son; and
+it is at her entreaty (for she cannot prevail on herself to face
+you) that I now beg to inquire whether Mr. Armadale is still in
+Somersetshire, and whether he would consent to take back in small
+installments the sum of money which my friend acknowledges that
+she received by practicing on Mrs. Armadale's fears.' Those were
+my very words. A neater story (accounting so nicely for
+everything) was never told; it was a story to melt a stone. But
+this Somersetshire parson is harder than stone itself. I blush
+for _him,_ my dear, when I assure you that he was evidently
+insensible enough to disbelieve every word I said about your
+reformed character, your husband in the Brazils, and your
+penitent anxiety to pay the money back. It is really a disgrace
+that such a man should be in the Church; such cunning as his is
+in the last degree unbecoming in a member of a sacred profession.
+
+" 'Does your friend propose to join her husband by the next
+steamer?' was all he condescended to say, when I had done.
+
+"I acknowledge I was angry. I snapped at him. I said, 'Yes, she
+does.'
+
+" 'How am I to communicate with her?' he asked.
+
+"I snapped at him again. 'By letter--through me.'
+
+" 'At what address, ma'am?'
+
+"There, I had him once more. 'You have found my address out for
+yourself, sir,' I said. 'The directory will tell you my name, if
+you wish to find that out for yourself also; otherwise, you are
+welcome to my card.'
+
+" 'Many thanks, ma'am. If your friend wishes to communicate with
+Mr. Armadale, I will give you _my_ card in return.'
+
+" 'Thank you, sir.'
+
+" 'Thank you, ma'am.'
+
+" 'Good-afternoon, sir.'
+
+" 'Good-afternoon, ma'am.'
+
+"So we parted. I went my way to an appointment at my place of
+business, and he went his in a hurry; which is of itself
+suspicious. What I can't get over is his heartlessness. Heaven
+help the people who send for _him_ to comfort them on their
+death-beds!
+
+"The next consideration is, What are we to do? If we don't find
+out the right way to keep this old wretch in the dark, he may be
+the ruin of us at Thorpe Ambrose just as we are within easy reach
+of our end in view. Wait up till I come to you, with my mind
+free, I hope, from the other difficulty which is worrying me
+here. Was there ever such ill luck as ours? Only think of that
+man deserting his congregation, and coming to London just at the
+very time when we have answered Major Milroy's advertisement, and
+may expect the inquiries to be made next week! I have no patience
+with him; his bishop ought to interfere.
+
+"Affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+2. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw._
+
+"West Place, June 20th.
+
+"MY POOR OLD DEAR--How very little you know of my sensitive
+nature, as you call it! Instead of feeling offended when you left
+me, I went to your piano, and forgot all about you till your
+messenger came. Your letter is irresistible; I have been laughing
+over it till I am quite out of breath. Of all the absurd stories
+I ever read, the story you addressed to the Somersetshire
+clergyman is the most ridiculous. And as for your interview with
+him in the street, it is a perfect sin to keep it to ourselves.
+The public ought really to enjoy it in the form of a farce at one
+of the theaters.
+
+"Luckily for both of us (to come to serious matters), your
+messenger is a prudent person. He sent upstairs to know if there
+was an answer. In the midst of my merriment I had presence of
+mind enough to send downstairs and say 'Yes.'
+
+"Some brute of a man says, in some book which I once read, that
+no woman can keep two separate trains of ideas in her mind at the
+same time. I declare you have almost satisfied me that the man is
+right. What! when you have escaped unnoticed to your place of
+business, and when you suspect this house to be watched, you
+propose to come back here, and to put it in the parson's power to
+recover the lost trace of you! What madness! Stop where you are;
+and when you have got over your difficulty at Pimlico (it is some
+woman's business, of course; what worries women are!), be so good
+as to read what I have got to say about our difficulty at
+Brompton.
+
+"In the first place, the house (as you supposed) is watched.
+
+"Half an hour after you left me, loud voices in the street
+interrupted me at the piano, and I went to the window. There was
+a cab at the house opposite, where they let lodgings; and an old
+man, who looked like a respectable servant, was wrangling with
+the driver about his fare. An elderly gentleman came out of the
+house, and stopped them. An elderly gentleman returned into the
+house, and appeared cautiously at the front drawing-room window.
+You know him, you worthy creature; he had the bad taste, some few
+hours since, to doubt whether you were telling him the truth.
+Don't be afraid, he didn't see me. When he looked up, after
+settling with the cab driver, I was behind the curtain. I have
+been behind the curtain once or twice since; and I have seen
+enough to satisfy me that he and his servant will relieve each
+other at the window, so as never to lose sight of your house
+here, night or day. That the parson suspects the real truth is of
+course impossible. But that he firmly believes I mean some
+mischief to young Armadale, and that you have entirely confirmed
+him in that conviction, is as plain as that two and two make
+four. And this has happened (as you helplessly remind me) just
+when we have answered the advertisement, and when we may expect
+the major's inquiries to be made in a few days' time.
+
+"Surely, here is a terrible situation for two women to find
+themselves in? A fiddlestick's end for the situation! We have got
+an easy way out of it--thanks, Mother Oldershaw, to what I myself
+forced you to do, not three hours before the Somersetshire
+clergyman met with us.
+
+"Has that venomous little quarrel of ours this morning--after we
+had pounced on the major's advertisement in the newspaper--quite
+slipped out of your memory? Have you forgotten how I persisted in
+my opinion that you were a great deal too well known in London to
+appear safely as my reference in your own name, or to receive an
+inquiring lady or gentleman (as you were rash enough to propose)
+in your own house? Don't you remember what a passion you were in
+when I brought our dispute to an end by declining to stir a step
+in the matter, unless I could conclude my application to Major
+Milroy by referring him to an address at which you were totally
+unknown, and to a name which might be anything you pleased, as
+long as it was not yours? What a look you gave me when you found
+there was nothing for it but to drop the whole speculation or to
+let me have my own way! How you fumed over the lodging hunting on
+the other side of the Park! and how you groaned when you came
+back, possessed of furnished apartments in respectable Bayswater,
+over the useless expense I had put you to!
+
+"What do you think of those furnished apartments _now,_ you
+obstinate old woman? Here we are, with discovery threatening us
+at our very door, and with no hope of escape unless we can
+contrive to disappear from the parson in the dark. And there are
+the lodgings in Bayswater, to which no inquisitive strangers have
+traced either you or me, ready and waiting to swallow us up--the
+lodgings in which we can escape all further molestation, and
+answer the major's inquiries at our ease. Can you see, at last, a
+little further than your poor old nose? Is there anything in the
+world to prevent your safe disappearance from Pimlico to-night,
+and your safe establishment at the new lodgings, in the character
+of my respectable reference, half an hour afterward? Oh, fie,
+fie, Mother Oldershaw! Go down on your wicked old knees, and
+thank your stars that you had a she-devil like me to deal with
+this morning!
+
+"Suppose we come now to the only difficulty worth mentioning--_
+my_ difficulty. Watched as I am in this house, how am I to join
+you without bringing the parson or the parson's servant with me
+at my heels?
+
+"Being to all intents and purposes a prisoner here, it seems to
+me that I have no choice but to try the old prison plan of
+escape--a change of clothes. I have been looking at your
+house-maid. Excep t that we are both light, her face and hair and
+my face and hair are as unlike each other as possible. But she is
+as nearly as can be my height and size; and (if she only knew how
+to dress herself, and had smaller feet) her figure is a very much
+better one than it ought to be for a person in her station in
+life.
+
+"My idea is, to dress her in the clothes I wore in the Gardens
+to-day; to send her out, with our reverend enemy in full pursuit
+of her; and, as soon as the coast is clear, to slip away myself
+and join you. The thing would be quite impossible, of course, if
+I had been seen with my veil up; but, as events have turned out,
+it is one advantage of the horrible exposure which followed my
+marriage that I seldom show myself in public, and never, of
+course, in such a populous place as London, without wearing a
+thick veil and keeping that veil down. If the house-maid wears my
+dress, I don't really see why the house-maid may not be counted
+on to represent me to the life.
+
+"The one question is, Can the woman be trusted? If she can, send
+me a line, telling her, on your authority, that she is to place
+herself at my disposal. I won't say a word till I have heard from
+you first.
+
+"Let me have my answer to-night. As long as we were only talking
+about my getting the governess's place, I was careless enough how
+it ended. But now that we have actually answered Major Milroy's
+advertisement, I am in earnest at last. I mean to be Mrs.
+Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose; and woe to the man or woman who tries
+to stop me! Yours,
+
+"LYDIA GWILT.
+
+"P.S.--I open my letter again to say that you need have no fear
+of your messenger being followed on his return to Pimlico. He
+will drive to a public-house where he is known, will dismiss the
+cab at the door, and will go out again by a back way which is
+only used by the landlord and his friends.--L. G."
+
+3. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Diana Street, 10 o'clock.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--You have written me a heartless letter. If you
+had been in my trying position, harassed as I was when I wrote to
+you, I should have made allowances for my friend when I found my
+friend not so sharp as usual. But the vice of the present age is
+a want of consideration for persons in the decline of life.
+Morally speaking, you are in a sad state, my dear; and you stand
+much in need of a good example. You shall have a good example--I
+forgive you.
+
+"Having now relieved my mind by the performance of a good action,
+suppose I show you next (though I protest against the vulgarity
+of the expression) that I _can_ see a little further than my poor
+old nose?
+
+"I will answer your question about the house-maid first. You may
+trust her implicitly. She has had her troubles, and has learned
+discretion. She also looks your age; though it is only her due to
+say that, in this particular, she has some years the advantage of
+you. I inclose the necessary directions which will place her
+entirely at your disposal.
+
+"And what comes next?
+
+"Your plan for joining me at Bayswater comes next. It is very
+well as far as it goes; but it stands sadly in need of a little
+judicious improvement. There is a serious necessity (you shall
+know why presently) for deceiving the parson far more completely
+than you propose to deceive him. I want him to see the
+house-maid's face under circumstances which will persuade him
+that it is _your_ face. And then, going a step further, I want
+him to see the house-maid leave London, under the impression that
+he has seen _you_ start on the first stage of your journey to the
+Brazils. He didn't believe in that journey when I announced it to
+him this afternoon in the street. He may believe in it yet, if
+you follow the directions I am now going to give you.
+
+"To-morrow is Saturday. Send the housemaid out in your walking
+dress of to-day, just as you propose; but don't stir out
+yourself, and don't go near the window. Desire the woman to keep
+her veil down, to take half an hour's walk (quite unconscious, of
+course, of the parson or his servant at her heels), and then to
+come back to you. As soon as she appears, send her instantly to
+the open window, instructing her to lift her veil carelessly and
+look out. Let her go away again after a minute or two, take off
+her bonnet and shawl, and then appear once more at the window,
+or, better still, in the balcony outside. She may show herself
+again occasionally (not too often) later in the day. And
+to-morrow--as we have a professional gentleman to deal with--by
+all means send her to church. If these proceedings don't persuade
+the parson that the house-maid's face is your face, and if they
+don't make him readier to believe in your reformed character than
+he was when I spoke to him, I have lived sixty years, my love, in
+this vale of tears to mighty little purpose.
+
+"The next day is Monday. I have looked at the shipping
+advertisements, and I find that a steamer leaves Liverpool for
+the Brazils on Tuesday. Nothing could be more convenient; we will
+start you on your voyage under the parson's own eyes. You may
+manage it in this way:
+
+"At one o'clock send out the man who cleans the knives and forks
+to get a cab; and when he has brought it up to the door, let him
+go back and get a second cab, which he is to wait in himself,
+round the corner, in the square. Let the house-maid (still in
+your dress) drive off, with the necessary boxes, in the first cab
+to the North-western Railway. When she is gone, slip out yourself
+to the cab waiting round the corner, and come to me at Bayswater.
+They may be prepared to follow the house-maid's cab, because they
+have seen it at the door; but they won't be prepared to follow
+your cab, because it has been hidden round the corner. When the
+house-maid has got to the station, and has done her best to
+disappear in the crowd (I have chosen the mixed train at 2:10, so
+as to give her every chance), you will be safe with me; and
+whether they do or do not find out that she does not really start
+for Liverpool won't matter by that time. They will have lost all
+trace of you; and they may follow the house-maid half over
+London, if they like. She has my instructions (inclosed) to leave
+the empty boxes to find their way to the lost luggage office and
+to go to her friends in the City, and stay there till I write
+word that I want her again.
+
+"And what is the object of all this?
+
+"My dear Lydia, the object is your future security (and mine). We
+may succeed or we may fail, in persuading the parson that you
+have actually gone to the Brazils. If we succeed, we are relieved
+of all fear of him. If we fail, he will warn young Armadale to be
+careful _of a woman like my house-maid, and not of a woman like
+you._ This last gain is a very important one; for we don't know
+that Mrs. Armadale may not have told him your maiden name. In
+that event, the 'Miss Gwilt' whom he will describe as having
+slipped through his fingers here will be so entirely unlike the
+'Miss Gwilt' established at Thorpe Ambrose, as to satisfy
+everybody that it is not a case of similarity of persons, but
+only a case of similarity of names.
+
+"What do you say now to my improvement on your idea? Are my
+brains not quite so addled as you thought them when you wrote?
+Don't suppose I'm at all overboastful about my own ingenuity.
+Cleverer tricks than this trick of mine are played off on the
+public by swindlers, and are recorded in the newspapers every
+week. I only want to show you that my assistance is not less
+necessary to the success of the Armadale speculation now than it
+was when I made our first important discoveries, by means of the
+harmless-looking young man and the private inquiry office in
+Shadyside Place.
+
+"There is nothing more to say that I know of, except that I am
+just going to start for the new lodging, with a box directed in
+my new name. The last expiring moments of Mother Oldershaw, of
+the Toilet Repository, are close at hand, and the birth of Miss
+Gwilt's respectable reference, Mrs. Mandeville, will take place
+in a cab in five minutes' time. I fancy I must be still young at
+heart, for I am quite in love already with my romantic name; it
+sounds almost as pretty as Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose,
+doesn't it?
+
+"Good-night, my dear, and pleasant
+ dreams. If any accident happens between this and Monday, write
+to me instantly by post. If no accident happens you will be with
+me in excellent time for the earliest inquiries that the major
+can possibly make. My last words are, don't go out, and don't
+venture near the front windows till Monday comes.
+
+"Affectionately yours,
+
+M. O."
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+MIDWINTER IN DISGUISE.
+
+TOWARD noon on the day of the twenty-first, Miss Milroy was
+loitering in the cottage garden--released from duty in the
+sick-room by an improvement in her mother's health--when her
+attention was attracted by the sound of voices in the park. One
+of the voices she instantly recognized as Allan's; the other was
+strange to her. She put aside the branches of a shrub near the
+garden palings, and, peeping through, saw Allan approaching the
+cottage gate, in company with a slim, dark, undersized man, who
+was talking and laughing excitably at the top of his voice. Miss
+Milroy ran indoors to warn her father of Mr. Armadale's arrival,
+and to add that he was bringing with him a noisy stranger, who
+was, in all probability, the friend generally reported to be
+staying with the squire at the great house.
+
+Had the major's daughter guessed right? Was the squire's
+loud-talking, loud-laughing companion the shy, sensitive
+Midwinter of other times? It was even so. In Allan's presence,
+that morning, an extraordinary change had passed over the
+ordinarily quiet demeanor of Allan's friend.
+
+When Midwinter had first appeared in the breakfast-room, after
+putting aside Mr. Brock's startling letter, Allan had been too
+much occupied to pay any special attention to him. The undecided
+difficulty of choosing the day for the audit dinner had pressed
+for a settlement once more, and had been fixed at last (under the
+butler's advice) for Saturday, the twenty-eighth of the month. It
+was only on turning round to remind Midwinter of the ample space
+of time which the new arrangement allowed for mastering the
+steward's books, that even Allan's flighty attention had been
+arrested by a marked change in the face that confronted him. He
+had openly noticed the change in his usual blunt manner, and had
+been instantly silenced by a fretful, almost an angry, reply. The
+two had sat down together to breakfast without the usual
+cordiality, and the meal had proceeded gloomily, till Midwinter
+himself broke the silence by bursting into the strange outbreak
+of gayety which had revealed in Allan's eyes a new side to the
+character of his friend.
+
+As usual with most of Allan's judgments, here again the
+conclusion was wrong. It was no new side to Midwinter's character
+that now presented itself--it was only a new aspect of the one
+ever-recurring struggle of Midwinter's life.
+
+Irritated by Allan's discovery of the change in him, and dreading
+the next questions that Allan's curiosity might put, Midwinter
+had roused himself to efface, by main force, the impression which
+his own altered appearance had produced. It was one of those
+efforts which no men compass so resolutely as the men of his
+quick temper and his sensitive feminine organization. With his
+whole mind still possessed by the firm belief that the Fatality
+had taken one great step nearer to Allan and himself since the
+rector's adventure in Kensington Gardens--with his face still
+betraying what he had suffered, under the renewed conviction that
+his father's death-bed warning was now, in event after event,
+asserting its terrible claim to part him, at any sacrifice, from
+the one human creature whom he loved--with the fear still busy at
+his heart that the first mysterious vision of Allan's Dream might
+be a vision realized, before the new day that now saw the two
+Armadales together was a day that had passed over their
+heads--with these triple bonds, wrought by his own superstition,
+fettering him at that moment as they had never fettered him yet,
+he mercilessly spurred his resolution to the desperate effort of
+rivaling, in Allan's presence, the gayety and good spirits of
+Allan himself.
+
+He talked and laughed, and heaped his plate indiscriminately from
+every dish on the breakfast-table. He made noisily merry with
+jests that had no humor, and stories that had no point. He first
+astonished Allan, then amused him, then won his easily encouraged
+confidence on the subject of Miss Milroy. He shouted with
+laughter over the sudden development of Allan's views on
+marriage, until the servants downstairs began to think that their
+master's strange friend had gone mad. Lastly, he had accepted
+Allan's proposal that he should be presented to the major's
+daughter, and judge of her for himself, as readily, nay, more
+readily than it would have been accepted by the least diffident
+man living. There the two now stood at the cottage
+gate--Midwinter's voice rising louder and louder over
+Allan's--Midwinter's natural manner disguised (how madly and
+miserably none but he knew!) in a coarse masquerade of
+boldness--the outrageous, the unendurable boldness of a shy man.
+
+They were received in the parlor by the major's daughter, pending
+the arrival of the major himself.
+
+Allan attempted to present his friend in the usual form. To his
+astonishment, Midwinter took the words flippantly out of his
+lips, and introduced himself to Miss Milroy with a confident
+look, a hard laugh, and a clumsy assumption of ease which
+presented him at his worst. His artificial spirits, lashed
+continuously into higher and higher effervescence since the
+morning, were now mounting hysterically beyond his own control.
+He looked and spoke with that terrible freedom of license which
+is the necessary consequence, when a diffident man has thrown off
+his reserve, of the very effort by which he has broken loose from
+his own restraints. He involved himself in a confused medley of
+apologies that were not wanted, and of compliments that might
+have overflattered the vanity of a savage. He looked backward and
+forward from Miss Milroy to Allan, and declared jocosely that he
+understood now why his friend's morning walks were always taken
+in the same direction. He asked her questions about her mother,
+and cut short the answers she gave him by remarks on the weather.
+In one breath, he said she must feel the day insufferably hot,
+and in another he protested that he quite envied her in her cool
+muslin dress.
+
+The major came in.
+
+Before he could say two words, Midwinter overwhelmed him with the
+same frenzy of familiarity, and the same feverish fluency of
+speech. He expressed his interest in Mrs. Milroy's health in
+terms which would have been exaggerated on the lips of a friend
+of the family. He overflowed into a perfect flood of apologies
+for disturbing the major at his mechanical pursuits. He quoted
+Allan's extravagant account of the clock, and expressed his own
+anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant still. He paraded his
+superficial book knowledge of the great clock at Strasbourg, with
+far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton figures which
+that clock puts in motion--on the procession of the Twelve
+Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy
+cock, which crows at St. Peter's appearance--and this before a
+man who had studied every wheel in that complex machinery, and
+who had passed whole years of his life in trying to imitate it.
+"I hear you have outnumbered the Strasbourg apostles, and
+outcrowed the Strasbourg cock," he exclaimed, with the tone and
+manner of a friend habitually privileged to waive all ceremony;
+"and I am dying, absolutely dying, major, to see your wonderful
+clock!"
+
+Major Milroy had entered the room with his mind absorbed in his
+own mechanical contrivances as usual. But the sudden shock of
+Midwinter's familiarity was violent enough to recall him
+instantly to himself, and to make him master again, for the time,
+of his social resources as a man of the world.
+
+"Excuse me for interrupting you," he said, stopping Midwinter for
+the moment, by a look of steady surprise. "I happen to have seen
+the clock at Strasbourg; and it sounds almost absurd in my ears
+(if you will pardon me for saying so) to put my little experiment
+in any light of comparison with that wonderful achievement. There
+is nothing else of the kind like
+ it in the world!" He paused, to control his own mounting
+enthusiasm; the clock at Strasbourg was to Major Milroy what the
+name of Michael Angelo was to Sir Joshua Reynolds. "Mr.
+Armadale's kindness has led him to exaggerate a little," pursued
+the major, smiling at Allan, and passing over another attempt of
+Midwinter's to seize on the talk, as if no such attempt had been
+made. "But as there does happen to be this one point of
+resemblance between the great clock abroad and the little clock
+at home, that they both show what they can do on the stroke of
+noon, and as it is close on twelve now, if you still wish to
+visit my workshop, Mr. Midwinter, the sooner I show you the way
+to it the better." He opened the door, and apologized to
+Midwinter, with marked ceremony, for preceding him out of the
+room.
+
+"What do you think of my friend?" whispered Allan, as he and Miss
+Milroy followed.
+
+"Must I tell you the truth, Mr. Armadale?" she whispered back.
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"Then I don't like him at all!"
+
+"He's the best and dearest fellow in the world, " rejoined the
+outspoken Allan. "You'll like him better when you know him
+better--I'm sure you will!"
+
+Miss Milroy made a little grimace, implying supreme indifference
+to Midwinter, and saucy surprise at Allan's earnest advocacy of
+the merits of his friend. "Has he got nothing more interesting to
+say to me than _that,_" she wondered, privately, "after kissing
+my hand twice yesterday morning?"
+
+They were all in the major's workroom before Allan had the chance
+of trying a more attractive subject. There, on the top of a rough
+wooden case, which evidently contained the machinery, was the
+wonderful clock. The dial was crowned by a glass pedestal placed
+on rock-work in carved ebony; and on the top of the pedestal sat
+the inevitable figure of Time, with his everlasting scythe in his
+hand. Below the dial was a little platform, and at either end of
+it rose two miniature sentry-boxes, with closed doors.
+Externally, this was all that appeared, until the magic moment
+came when the clock struck twelve noon.
+
+It wanted then about three minutes to twelve; and Major Milroy
+seized the opportunity of explaining what the exhibition was to
+be, before the exhibition began.
+
+"At the first words, his mind fell back again into its old
+absorption over the one employment of his life. He turned to
+Midwinter (who had persisted in talking all the way from the
+parlor, and who was talking still) without a trace left in his
+manner of the cool and cutting composure with which he had spoken
+but a few minutes before. The noisy, familiar man, who had been
+an ill-bred intruder in the parlor, became a privileged guest in
+the workshop, for _there_ he possessed the all-atoning social
+advantage of being new to the performances of the wonderful
+clock.
+
+"At the first stroke of twelve, Mr. Midwinter," said the major,
+quite eagerly, "keep your eye on the figure of Time: he will move
+his scythe, and point it downward to the glass pedestal. You will
+next see a little printed card appear behind the glass, which
+will tell you the day of the month and the day of the week. At
+the last stroke of the clock, Time will lift his scythe again
+into its former position, and the chimes will ring a peal. The
+peal will be succeeded by the playing of a tune--the favorite
+march of my old regiment--and then the final performance of the
+clock will follow. The sentry-boxes, which you may observe at
+each side, will both open at the same moment. In one of them you
+will see the sentinel appear; and from the other a corporal and
+two privates will march across the platform to relieve the guard,
+and will then disappear, leaving the new sentinel at his post. I
+must ask your kind allowances for this last part of the
+performance. The machinery is a little complicated, and there are
+defects in it which I am ashamed to say I have not yet succeeded
+in remedying as I could wish. Sometimes the figures go all wrong,
+and sometimes they go all right. I hope they may do their best on
+the occasion of your seeing them for the first time."
+
+As the major, posted near his clock, said the last words, his
+little audience of three, assembled at the opposite end of the
+room, saw the hour-hand and the minute-hand on the dial point
+together to twelve. The first stroke sounded, and Time, true to
+the signal, moved his scythe. The day of the month and the day of
+the week announced themselves in print through the glass pedestal
+next; Midwinter applauding their appearance with a noisy
+exaggeration of surprise, which Miss Milroy mistook for coarse
+sarcasm directed at her father's pursuits, and which Allan
+(seeing that she was offended) attempted to moderate by touching
+the elbow of his friend. Meanwhile, the performances of the clock
+went on. At the last stroke of twelve, Time lifted his scythe
+again, the chimes rang, the march tune of the major's old
+regiment followed; and the crowning exhibition of the relief of
+the guard announced itself in a preliminary trembling of the
+sentry-boxes, and a sudden disappearance of the major at the back
+of the clock.
+
+The performance began with the opening of the sentry-box on the
+right-hand side of the platform, as punctually as could be
+desired; the door on the other side, however, was less
+tractable--it remained obstinately closed. Unaware of this hitch
+in the proceedings, the corporal and his two privates appeared in
+their places in a state of perfect discipline, tottered out
+across the platform, all three trembling in every limb, dashed
+themselves headlong against the closed door on the other side,
+and failed in producing the smallest impression on the immovable
+sentry presumed to be within. An intermittent clicking, as of the
+major's keys and tools at work, was heard in the machinery. The
+corporal and his two privates suddenly returned, backward, across
+the platform, and shut themselves up with a bang inside their own
+door. Exactly at the same moment, the other door opened for the
+first time, and the provoking sentry appeared with the utmost
+deliberation at his post, waiting to be relieved. He was allowed
+to wait. Nothing happened in the other box but an occasional
+knocking inside the door, as if the corporal and his privates
+were impatient to be let out. The clicking of the major's tools
+was heard again among the machinery; the corporal and his party,
+suddenly restored to liberty, appeared in a violent hurry, and
+spun furiously across the platform. Quick as they were, however,
+the hitherto deliberate sentry on the other side now perversely
+showed himself to be quicker still. He disappeared like lightning
+into his own premises, the door closed smartly after him, the
+corporal and his privates dashed themselves headlong against it
+for the second time, and the major, appearing again round the
+corner of the clock, asked his audience innocently "if they would
+be good enough to tell him whether anything had gone wrong?"
+
+The fantastic absurdity of the exhibition, heightened by Major
+Milroy's grave inquiry at the end of it, was so irresistibly
+ludicrous that the visitors shouted with laughter; and even Miss
+Milroy, with all her consideration for her father's sensitive
+pride in his clock, could not restrain herself from joining in
+the merriment which the catastrophe of the puppets had provoked.
+But there are limits even to the license of laughter; and these
+limits were ere long so outrageously overstepped by one of the
+little party as to have the effect of almost instantly silencing
+the other two. The fever of Midwinter's false spirits flamed out
+into sheer delirium as the performance of the puppets came to an
+end. His paroxysms of laughter followed each other with such
+convulsive violence that Miss Milroy started back from him in
+alarm, and even the patient major turned on him with a look which
+said plainly, Leave the room! Allan, wisely impulsive for once in
+his life, seized Midwinter by the arm, and dragged him out by
+main force into the garden, and thence into the park beyond.
+
+"Good heavens! what has come to you!" he exclaimed, shrinking
+back from the tortured face before him, as he stopped and looked
+close at it for the first time.
+
+For the moment, Midwinter was inca pable of answering. The
+hysterical paroxysm was passing from one extreme to the other. He
+leaned against a tree, sobbing and gasping for breath, and
+stretched out his hand in mute entreaty to Allan to give him
+time.
+
+"You had better not have nursed me through my fever," he said,
+faintly, as soon as he could speak. "I'm mad and miserable,
+Allan; I have never recovered it. Go back and ask them to forgive
+me; I am ashamed to go and ask them myself. I can't tell how it
+happened; I can only ask your pardon and theirs." He turned aside
+his head quickly so as to conceal his face. "Don't stop here," he
+said; "don't look at me; I shall soon get over it." Allan still
+hesitated, and begged hard to be allowed to take him back to the
+house. It was useless. "You break my heart with your kindness,"
+he burst out, passionately. "For God's sake, leave me by my
+self!"
+
+Allan went back to she cottage, and pleaded there for indulgence
+to Midwinter, with an earnestness and simplicity which raised him
+immensely in the major's estimation, but which totally failed to
+produce the same favorable impression on Miss Milroy. Little as
+she herself suspected it, she was fond enough of Allan already to
+be jealous of Allan's friend.
+
+"How excessively absurd!" she thought, pettishly. "As if either
+papa or I considered such a person of the slightest consequence!"
+
+"You will kindly suspend your opinion, won't you, Major Milroy?"
+said Allan, in his hearty way, at parting.
+
+"With the greatest pleasure! " replied the major, cordially
+shaking hands.
+
+"And you, too, Miss Milroy?" added Allan.
+
+Miss Milroy made a mercilessly formal bow. "_My_ opinion, Mr.
+Armadale, is not of the slightest consequence."
+
+Allan left the cottage, sorely puzzled to account for Miss
+Milroy's sudden coolness toward him. His grand idea of
+conciliating the whole neighborhood by becoming a married man
+underwent some modification as he closed the garden gate behind
+him. The virtue called Prudence and the Squire of Thorpe Ambrose
+became personally acquainted with each other, on this occasion,
+for the first time; and Allan, entering headlong as usual on the
+high-road to moral improvement, actually decided on doing nothing
+in a hurry!
+
+A man who is entering on a course of reformation ought, if virtue
+is its own reward, to be a man engaged in an essentially
+inspiriting pursuit. But virtue is not always its own reward; and
+the way that leads to reformation is remarkably ill-lighted for
+so respectable a thoroughfare. Allan seemed to have caught the
+infection of his friend's despondency. As he walked home, he,
+too, began to doubt--in his widely different way, and for his
+widely different reasons--whether the life at Thorpe Ambrose was
+promising quite as fairly for the future as it had promised at
+first.
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE PLOT THICKENS.
+
+Two messages were waiting for Allan when he returned to the
+house. One had been left by Midwinter. "He had gone out for a
+long walk, and Mr. Armadale was not to be alarmed if he did not
+get back till late in the day." The other message had been left
+by "a person from Mr. Pedgift's office," who had called,
+according to appointment, while the two gentlemen were away at
+the major's. "Mr. Bashwood's respects, and he would have the
+honor of waiting on Mr. Armadale again in the course of the
+evening."
+
+Toward five o'clock, Midwinter returned, pale and silent. Allan
+hastened to assure him that his peace was made at the cottage;
+and then, to change the subject, mentioned Mr. Bashwood's
+message. Midwinter's mind was so preoccupied or so languid that
+he hardly seemed to remember the name. Allan was obliged to
+remind him that Bashwood was the elderly clerk, whom Mr. Pedgift
+had sent to be his instructor in the duties of the steward's
+office. He listened without making any remark, and withdrew to
+his room, to rest till dinner-time.
+
+Left by himself, Allan went into the library, to try if he could
+while away the time over a book.
+
+He took many volumes off the shelves, and put a few of them back
+again; and there he ended. Miss Milroy contrived in some
+mysterious manner to get, in this case, between the reader and
+the books. Her formal bow and her merciless parting speech dwelt,
+try how he might to forget them, on Allan's mind; he began to
+grow more and more anxious as the idle hour wore on, to recover
+his lost place in her favor. To call again that day at the
+cottage, and ask if he had been so unfortunate as to offend her,
+was impossible. To put the question in writing with the needful
+nicety of expression proved, on trying the experiment, to be a
+task beyond his literary reach. After a turn or two up and down
+the room, with his pen in his mouth, he decided on the more
+diplomatic course (which happened, in this case, to be the
+easiest course, too), of writing to Miss Milroy as cordially as
+if nothing had happened, and of testing his position in her good
+graces by the answer that she sent him back. An invitation of
+some kind (including her father, of course, but addressed
+directly to herself) was plainly the right thing to oblige her to
+send a written reply; but here the difficulty occurred of what
+the invitation was to be. A ball was not to be thought of, in his
+present position with the resident gentry. A dinner-party, with
+no indispensable elderly lady on the premises to receive Miss
+Milroy--except Mrs. Gripper, who could only receive her in the
+kitchen--was equally out of the question. What was the invitation
+to be? Never backward, when he wanted help, in asking for it
+right and left in every available direction, Allan, feeling
+himself at the end of his own resources, coolly rang the bell,
+and astonished the servant who answered it by inquiring how the
+late family at Thorpe Ambrose used to amuse themselves, and what
+sort of invitations they were in the habit of sending to their
+friends.
+
+"The family did what the rest of the gentry did, sir," said the
+man, staring at his master in utter bewilderment. "They gave
+dinner-parties and balls. And in fine summer weather, sir, like
+this, they sometimes had lawn-parties and picnics--"
+
+"That'll do!" shouted Allan. "A picnic's just the thing to please
+her. Richard, you're an invaluable man; you may go downstairs
+again."
+
+Richard retired wondering, and Richard's master seized his ready
+pen.
+
+
+"DEAR MISS MILROY--Since I left you it has suddenly struck me
+that we might have a picnic. A little change and amusement (what
+I should call a good shaking-up, if I wasn't writing to a young
+lady) is just the thing for you, after being so long indoors
+lately in Mrs. Milroy's room. A picnic is a change, and (when the
+wine is good) amusement, too. Will you ask the major if he will
+consent to the picnic, and come? And if you have got any friends
+in the neighborhood who like a picnic, pray ask them too, for I
+have got none. It shall be your picnic, but I will provide
+everything and take everybody. You shall choose the day, and we
+will picnic where you like. I have set my heart on this picnic.
+
+"Believe me, ever yours,
+
+"ALLAN ARMADALE."
+
+
+On reading over his composition before sealing it up, Allan
+frankly acknowledged to himself, this time, that it was not quite
+faultless. " 'Picnic' comes in a little too often," he said.
+"Never mind; if she likes the idea, she won't quarrel with that."
+He sent off the letter on the spot, with strict instructions to
+the messenger to wait for a reply.
+
+In half an hour the answer came back on scented paper, without an
+erasure anywhere, fragrant to smell, and beautiful to see.
+
+The presentation of the naked truth is one of those exhibitions
+from which the native delicacy of the female mind seems
+instinctively to revolt. Never were the tables turned more
+completely than they were now turned on Allan by his fair
+correspondent. Machiavelli himself would never have suspected,
+from Miss Milroy's letter, how heartily she had repented her
+petulance to the young squire as soon as his back was turned, and
+how extravagantly delighted she was when his invitation was
+placed in her hands. Her letter was the composition of a model
+young lady whose emotions are all kept under parental lock and
+key, and served out for her judiciously as occasion may re quire.
+"Papa," appeared quite as frequently in Miss Milroy's reply as
+"picnic" had appeared in Allan's invitation. "Papa" had been as
+considerately kind as Mr. Armadale in wishing to procure her a
+little change and amusement, and had offered to forego his usual
+quiet habits and join the picnic. With "papa's" sanction,
+therefore, she accepted, with much pleasure, Mr. Armadale's
+proposal; and, at "papa's" suggestion, she would presume on Mr.
+Armadale's kindness to add two friends of theirs recently settled
+at Thorpe Ambrose, to the picnic party--a widow lady and her son;
+the latter in holy orders and in delicate health. If Tuesday next
+would suit Mr. Armadale, Tuesday next would suit "papa"--being
+the first day he could spare from repairs which were required by
+his clock. The rest, by "papa's" advice, she would beg to leave
+entirely in Mr. Armadale's hands; and, in the meantime, she would
+remain, with "papa's" compliments, Mr. Armadale's truly--ELEANOR
+MILROY."
+
+Who would ever have supposed that the writer of that letter had
+jumped for joy when Allan's invitation arrived? Who would ever
+have suspected that there was an entry already in Miss Milroy's
+diary, under that day's date, to this effect: "The sweetest,
+dearest letter from _I-know-who;_ I'll never behave unkindly to
+him again as long as I live?" As for Allan, he was charmed with
+the sweet success of his maneuver. Miss Milroy had accepted his
+invitation; consequently, Miss Milroy was not offended with him.
+It was on the tip of his tongue to mention the correspondence to
+his friend when they met at dinner. But there was something in
+Midwinter's face and manner (even plain enough for Allan to see)
+which warned him to wait a little before he said anything to
+revive the painful subject of their visit to the cottage. By
+common consent they both avoided all topics connected with Thorpe
+Ambrose, not even the visit from Mr. Bashwood, which was to come
+with the evening, being referred to by either of them. All
+through the dinner they drifted further and further back into the
+old endless talk of past times about ships and sailing. When the
+butler withdrew from his attendance at table, he came downstairs
+with a nautical problem on his mind, and asked his
+fellow-servants if they any of them knew the relative merits "on
+a wind" and "off a wind" of a schooner and a brig.
+
+The two young men had sat longer at table than usual that day.
+When they went out into the garden with their cigars, the summer
+twilight fell gray and dim on lawn and flower bed, and narrowed
+round them by slow degrees the softly fading circle of the
+distant view. The dew was heavy, and, after a few minutes in the
+garden, they agreed to go back to the drier ground on the drive
+in front of the house.
+
+They were close to the turning which led into the shrubbery, when
+there suddenly glided out on them, from behind the foliage, a
+softly stepping black figure--a shadow, moving darkly through the
+dim evening light. Midwinter started back at the sight of it, and
+even the less finely strung nerves of his friend were shaken for
+the moment.
+
+"Who the devil are you?" cried Allan.
+
+The figure bared its head in the gray light, and came slowly a
+step nearer. Midwinter advanced a step on his side, and looked
+closer. It was the man of the timid manners and the mourning
+garments, of whom he had asked the way to Thorpe Ambrose where
+the three roads met.
+
+"Who are you?" repeated Allan.
+
+"I humbly beg your pardon, sir," faltered the stranger, stepping
+back again, confusedly. "The servants told me I should find Mr.
+Armadale--"
+
+"What, are you Mr. Bashwood?"
+
+"Yes, if you please, sir."
+
+"I beg your pardon for speaking to you so roughly," said Allan;
+"but the fact is, you rather startled me. My name is Armadale
+(put on your hat, pray), and this is my friend, Mr. Midwinter,
+who wants your help in the steward's office."
+
+"We hardly stand in need of an introduction," said Midwinter. "I
+met Mr. Bashwood out walking a few days since, and he was kind
+enough to direct me when I had lost my way."
+
+"Put on your hat," reiterated Allan, as Mr. Bashwood, still
+bareheaded, stood bowing speechlessly, now to one of the young
+men, and now to the other. "My good sir, put on your hat, and let
+me show you the way back to the house. Excuse me for noticing
+it," added Allan, as the man, in sheer nervous helplessness, let
+his hat fall, instead of putting it back on his head; "but you
+seem a little out of sorts; a glass of good wine will do you no
+harm before you and my friend come to business. Whereabouts did
+you meet with Mr. Bashwood, Midwinter, when you lost your way?"
+
+"I am too ignorant of the neighborhood to know. I must refer you
+to Mr. Bashwood."
+
+"Come, tell us where it was," said Allan, trying, a little too
+abruptly, to set the man at his ease, as they all three walked
+back to the house.
+
+The measure of Mr. Bashwood's constitutional timidity seemed to
+be filled to the brim by the loudness of Allan's voice and the
+bluntness of Allan's request. He ran over in the same feeble flow
+of words with which he had deluged Midwinter on the occasion when
+they first met.
+
+"It was on the road, sir," he began, addressing himself
+alternately to Allan, whom he called, "sir," and to Midwinter,
+whom he called by his name, "I mean, if you please, on the road
+to Little Gill Beck. A singular name, Mr. Midwinter, and a
+singular place; I don't mean the village; I mean the
+neighborhood--I mean the 'Broads' beyond the neighborhood.
+Perhaps you may have heard of the Norfolk Broads, sir? What they
+call lakes in other parts of England, they call Broads here. The
+Broads are quite numerous; I think they would repay a visit. You
+would have seen the first of them, Mr. Midwinter, if you had
+walked on a few miles from where I had the honor of meeting you.
+Remarkably numerous, the Broads, sir--situated between this and
+the sea. About three miles from the sea, Mr. Midwinter--about
+three miles. Mostly shallow, sir, with rivers running between
+them. Beautiful; solitary. Quite a watery country, Mr. Midwinter;
+quite separate, as it were, in itself. Parties sometimes visit
+them, sir--pleasure parties in boats. It's quite a little network
+of lakes, or, perhaps--yes, perhaps, more correctly, pools. There
+is good sport in the cold weather. The wild fowl are quite
+numerous. Yes; the Broads would repay a visit, Mr. Midwinter. the
+next time you are walking that way. The distance from here to
+Little Gill Beck, and then from Little Gill Beck to Girdler
+Broad, which is the first you come to, is altogether not more--"
+In sheer nervous inability to leave off, he would apparently have
+gone on talking of the Norfolk Broads for the rest of the
+evening, if one of his two listeners had not unceremoniously cut
+him short before he could find his way into a new sentence.
+
+"Are the Broads within an easy day's drive there and back from
+this house?" asked Allan, feeling, if they were, that the place
+for the picnic was discovered already.
+
+"Oh, yes, sir; a nice drive--quite a nice easy drive from this
+beautiful place!"
+
+They were by this time ascending the portico steps, Allan leading
+the way up, and calling to Midwinter and Mr. Bashwood to follow
+him into the library, where there was a lighted lamp.
+
+In the interval which elapsed before the wine made its
+appearance, Midwinter looked at his chance acquaintance of the
+high-road with strangely mingled feelings of compassion and
+distrust--of compassion that strengthened in spite of him; of
+distrust that persisted in diminishing, try as he might to
+encourage it to grow. There, perched comfortless on the edge of
+his chair, sat the poor broken-down, nervous wretch, in his worn
+black garments, with his watery eyes, his honest old outspoken
+wig, his miserable mohair stock, and his false teeth that were
+incapable of deceiving anybody--there he sat, politely ill at
+ease; now shrinking in the glare of the lamp, now wincing under
+the shock of Allan's sturdy voice; a man with the wrinkles of
+sixty years in his face, and the manners of a child in the
+presence of strangers; an object of pity surely, if ever there
+was a pitiable object yet!
+
+"Whatever else you're afraid of, Mr. Bashwood," cried
+ Allan, pouring out a glass of wine, "don't be afraid of that!
+There isn't a headache in a hogshead of it! Make yourself
+comfortable; I'll leave you and Mr. Midwinter to talk your
+business over by yourselves. It's all in Mr. Midwinter's hands;
+he acts for me, and settles everything at his own discretion."
+
+He said those words with a cautious choice of expression very
+uncharacteristic of him, and, without further explanation, made
+abruptly for the door. Midwinter, sitting near it, noticed his
+face as he went out. Easy as the way was into Allan's favor, Mr.
+Bashwood, beyond all kind of doubt, had in some unaccountable
+manner failed to find it!
+
+The two strangely assorted companions were left together--parted
+widely, as it seemed on the surface, from any possible
+interchange of sympathy; drawn invisibly one to the other,
+nevertheless, by those magnetic similarities of temperament which
+overleap all difference of age or station, and defy all apparent
+incongruities of mind and character. From the moment when Allan
+left the room, the hidden Influence that works in darkness began
+slowly to draw the two men together, across the great social
+desert which had lain between them up to this day.
+
+Midwinter was the first to approach the subject of the interview.
+
+"May I ask," he began, "if you have been made acquainted with my
+position here, and if you know why it is that I require your
+assistance?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood--still hesitating and still timid, but manifestly
+relieved by Allan's departure--sat further back in his chair, and
+ventured on fortifying himself with a modest little sip of wine.
+
+"Yes, sir," he replied; "Mr. Pedgift informed me of all--at least
+I think I may say so--of all the circumstances. I am to instruct,
+or perhaps, I ought to say to advise--"
+
+"No, Mr. Bashwood; the first word was the best word of the two. I
+am quite ignorant of the duties which Mr. Armadale's kindness has
+induced him to intrust to me. If I understand right, there can be
+no question of your capacity to instruct me, for you once filled
+a steward's situation yourself. May I inquire where it was?"
+
+"At Sir John Mellowship's, sir, in West Norfolk. Perhaps you
+would like--I have got it with me--to see my testimonial? Sir
+John might have dealt more kindly with me; but I have no
+complaint to make; it's all done and over now!" His watery eyes
+looked more watery still, and the trembling in his hands spread
+to his lips as he produced an old dingy letter from his
+pocket-book and laid it open on the table.
+
+The testimonial was very briefly and very coldly expressed, but
+it was conclusive as far as it went. Sir John considered it only
+right to say that he had no complaint to make of any want of
+capacity or integrity in his steward. If Mr. Bashwood's domestic
+position had been compatible with the continued performance of
+his duties on the estate, Sir John would have been glad to keep
+him. As it was, embarrassments caused by the state of Mr.
+Bashwood's personal affairs had rendered it undesirable that he
+should continue in Sir John's service; and on that ground, and
+that only, his employer and he had parted. Such was Sir John's
+testimony to Mr. Bashwood's character. As Midwinter read the last
+lines, he thought of another testimonial, still in his own
+possession--of the written character which they had given him at
+the school, when they turned their sick usher adrift in the
+world. His superstition (distrusting all new events and all new
+faces at Thorpe Ambrose) still doubted the man before him as
+obstinately as ever. But when he now tried to put those doubts
+into words, his heart upbraided him, and he laid the letter on
+the table in silence.
+
+The sudden pause in the conversation appeared to startle Mr.
+Bashwood. He comforted himself with another little sip of wine,
+and, leaving the letter untouched, burst irrepressibly into
+words, as if the silence was quite unendurable to him.
+
+"I am ready to answer any question, sir," he began. "Mr. Pedgift
+told me that I must answer questions, because I was applying for
+a place of trust. Mr. Pedgift said neither you nor Mr. Armadale
+was likely to think the testimonial sufficient of itself. Sir
+John doesn't say--he might have put it more kindly, but I don't
+complain--Sir John doesn't say what the troubles were that lost
+me my place. Perhaps you might wish to know--" He stopped
+confusedly, looked at the testimonial, and said no more.
+
+"If no interests but mine were concerned in the matter," rejoined
+Midwinter, "the testimonial would, I assure you, be quite enough
+to satisfy me. But while I am learning my new duties, the person
+who teaches me will be really and truly the steward of my
+friend's estate. I am very unwilling to ask you to speak on what
+may be a painful subject, and I am sadly inexperienced in putting
+such questions as I ought to put; but, perhaps, in Mr. Armadale's
+interests, I ought to know something more, either from yourself,
+or from Mr. Pedgift, if you prefer it--" He, too, stopped
+confusedly, looked at the testimonial, and said no more.
+
+There was another moment of silence. The night was warm, and Mr.
+Bashwood, among his other misfortunes, had the deplorable
+infirmity of perspiring in the palms of the hands. He took out a
+miserable little cotton pocket-handkerchief, rolled it up into a
+ball, and softly dabbed it to and fro, from one hand to the
+other, with the regularity of a pendulum. Performed by other men,
+under other circumstances, the action might have been ridiculous.
+Performed by this man, at the crisis of the interview, the action
+was horrible.
+
+"Mr. Pedgift's time is too valuable, sir, to be wasted on me," he
+said. "I will mention what ought to be mentioned myself--if you
+will please to allow me. I have been unfortunate in my family. It
+is very hard to bear, though it seems not much to tell. My
+wife--" One of his hands closed fast on the pocket-handkerchief;
+he moistened his dry lips, struggled with himself, and went on.
+
+"My wife, sir," he resumed, "stood a little in my way; she did me
+(I am afraid I must confess) some injury with Sir John. Soon
+after I got the steward's situation, she contracted--she
+took--she fell into habits (I hardly know how to say it) of
+drinking. I couldn't break her of it, and I couldn't always
+conceal it from Sir John's knowledge. She broke out, and--and
+tried his patience once or twice, when he came to my office on
+business. Sir John excused it, not very kindly; but still he
+excused it. I don't complain of Sir John! I don't complain now of
+my wife." He pointed a trembling finger at his miserable
+crape-covered beaver hat on the floor. "I'm in mourning for her,"
+he said, faintly. "She died nearly a year ago, in the county
+asylum here."
+
+His mouth began to work convulsively. He took up the glass of
+wine at his side, and, instead of sipping it this time, drained
+it to the bottom. "I'm not much used to wine, sir," he said,
+conscious, apparently, of the flush that flew into his face as he
+drank, and still observant of the obligations of politeness amid
+all the misery of the recollections that he was calling up.
+
+"I beg, Mr. Bashwood, you will not distress yourself by telling
+me any more," said Midwinter, recoiling from any further sanction
+on his part of a disclosure which had already bared the sorrows
+of the unhappy man before him to the quick.
+
+"I'm much obliged to you, sir," replied Mr. Bashwood. "But if I
+don't detain you too long, and if you will please to remember
+that Mr. Pedgift's directions to me were very particular--and,
+besides, I only mentioned my late wife because if she hadn't
+tried Sir John's patience to begin with, things might have turned
+out differently--" He paused, gave up the disjointed sentence in
+which he had involved himself, and tried another. "I had only two
+children, sir," he went on, advancing to a new point in his
+narrative, "a boy and a girl. The girl died when she was a baby.
+My son lived to grow up; and it was my son who lost me my place.
+I did my best for him; I got him into a respectable office in
+London. They wouldn't take him without security. I'm afraid it
+was imprudent; but I had no rich friends to help me, and I became
+security. My boy turned out badly, sir. He --perhaps you will
+kindly understand what I mean, if I say he behaved dishonestly.
+His employers consented, at my entreaty, to let him off without
+prosecuting. I begged very hard--I was fond of my son James--and
+I took him home, and did my best to reform him. He wouldn't stay
+with me; he went away again to London; he--I beg your pardon,
+sir! I'm afraid I'm confusing things; I'm afraid I'm wandering
+from the point."
+
+"No, no," said Midwinter, kindly. "If you think it right to tell
+me this sad story, tell it in your own way. Have you seen your
+son since he left you to go to London?"
+
+"No, sir. He's in London still, for all I know. When I last heard
+of him, he was getting his bread--not very creditably. He was
+employed, under the inspector, at the Private Inquiry Office in
+Shadyside Place."
+
+He spoke those words--apparently (as events then stood) the most
+irrelevant to the matter in hand that had yet escaped him;
+actually (as events were soon to be) the most vitally important
+that he had uttered yet--he spoke those words absently, looking
+about him in confusion, and trying vainly to recover the lost
+thread of his narrative.
+
+Midwinter compassionately helped him. "You were telling me," he
+said, "that your son had been the cause of your losing your
+place. How did that happen?"
+
+"In this way, sir," said Mr. Bashwood, getting back again
+excitedly into the right train of thought. "His employers
+consented to let him off; but they came down on his security; and
+I was the man. I suppose they were not to blame; the security
+covered their loss. I couldn't pay it all out of my savings; I
+had to borrow--on the word of a man, sir, I couldn't help it--I
+had to borrow. My creditor pressed me; it seemed cruel, but, if
+he wanted the money, I suppose it was only just. I was sold out
+of house and home. I dare say other gentlemen would have said
+what Sir John said; I dare say most people would have refused to
+keep a steward who had had the bailiffs after him, and his
+furniture sold in the neighborhood. That was how it ended, Mr.
+Midwinter. I needn't detain you any longer--here is Sir John's
+address, if you wish to apply to him." Midwinter generously
+refused to receive the address.
+
+"Thank you kindly, sir," said Mr. Bashwood, getting tremulously
+on his legs. "There is nothing more, I think, except--except that
+Mr. Pedgift will speak for me, if you wish to inquire into my
+conduct in his service. I'm very much indebted to Mr. Pedgift;
+he's a little rough with me sometimes, but, if he hadn't taken me
+into his office, I think I should have gone to the workhouse when
+I left Sir John, I was so broken down." He picked up his dingy
+old hat from the floor. "I won't intrude any longer, sir. I shall
+be happy to call again if you wish to have time to consider
+before you decide-"
+
+"I want no time to consider after what you have told me," replied
+Midwinter, warmly, his memory busy, while he spoke, with the time
+when _he_ had told _his_ story to Mr. Brock, and was waiting for
+a generous word in return, as the man before him was waiting now.
+"To-day is Saturday," he went on. "Can you come and give me my
+first lesson on Monday morning? I beg your pardon," he added,
+interrupting Mr. Bashwood's profuse expressions of
+acknowledgment, and stopping him on his way out of the room;
+"there is one thing we ought to settle, ought we not? We haven't
+spoken yet about your own interest in this matter; I mean, about
+the terms." He referred, a little confusedly, to the pecuniary
+part of the subject. Mr. Bashwood (getting nearer and nearer to
+the door) answered him more confusedly still.
+
+"Anything, sir--anything you think right. I won't intrude any
+longer; I'll leave it to you and Mr. Armadale."
+
+"I will send for Mr. Armadale, if you like," said Midwinter,
+following him into the hall. "But I am afraid he has as little
+experience in matters of this kind as I have. Perhaps, if you see
+no objection, we might be guided by Mr. Pedgift?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood caught eagerly at the last suggestion, pushing his
+retreat, while he spoke, as far as the front door. "Yes, sir--oh,
+yes, yes! nobody better than Mr. Pedgift. Don't--pray don't
+disturb Mr. Armadale!" His watery eyes looked quite wild with
+nervous alarm as he turned round for a moment in the light of the
+hall lamp to make that polite request. If sending for Allan had
+been equivalent to unchaining a ferocious watch-dog, Mr. Bashwood
+could hardly have been more anxious to stop the proceeding. "I
+wish you kindly good-evening, sir," he went on, getting out to
+the steps. "I'm much obliged to you. I will be scrupulously
+punctual on Monday morning--I hope--I think--I'm sure you will
+soon learn everything I can teach you. It's not difficult--oh
+dear, no--not difficult at all! I wish you kindly good-evening,
+sir. A beautiful night; yes, indeed, a beautiful night for a walk
+home."
+
+With those words, all dropping out of his lips one on the top of
+the other, and without noticing, in his agony of embarrassment at
+effecting his departure, Midwinter's outstretched hand, he went
+noiselessly down the steps, and was lost in the darkness of the
+night.
+
+As Midwinter turned to re-enter the house, the dining-room door
+opened and his friend met him in the hall.
+
+"Has Mr. Bashwood gone?" asked Allan.
+
+"He has gone," replied Midwinter, "after telling me a very sad
+story, and leaving me a little ashamed of myself for having
+doubted him without any just cause. I have arranged that he is to
+give me my first lesson in the steward's office on Monday
+morning."
+
+"All right," said Allan. "You needn't be afraid, old boy, of my
+interrupting you over your studies. I dare say I'm wrong--but I
+don't like Mr. Bashwood."
+
+"I dare say _I'm_ wrong," retorted the other, a little
+petulantly. "I do."
+
+
+The Sunday morning found Midwinter in the park, waiting to
+intercept the postman, on the chance of his bringing more news
+from Mr. Brock.
+
+At the customary hour the man made his appearance, and placed the
+expected letter in Midwinter's hands. He opened it, far away from
+all fear of observation this time, and read these lines:
+
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--I write more for the purpose of quieting your
+anxiety than because I have anything definite to say. In my last
+hurried letter I had no time to tell you that the elder of the
+two women whom I met in the Gardens had followed me, and spoken
+to me in the street. I believe I may characterize what she said
+(without doing her any injustice) as a tissue of falsehoods from
+beginning to end. At any rate, she confirmed me in the suspicion
+that some underhand proceeding is on foot, of which Allan is
+destined to be the victim, and that the prime mover in the
+conspiracy is the vile woman who helped his mother's marriage and
+who hastened his mother's death.
+
+"Feeling this conviction, I have not hesitated to do, for Allan's
+sake, what I would have done for no other creature in the world.
+I have left my hotel, and have installed myself (with my old
+servant Robert) in a house opposite the house to which I traced
+the two women. We are alternately on the watch (quite
+unsuspected, I am certain, by the people opposite) day and night.
+All my feelings, as a gentleman and a clergyman, revolt from such
+an occupation as I am now engaged in; but there is no other
+choice. I must either do this violence to my own self-respect, or
+I must leave Allan, with his easy nature, and in his assailable
+position, to defend himself against a wretch who is prepared, I
+firmly believe, to take the most unscrupulous advantage of his
+weakness and his youth. His mother's dying entreaty has never
+left my memory; and, God help me, I am now degrading myself in my
+own eyes in consequence.
+
+'There has been some reward already for the sacrifice. This day
+(Saturday) I have gained an immense advantage--I have at last
+seen the woman's face. She went out with her veil down as before;
+and Robert kept her in view, having my instructions, if she
+returned to the house, not to follow her back to the door. She
+did return to the house; and the result of my precaution was, as
+I had expected, to throw her off her guard. I saw her face
+unveiled at the window, and  afterward again in the balcony. If
+any occasion should ari se for describing her particularly, you
+shall have the description. At present I need only say that she
+looks the full age (five-and-thirty) at which you estimated her,
+and that she is by no means so handsome a woman as I had (I
+hardly know why) expected to see.
+
+"This is all I can now tell you. If nothing more happens by
+Monday or Tuesday next, I shall have no choice but to apply to my
+lawyers for assistance; though I am most unwilling to trust this
+delicate and dangerous matter in other hands than mine. Setting
+my own feelings however, out of the question, the business which
+has been the cause of my journey to London is too important to be
+trifled with much longer as I am trifling with it now. In any and
+every case, depend on my keeping you informed of the progress of
+events, and believe me yours truly,
+
+"DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+
+Midwinter secured the letter as he had secured the letter that
+preceded it--side by side in his pocket-book with the narrative
+of Allan's Dream.
+
+"How many days more?" he asked himself, as he went back to the
+house. "How many days more?"
+
+Not many. The time he was waiting for was a time close at hand.
+
+
+Monday came, and brought Mr. Bashwood, punctual to the appointed
+hour. Monday came, and found Allan immersed in his preparations
+for the picnic. He held a series of interviews, at home and
+abroad, all through the day. He transacted business with Mrs.
+Gripper, with the butler, and with the coachman, in their three
+several departments of eating, drinking, and driving. He went to
+the town to consult his professional advisers on the subject of
+the Broads, and to invite both the lawyers, father and son (in
+the absence of anybody else in the neighborhood whom he could
+ask), to join the picnic. Pedgift Senior (in his department)
+supplied general information, but begged to be excused from
+appearing at the picnic, on the score of business engagements.
+Pedgift Junior (in his department) added all the details; and,
+casting business engagements to the winds, accepted the
+invitation with the greatest pleasure. Returning from the
+lawyer's office, Allan's next proceeding was to go to the major's
+cottage and obtain Miss Milroy's approval of the proposed
+locality for the pleasure party. This object accomplished, he
+returned to his own house, to meet the last difficulty now left
+to encounter--the difficulty of persuading Midwinter to join the
+expedition to the Broads.
+
+On first broaching the subject, Allan found his friend
+impenetrably resolute to remain at home. Midwinter's natural
+reluctance to meet the major and his daughter after what had
+happened at the cottage, might probably have been overcome. But
+Midwinter's determination not to allow Mr. Bashwood's course of
+instruction to be interrupted was proof against every effort that
+could be made to shake it. After exerting his influence to the
+utmost, Allan was obliged to remain contented with a compromise.
+Midwinter promised, not very willingly, to join the party toward
+evening, at the place appointed for a gypsy tea-making, which was
+to close the proceedings of the day. To this extent he would
+consent to take the opportunity of placing himself on a friendly
+footing with the Milroys. More he could not concede, even to
+Allan's persuasion, and for more it would he useless to ask.
+
+The day of the picnic came. The lovely morning, and the cheerful
+bustle of preparation for the expedition, failed entirely to
+tempt Midwinter into altering his resolution. At the regular hour
+he left the breakfast-table to join Mr. Bashwood in the steward's
+office. The two were quietly closeted over the books, at the back
+of the house, while the packing for the picnic went on in front.
+Young Pedgift (short in stature, smart in costume, and
+self-reliant in manner) arrived some little time before the hour
+for starting, to revise all the arrangements, and to make any
+final improvements which his local knowledge might suggest. Allan
+and he were still busy in consultation when the first hitch
+occurred in the proceedings. The woman-servant from the cottage
+was reported to be waiting below for an answer to a note from her
+young mistress, which was placed in Allan's hands.
+
+On this occasion Miss Milroy's emotions had apparently got the
+better of her sense of propriety. The tone of the letter was
+feverish, and the handwriting wandered crookedly up and down in
+deplorable freedom from all proper restraint.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Armadale" (wrote the major's daughter), "such a
+misfortune! What _are_ we to do? Papa has got a letter from
+grandmamma this morning about the new governess. Her reference
+has answered all the questions, and she's ready to come at the
+shortest notice. Grandmamma thinks (how provoking!) the sooner
+the better; and she says we may expect her--I mean the
+governess--either to-day or to-morrow. Papa says (he _will_ be so
+absurdly considerate to everybody!) that we can't allow Miss
+Gwilt to come here (if she comes to-day) and find nobody at home
+to receive her. What is to be done? I am ready to cry with
+vexation. I have got the worst possible impression (though
+grandmamma says she is a charming person) of Miss Gwilt. _Can_
+you suggest something, dear Mr. Armadale? I'm sure papa would
+give way if you could. Don't stop to write; send me a message
+back. I have got a new hat for the picnic; and oh, the agony of
+not knowing whether I am to keep it on or take it off. Yours
+truly, E. M."
+
+"The devil take Miss Gwilt!" said Allan, staring at his legal
+adviser in a state of helpless consternation.
+
+"With all my heart, sir--I don't wish to interfere," remarked
+Pedgift Junior. "May I ask what's the matter?"
+
+Allan told him. Mr. Pedgift the younger might have his faults,
+but a want of quickness of resource was not among them.
+
+"There's a way out of the difficulty, Mr. Armadale," he said. "If
+the governess comes today, let's have her at the picnic."
+
+Allan's eyes opened wide in astonishment.
+
+"All the horses and carriages in the Thorpe Ambrose stables are
+not wanted for this small party of ours," proceeded Pedgift
+Junior. "Of course not! Very good. If Miss Gwilt comes to-day,
+she can't possibly get here before five o'clock. Good again. You
+order an open carriage to be waiting at the major's door at that
+time, Mr. Armadale, and I'll give the man his directions where to
+drive to. When the governess comes to the cottage, let her find a
+nice little note of apology (along with the cold fowl, or
+whatever else they give her after her journey) begging her to
+join us at the picnic, and putting a carriage at her own sole
+disposal to take her there. Gad, sir!" said young Pedgift, gayly,
+"she _must_ be a Touchy One if she thinks herself neglected after
+that!"
+
+"Capital!" cried Allan. "She shall have every attention. I'll
+give her the pony-chaise and the white harness, and she shall
+drive herself, if she likes."
+
+He scribbled a line to relieve Miss Milroy's apprehensions, and
+gave the necessary orders for the pony-chaise. Ten minutes later,
+the carriages for the pleasure party were at the door.
+
+"Now we've taken all this trouble about her," said Allan,
+reverting to the governess as they left the house, "I wonder, if
+she does come today, whether we shall see her at the picnic!"
+
+"Depends, entirely on her age, sir," remarked young Pedgift,
+pronouncing judgment with the happy confidence in himself which
+eminently distinguished him. "If she's an old one, she'll be
+knocked up with the journey, and she'll stick to the cold fowl
+and the cottage. If she's a young one, either I know nothing of
+women, or the pony in the white harness will bring her to the
+picnic."
+
+They started for the major's cottage.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE NORFOLK BROADS.
+
+THE little group gathered together in Major Milroy's parlor to
+wait for the carriages from Thorpe Ambrose would hardly have
+conveyed the idea, to any previously uninstructed person
+introduced among them, of a party assembled in expectation of a
+picnic. They were almost dull enough, as far as outward
+appearances went, to have been a party assembled in expectation
+of a marriage.
+
+Even Miss Milroy herself, though conscious, of looking her best
+in her bright muslin dress and her gayly feathered new hat, was
+at this inaus picious moment Miss Milroy under a cloud. Although
+Allan's note had assured her, in Allan's strongest language, that
+the one great object of reconciling the governess's arrival with
+the celebration of the picnic was an object achieved, the doubt
+still remained whether the plan proposed--whatever it might
+be--would meet with her father's approval. In a word, Miss Milroy
+declined to feel sure of her day's pleasure until the carriage
+made its appearance and took her from the door. The major, on his
+side, arrayed for the festive occasion in a tight blue frock-coat
+which he had not worn for years, and threatened with a whole long
+day of separation from his old friend and comrade the clock, was
+a man out of his element, if ever such a man existed yet. As for
+the friends who had been asked at Allan's request--the widow lady
+(otherwise Mrs. Pentecost) and her son (the Reverend Samuel) in
+delicate health--two people less capable, apparently of adding to
+the hilarity of the day could hardly have been discovered in the
+length and breadth of all England. A young man who plays his part
+in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with
+a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of
+virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have
+at a picnic. An old lady afflicted with deafness, whose one
+inexhaustible subject of interest is the subject of her son, and
+who (on the happily rare occasions when that son opens his lips)
+asks everybody eagerly, "What does my boy say?" is a person to be
+pitied in respect of her infirmities, and a person to be admired
+in respect of her maternal devotedness, but not a person, if the
+thing could possibly be avoided, to take to a picnic. Such a man,
+nevertheless, was the Reverend Samuel Pentecost, and such a woman
+was the Reverend Samuel's mother; and in the dearth of any other
+producible guests, there they were, engaged to eat, drink, and be
+merry for the day at Mr. Armadale's pleasure party to the Norfolk
+Broads.
+
+The arrival of Allan, with his faithful follower, Pedgift Junior,
+at his heels, roused the flagging spirits of the party at the
+cottage. The plan for enabling the governess to join the picnic,
+if she arrived that day, satisfied even Major Milroy's anxiety to
+show all proper attention to the lady who was coming into his
+house. After writing the necessary note of apology and
+invitation, and addressing it in her very best handwriting to the
+new governess, Miss Milroy ran upstairs to say good-by to her
+mother, and returned with a smiling face and a side look of
+relief directed at her father, to announce that there was nothing
+now to keep any of them a moment longer indoors. The company at
+once directed their steps to the garden gate, and were there met
+face to face by the second great difficulty of the day. How were
+the six persons of the picnic to be divided between the two open
+carriages that were in waiting for them?
+
+Here, again, Pedgift Junior exhibited his invaluable faculty of
+contrivance. This highly cultivated young man possessed in an
+eminent degree an accomplishment more or less peculiar to all the
+young men of the age we live in: he was perfectly capable of
+taking his pleasure without forgetting his business. Such a
+client as the Master of Thorpe Ambrose fell but seldom in his
+father's way, and to pay special but unobtrusive attention to
+Allan all through the day was the business of which young
+Pedgift, while proving himself to be the life and soul of the
+picnic, never once lost sight from the beginning of the
+merry-making to the end. He had detected the state of affairs
+between Miss Milroy and Allan at glance, and he at once provided
+for his client's inclinations in that quarter by offering, in
+virtue of his local knowledge, to lead the way in the first
+carriage, and by asking Major Milroy and the curate if they would
+do him the honor of accompanying him.
+
+"We shall pass a very interesting place to a military man, sir,"
+said young Pedgift, addressing the major, with his happy and
+unblushing confidence--"the remains of a Roman encampment. And my
+father, sir, who is a subscriber," proceeded this rising lawyer,
+turning to the curate, "wished me to ask your opinion of the new
+Infant School buildings at Little Gill Beck. Would you kindly
+give it me as we go along?" He opened the carriage door, and
+helped in the major and the curate before they could either of
+them start any difficulties. The necessary result followed. Allan
+and Miss Milroy rode together in the same carriage, with the
+extra convenience of a deaf old lady in attendance to keep the
+squire's compliments within the necessary limits.
+
+Never yet had Allan enjoyed such an interview with Miss Milroy as
+the interview he now obtained on the road to the Broads.
+
+The dear old lady, after a little anecdote or two on the subject
+of her son, did the one thing wanting to secure the perfect
+felicity of her two youthful companions: she became considerately
+blind for the occasion, as well as deaf. A quarter of an hour
+after the carriage left the major's cottage, the poor old soul,
+reposing on snug cushions, and fanned by a fine summer air, fell
+peaceably asleep. Allan made love, and Miss Milroy sanctioned the
+manufacture of that occasionally precious article of human
+commerce, sublimely indifferent on both sides to a solemn bass
+accompaniment on two notes, played by the curate's mother's
+unsuspecting nose. The only interruption to the love-making (the
+snoring, being a thing more grave and permanent in its nature,
+was not interrupted at all) came at intervals from the carriage
+ahead. Not satisfied with having the major's Roman encampment and
+the curate's Infant Schools on his mind, Pedgift Junior rose
+erect from time to time in his place, and, respectfully hailing
+the hindmost vehicle, directed Allan's attention, in a shrill
+tenor voice, and with an excellent choice of language, to objects
+of interest on the road. The only way to quiet him was to answer,
+which Allan invariably did by shouting back, "Yes, beautiful,"
+upon which young Pedgift disappeared again in the recesses of the
+leading carriage, and took up the Romans and the Infants where he
+had left them last.
+
+The scene through which the picnic party was now passing merited
+far more attention than it received either from Allan or Allan's
+friends.
+
+
+An hour's steady driving from the major's cottage had taken young
+Armadale and his guests beyond the limits of Midwinter's solitary
+walk, and was now bringing them nearer and nearer to one of the
+strangest and loveliest aspects of nature which the inland
+landscape, not of Norfolk only, but of all England, can show.
+Little by little the face of the country began to change as the
+carriages approached the remote and lonely district of the
+Broads. The wheat fields and turnip fields became perceptibly
+fewer, and the fat green grazing grounds on either side grew
+wider and wider in their smooth and sweeping range. Heaps of dry
+rushes and reeds, laid up for the basket-maker and the thatcher,
+began to appear at the road-side. The old gabled cottages of the
+early part of the drive dwindled and disappeared, and huts with
+mud walls rose in their place. With the ancient church towers and
+the wind and water mills, which had hitherto been the only lofty
+objects seen over the low marshy flat, there now rose all round
+the horizon, gliding slow and distant behind fringes of pollard
+willows, the sails of invisible boats moving on invisible waters.
+All the strange and startling anomalies presented by an inland
+agricultural district, isolated from other districts by its
+intricate surrounding network of pools and streams--holding its
+communications and carrying its produce by water instead of by
+land--began to present themselves in closer and closer
+succession. Nets appeared on cottage pailings; little
+flat-bottomed boats lay strangely at rest among the flowers in
+cottage gardens; farmers' men passed to and fro clad in composite
+costume of the coast and the field, in sailors' hats, and
+fishermen's boots, and plowmen's smocks; and even yet the
+low-lying labyrinth of waters, embosomed in its mystery of
+solitude, was a hidden labyrinth still. A m inute more, and the
+carriages took a sudden turn from the hard high-road into a
+little weedy lane. The wheels ran noiseless on the damp and
+spongy ground. A lonely outlying cottage appeared with its litter
+of nets and boats. A few yards further on, and the last morsel of
+firm earth suddenly ended in a tiny creek and quay. One turn more
+to the end of the quay--and there, spreading its great sheet of
+water, far and bright and smooth, on the right hand and the
+left--there, as pure in its spotless blue, as still in its
+heavenly peacefulness, as the summer sky above it, was the first
+of the Norfolk Broads.
+
+The carriages stopped, the love-making broke off, and the
+venerable Mrs. Pentecost, recovering the use of her senses at a
+moment's notice, fixed her eyes sternly on Allan the instant she
+woke.
+
+"I see in your face, Mr. Armadale," said the old lady, sharply,
+"that you think I have been asleep."
+
+The consciousness of guilt acts differently on the two sexes. In
+nine cases out of ten, it is a much more manageable consciousness
+with a woman than with a man. All the confusion, on this
+occasion, was on the man's side. While Allan reddened and looked
+embarrassed, the quick-witted Miss Milroy instantly embraced the
+old lady with a burst of innocent laughter. "He is quite
+incapable, dear Mrs. Pentecost," said the little hypocrite, "of
+anything so ridiculous as thinking you have been asleep!"
+
+"All I wish Mr. Armadale to know," pursued the old lady, still
+suspicious of Allan, "is, that my head being giddy, I am obliged
+to close my eyes in a carriage. Closing the eyes, Mr. Armadale,
+is one thing, and going to sleep is another. Where is my son?"
+
+The Reverend Samuel appeared silently at the carriage door, and
+assisted his mother to get out ("Did you enjoy the drive, Sammy?"
+asked the old lady. "Beautiful scenery, my dear, wasn't it?")
+Young Pedgift, on whom the arrangements for exploring the Broads
+devolved, hustled about, giving his orders to the boatman. Major
+Milroy, placid and patient, sat apart on an overturned punt, and
+privately looked at his watch. Was it past noon already? More
+than an hour past. For the first time, for many a long year, the
+famous clock at home had struck in an empty workshop. Time had
+lifted his wonderful scythe, and the corporal and his men had
+relieved guard, with no master's eye to watch their performances,
+with no master's hand to encourage them to do their best. The
+major sighed as he put his watch back in his pocket. "I'm afraid
+I'm too old for this sort of thing," thought the good man,
+looking about him dreamily. "I don't find I enjoy it as much as I
+thought I should. When are we going on the water, I wonder?
+Where's Neelie?"
+
+Neelie--more properly Miss Milroy--was behind one of the
+carriages with the promoter of the picnic. They were immersed in
+the interesting subject of their own Christian names, and Allan
+was as near a pointblank proposal of marriage as it is well
+possible for a thoughtless young gentleman of two-and-twenty to
+be.
+
+"Tell me the truth," said Miss Milroy, with her eyes modestly
+riveted on the ground. "When you first knew what my name was, you
+didn't like it, did you?"
+
+"I like everything that belongs to you," rejoined Allan,
+vigorously. "I think Eleanor is a beautiful name; and yet, I
+don't know why, I think the major made an improvement when he
+changed it to Neelie."
+
+"I can tell you why, Mr. Armadale," said the major's daughter,
+with great gravity. 'There are some unfortunate people in this
+world whose names are--how can I express it?--whose names are
+misfits. Mine is a misfit. I don't blame my parents, for of
+course it was impossible to know when I was a baby how I should
+grow up. But as things are, I and my name don't fit each other.
+When you hear a young lady called Eleanor, you think of a tall,
+beautiful, interesting creature directly--the very opposite of
+_me!_ With my personal appearance, Eleanor sounds ridiculous; and
+Neelie, as you yourself remarked, is just the thing. No! no!
+don't say any more; I'm tired of the subject. I've got another
+name in my head, if we must speak of names, which is much better
+worth talking about than mine."
+
+She stole a glance at her companion which said plainly enough,
+"The name is yours." Allan advanced a step nearer to her, and
+lowered his voice, without the slightest necessity, to a
+mysterious whisper. Miss Milroy instantly resumed her
+investigation of the ground. She looked at it with such
+extraordinary interest that a geologist might have suspected her
+of scientific flirtation with the superficial strata.
+
+"What name are you thinking of?" asked Allan.
+
+Miss Milroy addressed her answer, in the form of a remark, to the
+superficial strata--and let them do what they liked with it, in
+their capacity of conductors of sound. "If I had been a man," she
+said, "I should so like to have been called Allan!"
+
+She felt his eyes on her as she spoke, and, turning her head
+aside, became absorbed in the graining of the panel at the back
+of the carriage. "How beautiful it is!" she exclaimed, with a
+sudden outburst of interest in the vast subject of varnish. "I
+wonder how they do it?"
+
+Man persists, and woman yields. Allan declined to shift the
+ground from love-making to coach-making. Miss Milroy dropped the
+subject.
+
+"Call me by my name, if you really like it," he whispered,
+persuasively. "Call me 'Allan' for once; just to try."
+
+She hesitated with a heightened color and a charming smile, and
+shook her head. "I couldn't just yet," she answered, softly.
+
+"May I call you Neelie? Is it too soon?"
+
+She looked at him again, with a sudden disturbance about the
+bosom of her dress, and a sudden flash of tenderness in her
+dark-gray eyes.
+
+"You know best," she said, faintly, in a whisper.
+
+The inevitable answer was on the tip of Allan's tongue. At the
+very instant, however, when he opened his lips, the abhorrent
+high tenor of Pedgift Junior, shouting for "Mr. Armadale," rang
+cheerfully through the quiet air. At the same moment, from the
+other side of the carriage, the lurid spectacles of the Reverend
+Samuel showed themselves officiously on the search; and the voice
+of the Reverend Samuel's mother (who had, with great dexterity,
+put the two ideas of the presence of water and a sudden movement
+among the company together) inquired distractedly if anybody was
+drowned? Sentiment flies and Love shudders at all demonstrations
+of the noisy kind. Allan said: "Damn it," and rejoined young
+Pedgift. Miss Milroy sighed, and took refuge with her father.
+
+"I've done it, Mr. Armadale!" cried young Pedgift, greeting his
+patron gayly. "We can all go on the water together; I've got the
+biggest boat on the Broads. The little skiffs," he added, in a
+lower tone, as he led the way to the quay steps, "besides being
+ticklish and easily upset, won't hold more than two, with the
+boatman; and the major told me he should feel it his duty to go
+with his daughter, if we all separated in different boats. I
+thought _that_ would hardly do, sir," pursued Pedgift Junior,
+with a respectfully sly emphasis on the words. "And, besides, if
+we had put the old lady into a skiff, with her weight (sixteen
+stone if she's a pound), we might have had her upside down in the
+water half her time, which would have occasioned delay, and
+thrown what you call a damp on the proceedings. Here's the boat,
+Mr. Armadale. What do you think of it?"
+
+The boat added one more to the strangely anomalous objects which
+appeared at the Broads. It was nothing less than a stout old
+lifeboat, passing its last declining years on the smooth fresh
+water, after the stormy days of its youth time on the wild salt
+sea. A comfortable little cabin for the use of fowlers in the
+winter season had been built amidships, and a mast and sail
+adapted for inland navigation had been fitted forward. There was
+room enough and to spare for the guests, the dinner, and the
+three men in charge. Allan clapped his faithful lieutenant
+approvingly on the shoulder; and even Mrs. Pentecost, when the
+whole party were comfortably established on board, took a
+comparatively cheerful view of the prospects of the picnic. "If
+anything happens," said the old lady, addressing the company
+gener ally, "there's one comfort for all of us. My son can swim."
+
+The boat floated out from the creek into the placid waters of the
+Broad, and the full beauty of the scene opened on the view.
+
+On the northward and westward, as the boat reached the middle of
+the lake, the shore lay clear and low in the sunshine, fringed
+darkly at certain points by rows of dwarf trees; and dotted here
+and there, in the opener spaces, with windmills and reed-thatched
+cottages, of puddled mud. Southward, the great sheet of water
+narrowed gradually to a little group of close-nestling islands
+which closed the prospect; while to the east a long, gently
+undulating line of reeds followed the windings of the Broad, and
+shut out all view of the watery wastes beyond. So clear and so
+light was the summer air that the one cloud in the eastern
+quarter of the heaven was the smoke cloud left by a passing
+steamer three miles distant and more on the invisible sea. When
+the voices of the pleasure party were still, not a sound rose,
+far or near, but the faint ripple at the bows, as the men, with
+slow, deliberate strokes of their long poles, pressed the boat
+forward softly over the shallow water. The world and the world's
+turmoil seemed left behind forever on the land; the silence was
+the silence of enchantment--the delicious interflow of the soft
+purity of the sky and the bright tranquillity of the lake.
+
+Established in perfect comfort in the boat--the major and his
+daughter on one side, the curate and his mother on the other, and
+Allan and young Pedgift between the two--the water party floated
+smoothly toward the little nest of islands at the end of the
+Broad. Miss Milroy was in raptures; Allan was delighted; and the
+major for once forgot his clock. Every one felt pleasurably, in
+their different ways, the quiet and beauty of the scene. Mrs.
+Pentecost, in her way, felt it like a clairvoyant--with closed
+eyes.
+
+"Look behind you, Mr. Armadale," whispered young Pedgift. "I
+think the parson's beginning to enjoy himself."
+
+An unwonted briskness--portentous apparently of coming
+speech--did certainly at that moment enliven the curate's manner.
+He jerked his head from side to side like a bird; he cleared his
+throat, and clasped his hands, and looked with a gentle interest
+at the company. Getting into spirits seemed, in the case of this
+excellent person, to be alarmingly like getting into the pulpit.
+
+"Even in this scene of tranquillity," said the Reverend Samuel,
+coming out softly with his first contribution to the society in
+the shape of a remark, "the Christian mind--led, so to speak,
+from one extreme to another--is forcibly recalled to the unstable
+nature of all earthly enjoyments. How if this calm should not
+last? How if the winds rose and the waters became agitated?"
+
+"You needn't alarm yourself about that, sir," said young Pedgift;
+"June's the fine season here--and you can swim."
+
+Mrs. Pentecost (mesmerically affected, in all probability, by the
+near neighborhood of her son) opened her eyes suddenly and asked,
+with her customary eagerness. "What does my boy say?"
+
+The Reverend Samuel repeated his words in the key that suited his
+mother's infirmity. The old lady nodded in high approval, and
+pursued her son's train of thought through the medium of a
+quotation.
+
+"Ah!" sighed Mrs. Pentecost, with infinite relish, "He rides the
+whirlwind, Sammy, and directs the storm!"
+
+"Noble words!" said the Reverend Samuel. "Noble and consoling
+words!"
+
+"I say," whispered Allan, "if he goes on much longer in that way,
+what's to be done?"
+
+"I told you, papa, it was a risk to ask them," added Miss Milroy,
+in another whisper.
+
+"My dear!" remonstrated the major. "We knew nobody else in the
+neighborhood, and, as Mr. Armadale kindly suggested our bringing
+our friends, what could we do?"
+
+"We can't upset the boat," remarked young Pedgift, with sardonic
+gravity. "It's a lifeboat, unfortunately. May I venture to
+suggest putting something into the reverend gentleman's mouth,
+Mr. Armadale? It's close on three o'clock. What do you say to
+ringing the dinner-bell, sir?"
+
+Never was the right man more entirely in the right place than
+Pedgift Junior at the picnic. In ten minutes more the boat was
+brought to a stand-still among the reeds; the Thorpe Ambrose
+hampers were unpacked on the roof of the cabin; and the current
+of the curate's eloquence was checked for the day.
+
+How inestimably important in its moral results--and therefore how
+praiseworthy in itself--is the act of eating and drinking! The
+social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a better
+husband, father, and brother after dinner than before is,
+digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man. What hidden
+charms of character disclose themselves, what dormant
+amiabilities awaken, when our common humanity gathers together to
+pour out the gastric juice! At the opening of the hampers from
+Thorpe Ambrose, sweet Sociability (offspring of the happy union
+of Civilization and Mrs. Gripper) exhaled among the boating
+party, and melted in one friendly fusion the discordant elements
+of which that party had hitherto been composed. Now did the
+Reverend Samuel Pentecost, whose light had hitherto been hidden
+under a bushel, prove at last that he could do something by
+proving that he could eat. Now did Pedgift Junior shine brighter
+than ever he had shone yet in gems of caustic humor and exquisite
+fertilities of resource. Now did the squire, and the squire's
+charming guest, prove the triple connection between Champagne
+that sparkles, Love that grows bolder, and Eyes whose vocabulary
+is without the word No. Now did cheerful old times come back to
+the major's memory, and cheerful old stories not told for years
+find their way to the major's lips. And now did Mrs. Pentecost,
+coming out wakefully in the whole force of her estimable maternal
+character, seize on a supplementary fork, and ply that useful
+instrument incessantly between the choicest morsels in the whole
+round of dishes, and the few vacant places left available on the
+Reverend Samuel's plate. "Don't laugh at my son," cried the old
+lady, observing the merriment which her proceedings produced
+among the company. "It's my fault, poor dear--_I_ make him eat!"
+And there are men in this world who, seeing virtues such as these
+developed at the table, as they are developed nowhere else, can,
+nevertheless, rank the glorious privilege of dining with the
+smallest of the diurnal personal worries which necessity imposes
+on mankind--with buttoning your waistcoat, for example, or lacing
+your stays! Trust no such monster as this with your tender
+secrets, your loves and hatreds, your hopes and fears. His heart
+is uncorrected by his stomach, and the social virtues are not in
+him.
+
+The last mellow hours of the day and the first cool breezes of
+the long summer evening had met before the dishes were all laid
+waste, and the bottles as empty as bottles should be. This point
+in the proceedings attained, the picnic party looked lazily at
+Pedgift Junior to know what was to be done next. That
+inexhaustible functionary was equal as ever to all the calls on
+him. He had a new amusement ready before the quickest of the
+company could so much as ask him what that amusement was to be.
+
+"Fond of music on the water, Miss Milroy?" he asked, in his
+airiest and pleasantest manner.
+
+Miss Milroy adored music, both on the water and the land--always
+excepting the one case when she was practicing the art herself on
+the piano at home.
+
+"We'll get out of the reeds first," said young Pedgift. He gave
+his orders to the boatmen, dived briskly into the little cabin,
+and reappeared with a concertina in his hand. "Neat, Miss Milroy,
+isn't it?" he observed, pointing to his initials, inlaid on the
+instrument in mother-of-pearl. "My name's Augustus, like my
+father's. Some of my friends knock off the 'A,' and call me
+'Gustus Junior.' A small joke goes a long way among friends,
+doesn't it, Mr. Armadale? I sing a little to my own
+accompaniment, ladies and gentlemen; and, if quite agreeable, I
+shall be proud and happy to do my best."
+
+"Stop!" cried Mrs. Pentecost; "I dote on music."
+
+With this formidable announcement, the old lady opened a
+prodigious leather bag, from
+ which she never parted night or day, and took out an ear-trumpet
+of the old-fashioned kind--something between a key-bugle and a
+French horn. "I don't care to use the thing generally," explained
+Mrs. Pentecost, "because I'm afraid of its making me deafer than
+ever. But I can't and won't miss the music. I dote on music. If
+you'll hold the other end, Sammy, I'll stick it in my ear.
+Neelie, my dear, tell him to begin."
+
+Young Pedgift was troubled with no nervous hesitation. He began
+at once, not with songs of the light and modern kind, such as
+might have been expected from an amateur of his age and
+character, but with declamatory and patriotic bursts of poetry,
+set to the bold and blatant music which the people of England
+loved dearly at the earlier part of the present century, and
+which, whenever they can get it, they love dearly still. "The
+Death of Marmion," "The Battle of the Baltic," "The Bay of
+Biscay," "Nelson," under various vocal aspects, as exhibited by
+the late Braham--these were the songs in which the roaring
+concertina and strident tenor of Gustus Junior exulted together.
+"Tell me when you're tired, ladies and gentlemen," said the
+minstrel solicitor. "There's no conceit about _me._ Will you have
+a little sentiment by way of variety? Shall I wind up with 'The
+Mistletoe Bough' and 'Poor Mary Anne'?"
+
+Having favored his audience with those two cheerful melodies,
+young Pedgift respectfully requested the rest of the company to
+follow his vocal example in turn, offering, in every case, to
+play "a running accompaniment" impromptu, if the singer would
+only be so obliging as to favor him with the key-note.
+
+"Go on, somebody!" cried Mrs. Pentecost, eagerly. "I tell you
+again, I dote on music. We haven't had half enough yet, have we,
+Sammy?"
+
+The Reverend Samuel made no reply. The unhappy man had reasons of
+his own--not exactly in his bosom, but a little lower--for
+remaining silent, in the midst of the general hilarity and the
+general applause. Alas for humanity! Even maternal love is
+alloyed with mortal fallibility. Owing much already to his
+excellent mother, the Reverend Samuel was now additionally
+indebted to her for a smart indigestion.
+
+Nobody, however, noticed as yet the signs and tokens of internal
+revolution in the curate's face. Everybody was occupied in
+entreating everybody else to sing. Miss Milroy appealed to the
+founder of the feast. "Do sing something, Mr. Armadale," she
+said; "I should so like to hear you!"
+
+"If you once begin, sir," added the cheerful Pedgift, "you'll
+find it get uncommonly easy as you go on. Music is a science
+which requires to be taken by the throat at starting."
+
+"With all my heart," said Allan, in his good-humored way. "I know
+lots of tunes, but the worst of it is, the words escape me. I
+wonder if I can remember one of Moore's Melodies? My poor mother
+used to be fond of teaching me Moore's Melodies when I was a
+boy."
+
+"Whose melodies?" asked Mrs. Pentecost. "Moore's? Aha! I know Tom
+Moore heart."
+
+"Perhaps in that case you will he good enough to help me, ma'am,
+if my memory breaks down," rejoined Allan. "I'll take the easiest
+melody in the whole collection, if you'll allow me. Everybody
+knows it--'Eveleen's Bower.' "
+
+"I'm familiar, in a general sort of way, with the national
+melodies of England, Scotland, and Ireland," said Pedgift Junior.
+"I'll accompany you, sir, with the greatest pleasure. This is the
+sort of thing, I think." He seated himself cross-legged on the
+roof of the cabin, and burst into a complicated musical
+improvisation wonderful to hear--a mixture of instrumental
+flourishes and groans; a jig corrected by a dirge, and a dirge
+enlivened by a jig. "That's the sort of thing," said young
+Pedgift, with his smile of supreme confidence. "Fire away, sir!"
+
+Mrs. Pentecost elevated her trumpet, and Allan elevated his
+voice. "Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bower--" He
+stopped; the accompaniment stopped; the audience waited. "It's a
+most extraordinary thing," said Allan; "I thought I had the next
+line on the tip of my tongue, and it seems to have escaped me.
+I'll begin again, if you have no objection. 'Oh, weep for the
+hour when to Eveleen's Bower--' "
+
+" 'The lord of the valley with false vows came,' " said Mrs.
+Pentecost.
+
+"Thank you, ma'am," said Allan. "Now I shall get on smoothly.
+'Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bower, the lord of the
+valley with false vows came. The moon was shining bright--' "
+
+"No!" said Mrs. Pentecost.
+
+"I beg your pardon, ma'am," remonstrated Allan. " 'The moon was.
+shining bright--' "
+
+"The moon wasn't doing anything of the kind," said Mrs.
+Pentecost.
+
+Pedgift Junior, foreseeing a dispute, persevered _sotto voce_
+with the accompaniment, in the interests of harmony.
+
+"Moore's own words, ma'am," said Allan, "in my mother's copy of
+the Melodies."
+
+"Your mother's copy was wrong," retorted Mrs. Pentecost. "Didn't
+I tell you just now that I knew Tom Moore by heart?"
+
+Pedgift Junior's peace-making concertina still flourished and
+groaned in the minor key.
+
+"Well, what _did_ the moon do?" asked Allan, in despair.
+
+"What the moon _ought_ to have done, sir, or Tom Moore wouldn't
+have written it so," rejoined Mrs. Pentecost. " 'The moon hid her
+light from the heaven that night, and wept behind her clouds o'er
+the maiden's shame!' I wish that young man would leave off
+playing," added Mrs. Pentecost, venting her rising irritation on
+Gustus Junior. "I've had enough of him--he tickles my ears."
+
+"Proud, I'm sure, ma'am," said the unblushing Pedgift. "The whole
+science of music consists in tickling the ears."
+
+"We seem to be drifting into a sort of argument," remarked Major
+Milroy, placidly. "Wouldn't it be better if Mr. Armadale went on
+with his song?"
+
+"Do go on, Mr. Armadale!" added the major's daughter. "Do go on,
+Mr. Pedgift!"
+
+"One of them doesn't know the words, and the other doesn't know
+the music," said Mrs. Pentecost. "Let them go on if they can!"
+
+"Sorry to disappoint you, ma'am," said Pedgift Junior; "I'm ready
+to go on myself to any extent. Now, Mr. Armadale!"
+
+Allan opened his lips to take up the unfinished melody where he
+had last left it. Before he could utter a note, the curate
+suddenly rose, with a ghastly face, and a hand pressed
+convulsively over the middle region of his waistcoat.
+
+"What's the matter?" cried the whole boating party in chorus.
+
+"I am exceedingly unwell," said the Reverend Samuel Pentecost.
+The boat was instantly in a state of confusion. "Eveleen's Bower"
+expired on Allan's lips, and even the irrepressible concertina of
+Pedgift was silenced at last. The alarm proved to be quite
+needless. Mrs. Pentecost's son possessed a mother, and that
+mother had a bag. In two seconds the art of medicine occupied the
+place left vacant in the attention of the company by the art of
+music.
+
+"Rub it gently, Sammy," said Mrs. Pentecost. "I'll get out the
+bottles and give you a dose. It's his poor stomach, major. Hold
+my trumpet, somebody--and stop the boat. You take that bottle,
+Neelie, my dear; and you take this one, Mr. Armadale; and give
+them to me as I want them. Ah, poor dear, I know what's the
+matter with him! Want of power _here,_ major--cold, acid, and
+flabby. Ginger to warm him; soda to correct him; sal volatile to
+hold him up. There, Sammy! drink it before it settles; and then
+go and lie down, my dear, in that dog-kennel of a place they call
+the cabin. No more music!" added Mrs. Pentecost, shaking her
+forefinger at the proprietor of the concertina--"unless it's a
+hymn, and that I don't object to."
+
+Nobody appearing to be in a fit frame of mind for singing a hymn,
+the all-accomplished Pedgift drew upon his stores of local
+knowledge, and produced a new idea. The course of the boat was
+immediately changed under his direction. In a few minutes more,
+the company found themselves in a little island creek, with a
+lonely cottage at the far end of it, and a perfect forest of
+reeds closing the view all round them. "What do you say, ladies
+and gentlemen, to stepping on shore and seeing what a
+reed-cutter's cottage looks like?" suggested young Pedgift.
+
+"We say yes, to be sure," answered Allan. "I think our spirits
+have been a little dashed by Mr. Pentecos t's illness and Mrs.
+Pentecost's bag," he added, in a whisper to Miss Milroy. "A
+change of this sort is the very thing we want to set us all going
+again."
+
+He and young Pedgift handed Miss Milroy out of the boat. The
+major followed. Mrs. Pentecost sat immovable as the Egyptian
+Sphinx, with her bag on her knees, mounting guard over "Sammy" in
+the cabin.
+
+"We must keep the fun going, sir," said Allan, as he helped the
+major over the side of the boat. "We haven't half done yet with
+the enjoyment of the day."
+
+His voice seconded his hearty belief in his own prediction to
+such good purpose that even Mrs. Pentecost heard him, and
+ominously shook her head.
+
+"Ah!" sighed the curate's mother, "if you were as old as I am,
+young gentleman, you wouldn't feel quite so sure of the enjoyment
+of the day!"
+
+So, in rebuke of the rashness of youth, spoke the caution of age.
+The negative view is notoriously the safe view, all the world
+over, and the Pentecost philosophy is, as a necessary
+consequence, generally in the right.
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+FATE OR CHANCE?
+
+IT was close on six o'clock when Allan and his friends left the
+boat, and the evening influence was creeping already, in its
+mystery and its stillness, over the watery solitude of the
+Broads.
+
+The shore in these wild regions was not like the shore elsewhere.
+Firm as it looked, the garden ground in front of the
+reed-cutter's cottage was floating ground, that rose and fell and
+oozed into puddles under the pressure of the foot. The boatmen
+who guided the visitors warned them to keep to the path, and
+pointed through gaps in the reeds and pollards to grassy places,
+on which strangers would have walked confidently, where the crust
+of earth was not strong enough to bear the weight of a child over
+the unfathomed depths of slime and water beneath. The solitary
+cottage, built of planks pitched black, stood on ground that had
+been steadied and strengthened by resting it on piles. A little
+wooden tower rose at one end of the roof, and served as a lookout
+post in the fowling season. From this elevation the eye ranged
+far and wide over a wilderness of winding water and lonesome
+marsh. If the reed-cutter had lost his boat, he would have been
+as completely isolated from all communication with town or
+village as if his place of abode had been a light-vessel instead
+of a cottage. Neither he nor his family complained of their
+solitude, or looked in any way the rougher or the worse for it.
+His wife received the visitors hospitably, in a snug little room,
+with a raftered ceiling, and windows which looked like windows in
+a cabin on board ship. His wife's father told stories of the
+famous days when the smugglers came up from the sea at night,
+rowing through the net-work of rivers with muffled oars till they
+gained the lonely Broads, and sank their spirit casks in the
+water, far from the coast-guard's reach. His wild little children
+played at hide-and-seek with the visitors; and the visitors
+ranged in and out of the cottage, and round and round the morsel
+of firm earth on which it stood, surprised and delighted by the
+novelty of all they saw. The one person who noticed the advance
+of the evening--the one person who thought of the flying time and
+the stationary Pentecosts in the boat--was young Pedgift. That
+experienced pilot of the Broads looked askance at his watch, and
+drew Allan aside at the first opportunity.
+
+"I don't wish to hurry you, Mr. Armadale," said Pedgift Junior;
+"but the time is getting on, and there's a lady in the case. "
+
+"A lady?" repeated Allan.
+
+"Yes, sir," rejoined young Pedgift. "A lady from London;
+connected (if you'll allow me to jog your memory) with a
+pony-chaise and white harness."
+
+"Good heavens, the governess!" cried Allan. "Why, we have
+forgotten all about her!"
+
+"Don't be alarmed, sir; there's plenty of time, if we only get
+into the boat again. This is how it stands, Mr. Armadale. We
+settled, if you remember, to have the gypsy tea-making at the
+next 'Broad' to this--Hurle Mere?"
+
+"Certainly," said Allan. "Hurle Mere is the place where my friend
+Midwinter has promised to come and meet us."
+
+"Hurle Mere is where the governess will be, sir, if your coachman
+follows my directions," pursued young Pedgift. "We have got
+nearly an hour's punting to do, along the twists and turns of the
+narrow waters (which they call The Sounds here) between this and
+Hurle Mere; and according to my calculations we must get on board
+again in five minutes, if we are to be in time to meet the
+governess and to meet your friend."
+
+"We mustn't miss my friend on any account," said Allan; "or the
+governess, either, of course. I'll tell the major."
+
+Major Milroy was at that moment preparing to mount the wooden
+watch-tower of the cottage to see the view. The ever useful
+Pedgift volunteered to go up with him, and rattle off all the
+necessary local explanations in half the time which the
+reed-cutter would occupy in describing his own neighborhood to a
+stranger.
+
+Allan remained standing in front of the cottage, more quiet and
+more thoughtful than usual. His interview with young Pedgift had
+brought his absent friend to his memory for the first time since
+the picnic party had started. He was surprised that Midwinter, so
+much in his thoughts on all other occasions, should have been so
+long out of his thoughts now. Something troubled him, like a
+sense of self-reproach, as his mind reverted to the faithful
+friend at home, toiling hard over the steward's books, in his
+interests and for his sake. "Dear old fellow," thought Allan, "I
+shall be so glad to see him at the Mere; the day's pleasure won't
+be complete till he joins us!"
+
+"Should I be right or wrong, Mr. Armadale, if I guessed that you
+were thinking of somebody?" asked a voice, softly, behind him.
+
+Allan turned, and found the majorÕs daughter at his side. Miss
+Milroy (not unmindful of a certain tender interview which had
+taken place behind a carriage) had noticed her admirer standing
+thoughtfully by himself, and had determined on giving him another
+opportunity, while her father and young Pedgift were at the top
+of the watch-tower.
+
+"You know everything," said Allan, smiling. "I _was_ thinking of
+somebody."
+
+Miss Milroy stole a glance at him--a glance of gentle
+encouragement. There could be but one human creature in Mr.
+Armadale's mind after what had passed between them that morning!
+It would be only an act of mercy to take him back again at once
+to the interrupted conversation of a few hours since on the
+subject of names.
+
+"I have bean thinking of somebody, too," she said, half-inviting,
+half-repelling the coming avowal. "If I tell you the first letter
+of my Somebody's name, will you tell me the first letter of
+yours?"
+
+"I will tell you anything you like," rejoined Allan, with the
+utmost enthusiasm.
+
+She still shrank coquettishly from the very subject that she
+wanted to approach. "Tell me your letter first," she said, in low
+tones, looking away from him.
+
+Allan laughed. "M," he said, "is my first letter."
+
+She started a little. Strange that he should be thinking of her
+by her surname instead of her Christian name; but it mattered
+little as long as he _was_ thinking of her.
+
+"What is your letter?" asked Allan.
+
+She blushed and smiled. "A--if you will have it!" she answered,
+in a reluctant little whisper. She stole another look at him, and
+luxuriously protracted her enjoyment of the coming avowal once
+more. "How many syllables is the name in?" she asked, drawing
+patterns shyly on the ground with the end of the parasol.
+
+No man with the slightest knowledge of the sex would have been
+rash enough, in Allan's position, to tell her the truth. Allan,
+who knew nothing whatever of woman's natures, and who told the
+truth right and left in all mortal emergencies, answered as if he
+had been under examination in a court of justice.
+
+"It's a name in three syllables," he said.
+
+Miss Milroy's downcast eyes flashed up at him like lightning.
+"Three!" she repeated in the blankest astonishment.
+
+Allan was too inveterately straightforward to take the warning
+even now. "I'm not strong at my spelling, I know," he said, with
+his lighthearted laugh. "But I don't think I'm wrong, in calling
+Midwinter a name in t hree syllables. I was thinking of my
+friend; but never mind my thoughts. Tell me who A is--tell me
+whom _you_ were thinking of?"
+
+"Of the first letter of the alphabet, Mr. Armadale, and I beg
+positively to inform you of nothing more!"
+
+With that annihilating answer the major's daughter put up her
+parasol and walked back by herself to the boat.
+
+Allan stood petrified with amazement. If Miss Milroy had actually
+boxed his ears (and there is no denying that she had privately
+longed to devote her hand to that purpose), he could hardly have
+felt more bewildered than he felt now. "What on earth have I
+done?" he asked himself, helplessly, as the major and young
+Pedgift joined him, and the three walked down together to the
+water-side. "I wonder what she'll say to me next?"
+
+She said absolutely nothing; she never so much as looked at Allan
+when he took his place in the boat. There she sat, with her eyes
+and her complexion both much brighter than usual, taking the
+deepest interest in the curate's progress toward recovery; in the
+state of Mrs. Pentecost's spirits; in Pedgift Junior (for whom
+she ostentatiously made room enough to let him sit beside her);
+in the scenery and the reed-cutter's cottage; in everybody and
+everything but Allan--whom she would have married with the
+greatest pleasure five minutes since. "I'll never forgive him,"
+thought the major's daughter. "To be thinking of that ill-bred
+wretch when I was thinking of _him;_ and to make me all but
+confess it before I found him out! Thank Heaven, Mr. Pedgift is
+in the boat!"
+
+In this frame of mind Miss Neelie applied herself forthwith to
+the fascination of Pedgift and the discomfiture of Allan. "Oh,
+Mr. Pedgift, how extremely clever and kind of you to think of
+showing us that sweet cottage! Lonely, Mr. Armadale? I don't
+think it's lonely at all; I should like of all things to live
+there. What would this picnic have been without you, Mr. Pedgift;
+you can't think how I have enjoyed it since we got into the boat.
+Cool, Mr. Armadale? What can you possibly mean by saying it's
+cool; it's the warmest evening we've had this summer. And the
+music, Mr. Pedgift; how nice it was of you to bring your
+concertina! I wonder if I could accompany you on the piano? I
+would so like to try. Oh, yes, Mr. Armadale, no doubt you meant
+to do something musical, too, and I dare say you sing very well
+when you know the words; but, to tell you the truth, I always
+did, and always shall, hate Moore's Melodies!"
+
+Thus, with merciless dexterity of manipulation, did Miss Milroy
+work that sharpest female weapon of offense, the tongue; and thus
+she would have used it for some time longer, if Allan had only
+shown the necessary jealousy, or if Pedgift had only afforded the
+necessary encouragement. But adverse fortune had decreed that she
+should select for her victims two men essentially unassailable
+under existing circumstances. Allan was too innocent of all
+knowledge of female subtleties and susceptibilities to understand
+anything, except that the charming Neelie was unreasonably out of
+temper with him without the slightest cause. The wary Pedgift, as
+became one of the quick-witted youth of the present generation,
+submitted to female influence, with his eye fixed immovably all
+the time on his own interests. Many a young man of the past
+generation, who was no fool, has sacrificed everything for love.
+Not one young man in ten thousand of the present generation,
+_except_ the fools, has sacrificed a half-penny. The daughters of
+Eve still inherit their mother's merits and commit their mother's
+faults. But the sons of Adam, in these latter days, are men who
+would have handed the famous apple back with a bow, and a
+"Thanks, no; it might get me into a scrape." When
+Allan--surprised and disappointed--moved away out of Miss
+Milroy's reach to the forward part of the boat, Pedgift Junior
+rose and followed him. "You're a very nice girl," thought this
+shrewdly sensible young man; "but a client's a client; and I am
+sorry to inform you, miss, it won't do." He set himself at once
+to rouse Allan's spirits by diverting his attention to a new
+subject. There was to be a regatta that autumn on one of the
+Broads, and his client's opinion as a yachtsman might be valuable
+to the committee. "Something new, I should think, to you, sir, in
+a sailing match on fresh water?" he said, in his most
+ingratiatory manner. And Allan, instantly interested, answered,
+"Quite new. Do tell me about it!"
+
+As for the rest of the party at the other end of the boat, they
+were in a fair way to confirm Mrs. Pentecost's doubts whether the
+hilarity of the picnic would last the day out. Poor Neelie's
+natural feeling of irritation under the disappointment which
+Allan's awkwardness had inflicted on her was now exasperated into
+silent and settled resentment by her own keen sense of
+humiliation and defeat. The major had relapsed into his
+habitually dreamy, absent manner; his mind was turning
+monotonously with the wheels of his clock. The curate still
+secluded his indigestion from public view in the innermost
+recesses of the cabin; and the curate's mother, with a second
+dose ready at a moment's notice, sat on guard at the door. Women
+of Mrs. Pentecost's age and character generally enjoy their own
+bad spirits. "This," sighed the old lady, wagging her head with a
+smile of sour satisfaction "is what you call a day's pleasure, is
+it? Ah, what fools we all were to leave our comfortable homes!"
+
+Meanwhile the boat floated smoothly along the windings of the
+watery labyrinth which lay between the two Broads. The view on
+either side was now limited to nothing but interminable rows of
+reeds. Not a sound was heard, far or near; not so much as a
+glimpse of cultivated or inhabited land appeared anywhere. "A
+trifle dreary hereabouts, Mr. Armadale," said the ever-cheerful
+Pedgift. "But we are just out of it now. Look ahead, sir! Here we
+are at Hurle Mere."
+
+The reeds opened back on the right hand and the left, and the
+boat glided suddenly into the wide circle of a pool. Round the
+nearer half of the circle, the eternal reeds still fringed the
+margin of the water. Round the further half, the land appeared
+again, here rolling back from the pool in desolate sand-hills,
+there rising above it in a sweep of grassy shore. At one point
+the ground was occupied by a plantation, and at another by the
+out-buildings of a lonely old red brick house, with a strip of
+by-road near, that skirted the garden wall and ended at the pool.
+The sun was sinking in the clear heaven, and the water, where the
+sun's reflection failed to tinge it, was beginning to look black
+and cold. The solitude that had been soothing, the silence that
+had felt like an enchantment, on the other Broad, in the day's
+vigorous prime, was a solitude that saddened here--a silence that
+struck cold, in the stillness and melancholy of the day's
+decline.
+
+The course of the boat was directed across the Mere to a creek in
+the grassy shore. One or two of the little flat-bottomed punts
+peculiar to the Broads lay in the creek; and the reed cutters to
+whom the punts belonged, surprised at the appearance of
+strangers, came out, staring silently, from behind an angle of
+the old garden wall. Not another sign of life was visible
+anywhere. No pony-chaise had been seen by the reed cutters; no
+stranger, either man or woman, had approached the shores of Hurle
+Mere that day.
+
+Young Pedgift took another look at his watch, and addressed
+himself to Miss Milroy. "You may, or may not, see the governess
+when you get back to Thorpe Ambrose," he said; "but, as the time
+stands now, you won't see her here. You know best, Mr. Armadale,"
+he added, turning to Allan, "whether your friend is to be
+depended on to keep his appointment?"
+
+"I am certain he is to be depended on," replied Allan, looking
+about him--in unconcealed disappointment at Midwinter's absence.
+
+"Very good," pursued Pedgift Junior. "If we light the fire for
+our gypsy tea-making on the open ground there, your friend may
+find us out, sir, by the smoke. That's the Indian dodge for
+picking up a lost man on the prairie, Miss Milroy and it's pretty
+nearly wild enough (isn't it?) to be a prairie here!"
+
+There are some tem ptations--principally those of the smaller
+kind--which it is not in the defensive capacity of female human
+nature to resist. The temptation to direct the whole force of her
+influence, as the one young lady of the party, toward the instant
+overthrow of Allan's arrangement for meeting his friend, was too
+much for the major's daughter. She turned on the smiling Pedgift
+with a look which ought to have overwhelmed him. But who ever
+overwhelmed a solicitor?
+
+"I think it's the most lonely, dreary, hideous place I ever saw
+in my life!" said Miss Neelie. "If you insist on making tea here,
+Mr. Pedgift, don't make any for me. No! I shall stop in the boat;
+and, though I am absolutely dying with thirst, I shall touch
+nothing till we get back again to the other Broad!"
+
+The major opened his lips to remonstrate. To his daughter's
+infinite delight, Mrs. Pentecost rose from her seat before he
+could say a word, and, after surveying the whole landward
+prospect, and seeing nothing in the shape of a vehicle anywhere,
+asked indignantly whether they were going all the way back again
+to the place where they had left the carriages in the middle of
+the day. On ascertaining that this was, in fact, the arrangement
+proposed, and that, from the nature of the country, the carriages
+could not have been ordered round to Hurle Mere without, in the
+first instance, sending them the whole of the way back to Thorpe
+Ambrose, Mrs. Pentecost (speaking in her son's interests)
+instantly declared that no earthly power should induce her to be
+out on the water after dark. "Call me a boat!" cried the old
+lady, in great agitation. "Wherever there's water, there's a
+night mist, and wherever there's a night mist, my son Samuel
+catches cold. Don't talk to _me_ about your moonlight and your
+tea-making--you're all mad! Hi! you two men there!" cried Mrs.
+Pentecost, hailing the silent reed cutters on shore. "Sixpence
+apiece for you, if you'll take me and my son back in your boat!"
+
+Before young Pedgift could interfere, Allan himself settled the
+difficulty this time, with perfect patience and good temper.
+
+"I can't think, Mrs. Pentecost, of your going back in any boat
+but the boat you have come out in," he said. "There is not the
+least need (as you and Miss Milroy don't like the place) for
+anybody to go on shore here but me. I _must_ go on shore. My
+friend Midwinter never broke his promise to me yet; and I can't
+consent to leave Hurle Mere as long as there is a chance of his
+keeping his appointment. But there's not the least reason in the
+world why I should stand in the way on that account. You have the
+major and Mr. Pedgift to take care of you; and you can get back
+to the carriages before dark, if you go at once. I will wait
+here, and give my friend half an hour more, and then I can follow
+you in one of the reed-cutters' boats."
+
+"That's the most sensible thing, Mr. Armadale, you've said
+to-day," remarked Mrs. Pentecost, seating herself again in a
+violent hurry
+
+"Tell them to be quick! " cried the old lady, shaking her fist at
+the boatmen. "Tell them to be quick!"
+
+Allan gave the necessary directions, and stepped on shore. The
+wary Pedgift (sticking fast to his client) tried to follow.
+
+"We can't leave you here alone, sir," he said, protesting eagerly
+in a whisper. "Let the major take care of the ladies, and let me
+keep you company at the Mere."
+
+"No, no!" said Allan, pressing him back. "They're all in low
+spirits on board. If you want to be of service to me, stop like a
+good fellow where you are, and do your best to keep the thing
+going."
+
+He waved his hand, and the men pushed the boat off from the
+shore. The others all waved their hands in return except the
+major's daughter, who sat apart from the rest, with her face
+hidden under her parasol. The tears stood thick in Neelie's eyes.
+Her last angry feeling against Allan died out, and her heart went
+back to him penitently the moment he left the boat. "How good he
+is to us all!" she thought, "and what a wretch I am!" She got up
+with every generous impulse in her nature urging her to make
+atonement to him. She got up, reckless of appearances and looked
+after him with eager eyes and flushed checks, as he stood alone
+on the shore. "Don't be long, Mr. Armadale!" she said, with a
+desperate disregard of what the rest of the company thought of
+her.
+
+The boat was already far out in the water, and with all Neelie's
+resolution the words were spoken in a faint little voice, which
+failed to reach Allan's ears. The one sound he heard, as the boat
+gained the opposite extremity of the Mere, and disappeared slowly
+among the reeds, was the sound of the concertina. The
+indefatigable Pedgift was keeping things going--evidently under
+the auspices of Mrs. Pentecost--by performing a sacred melody.
+
+Left by himself, Allan lit a cigar, and took a turn backward and
+forward on the shore. "She might have said a word to me at
+parting!" he thought. "I've done everything for the best; I've as
+good as told her how fond of her I am, and this is the way she
+treats me!" He stopped, and stood looking absently at the sinking
+sun, and the fast-darkening waters of the Mere. Some inscrutable
+influence in the scene forced its way stealthily into his mind,
+and diverted his thoughts from Miss Milroy to his absent friend.
+He started, and looked about him.
+
+The reed-cutters had gone back to their retreat behind the angle
+of the wall, not a living creature was visible, not a sound rose
+anywhere along the dreary shore. Even Allan's spirits began to
+get depressed. It was nearly an hour after the time when
+Midwinter had promised to be at Hurle Mere. He had himself
+arranged to walk to the pool (with a stable-boy from Thorpe
+Ambrose as his guide), by lanes and footpaths which shortened the
+distance by the road. The boy knew the country well, and
+Midwinter was habitually punctual at all his appointments. Had
+anything gone wrong at Thorpe Ambrose? Had some accident happened
+on the way? Determined to remain no longer doubting and idling by
+himself, Allan made up his mind to walk inland from the Mere, on
+the chance of meeting his friend. He went round at once to the
+angle in the wall, and asked one of the reedcutters to show him
+the footpath to Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+The man led him away from the road, and pointed to a barely
+perceptible break in the outer trees of the plantation. After
+pausing for one more useless look around him, Allan turned his
+back on the Mere and made for the trees.
+
+For a few paces, the path ran straight through the plantation.
+Thence it took a sudden turn; and the water and the open country
+became both lost to view. Allan steadily followed the grassy
+track before him, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, until he
+came to another winding of the path. Turning in the new
+direction, he saw dimly a human figure sitting alone at the foot
+of one of the trees. Two steps nearer were enough to make the
+figure familiar to him. "Midwinter!" he exclaimed, in
+astonishment. "This is not the place where I was to meet you!
+What are you waiting for here?"
+
+Midwinter rose, without answering. The evening dimness among the
+trees, which obscured his face, made his silence doubly
+perplexing.
+
+Allan went on eagerly questioning him. "Did you come here by
+yourself?" he asked. "I thought the boy was to guide you?"
+
+This time Midwinter answered. "When we got as far as these
+trees," he said, "I sent the boy back. He told me I was close to
+the place, and couldn't miss it."
+
+"What made you stop here when he left you?" reiterated Allan.
+"Why didn't you walk on?"
+
+"Don't despise me," answered the other. "I hadn't the courage!"
+
+"Not the courage?" repeated Allan. He paused a moment. "Oh, I
+know!" he resumed, putting his hand gayly on Midwinter's
+shoulder. "You're still shy of the Milroys. What nonsense, when I
+told you myself that your peace was made at the cottage!"
+
+"I wasn't thinking, Allan, of your friends at the cottage. The
+truth is, I'm hardly myself to-day. I am ill and unnerved;
+trifles startle me." He stopped, and shrank away, under the
+anxious scrutiny of Allan's eyes. "If you _will_ have it," he
+burst out, abruptly, "the horror of that night on board the Wreck
+has got me again; there's a dreadful op pression on my head;
+there's a dreadful sinking at my heart. I am afraid of something
+happening to us, if we don't part before the day is out. I can't
+break my promise to you; for God's sake, release me from it, and
+let me go back!"
+
+Remonstrance, to any one who knew Midwinter, was plainly useless
+at that moment. Allan humored him. "Come out of this dark,
+airless place," he said, "and we will talk about it. The water
+and the open sky are within a stone's throw of us. I hate a wood
+in the evening; it even gives _me_ the horrors. You have been
+working too hard over the steward's books. Come and breathe
+freely in the blessed open air."
+
+Midwinter stopped, considered for a moment, and suddenly
+submitted.
+
+"You're right," he said, "and I'm wrong, as usual. I'm wasting
+time and distressing you to no purpose. What folly to ask you to
+let me go back! Suppose you had said yes?"
+
+"Well?" asked Allan.
+
+"Well," repeated Midwinter, "something would have happened at the
+first step to stop me, that's all. Come on."
+
+They walked together in silence on the way to the Mere.
+
+At the last turn in the path Allan's cigar went out. While he
+stopped to light it again, Midwinter walked on before him, and
+was the first to come in sight of the open ground.
+
+Allan had just kindled the match, when, to his surprise, his
+friend came back to him round the turn in the path. There was
+light enough to show objects more clearly in this part of the
+plantation. The match, as Midwinter faced him, dropped on the
+instant from Allan's hand.
+
+"Good God!" he cried, starting back, "you look as you looked on
+board the Wreck!"
+
+Midwinter held up his band for silence. He spoke with his wild
+eyes riveted on Allan's face, with his white lips close at
+Allan's ear.
+
+"You remember how I _looked,_" he answered, in a whisper. "Do you
+remember what I _said_ when you and the doctor were talking of
+the Dream?"
+
+"I have forgotten the Dream," said Allan.
+
+As he made that answer, Midwinter took his hand, and led him
+round the last turn in the path.
+
+"Do you remember it now?" he asked, and pointed to the Mere.
+
+The sun was sinking in the cloudless westward heaven. The waters
+of the Mere lay beneath, tinged red by the dying light. The open
+country stretched away, darkening drearily already on the right
+hand and the left. And on the near margin of the pool, where all
+had been solitude before, there now stood, fronting the sunset,
+the figure of a woman.
+
+The two Armadales stood together in silence, and looked at the
+lonely figure and the dreary view.
+
+Midwinter was the first to speak.
+
+"Your own eyes have seen it," he said. "Now look at our own
+words."
+
+He opened the narrative of the Dream, and held it under Allan's
+eyes. His finger pointed to the lines which recorded the first
+Vision; his voice, sinking lower and lower, repeated the words:
+
+
+"The sense came to me of being left alone in the darkness.
+
+"I waited.
+
+"The darkness opened, and showed me the vision--as in a
+picture--of a broad, lonely pool, surrounded by open ground.
+Above the further margin of the pool I saw the cloudless western
+sky, red with the light of sunset.
+
+"On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of a
+Woman."
+
+He ceased, and let the hand which held the manuscript drop to his
+side. The other hand pointed to the lonely figure, standing with
+its back turned on them, fronting the setting sun.
+
+"There," he said, "stands the living Woman, in the Shadow's
+place! There speaks the first of the dream warnings to you and to
+me! Let the future time find us still together, and the second
+figure that stands in the Shadow's place will be Mine."
+
+Even Allan was silenced by the terrible certainty of conviction
+with which he spoke.
+
+In the pause that followed, the figure at the pool moved, and
+walked slowly away round the margin of the shore. Allan stepped
+out beyond the last of the trees, and gained a wider view of the
+open ground. The first object that met his eyes was the
+pony-chaise from Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+He turned back to Midwinter with a laugh of relief. "What
+nonsense have you been talking!" he said. "And what nonsense have
+I been listening to! It's the governess at last."
+
+Midwinter made no reply. Allan took him by the arm, and tried to
+lead him on. He released himself suddenly, and seized Allan with
+both hands, holding him back from the figure at the pool, as he
+had held him back from the cabin door on the deck of the timber
+ship. Once again the effort was in vain. Once again Allan broke
+away as easily as he had broken away in the past time.
+
+"One of us must speak to her," he said. "And if you won't, I
+will."
+
+He had only advanced a few steps toward the Mere, when he heard,
+or thought he heard, a voice faintly calling after him, once and
+once only, the word Farewell. He stopped, with a feeling of
+uneasy surprise, and looked round.
+
+"Was that you, Midwinter?" he asked.
+
+There was no answer. After hesitating a moment more, Allan
+returned to the plantation. Midwinter was gone.
+
+He looked back at the pool, doubtful in the new emergency what to
+do next. The lonely figure had altered its course in the
+interval; it had turned, and was advancing toward the trees.
+Allan had been evidently either heard or seen. It was impossible
+to leave a woman unbefriended, in that helpless position and in
+that solitary place. For the second time Allan went out from the
+trees to meet her.
+
+As he came within sight of her face, he stopped in ungovernable
+astonishment. The sudden revelation of her beauty, as she smiled
+and looked at him inquiringly, suspended the movement in his
+limbs and the words on his lips. A vague doubt beset him whether
+it was the governess, after all.
+
+He roused himself, and, advancing a few paces, mentioned his
+name. "May I ask," he added, "if I have the pleasure--?"
+
+The lady met him easily and gracefully half-way. "Major Milroy's
+governess," she said. "Miss Gwilt."
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE HOUSE-MAID'S FACE.
+
+ALL was quiet at Thorpe Ambrose. The hall was solitary, the rooms
+were dark. The servants, waiting for the supper hour in the
+garden at the back of the house, looked up at the clear heaven
+and the rising moon, and agreed that there was little prospect of
+the return of the picnic party until later in the night. The
+general opinion, led by the high authority of the cook, predicted
+that they might all sit down to supper without the least fear of
+being disturbed by the bell. Having arrived at this conclusion,
+the servants assembled round the table, and exactly at the moment
+when they sat down the bell rang.
+
+The footman, wondering, went up stairs to open the door, and
+found to his astonishment Midwinter waiting alone on the
+threshold, and looking (in the servant's opinion) miserably ill.
+He asked for a light, and, saying he wanted nothing else,
+withdrew at once to his room. The footman went back to his
+fellow-servants, and reported that something had certainly
+happened to his master's friend.
+
+On entering his room, Midwinter closed the door, and hurriedly
+filled a bag with the necessaries for traveling. This done, he
+took from a locked drawer, and placed in the breast pocket of his
+coat, some little presents which Allan had given him--a cigar
+case, a purse, and a set of studs in plain gold. Having possessed
+himself of these memorials, he snatched up the bag and laid his
+hand on the door. There, for the first time, he paused. There,
+the headlong haste of all his actions thus far suddenly ceased,
+and the hard despair in his face began to soften: he waited, with
+the door in his hand.
+
+Up to that moment he had been conscious of but one motive that
+animated him, but one purpose that he was resolute to achieve.
+"For Allan's sake!" he had said to himself, when he looked back
+toward the fatal landscape and saw his friend leaving him to meet
+the woman at the pool. "For Allan's sake!" he had said again,
+when he crossed the open country beyond the wood, and saw afar,
+in the gray twilight, the long line of embankment and the distant
+glimmer of the railway lamps beckoning him away already to the
+iron road.
+
+It was only when he now paused before he closed the door behind
+him--it was only when his own impetuous rapidity of action came
+for the first time to a check, that the nobler nature of the man
+rose in protest against the superstitious despair which was
+hurrying him from all that he held dear. His conviction of the
+terrible necessity of leaving Allan for Allan's good had not been
+shaken for an instant since he had seen the first Vision of the
+Dream realized on the shores of the Mere. But now, for the first
+time, his own heart rose against him in unanswerable rebuke. "Go,
+if you must and will! but remember the time when you were ill,
+and he sat by your bedside; friendless, and he opened his heart
+to you--and write, if you fear to speak; write and ask him to
+forgive you, before you leave him forever!"
+
+The half-opened door closed again softly. Midwinter sat down at
+the writing-table and took up the pen.
+
+He tried again and again, and yet again, to write the farewell
+words; he tried, till the floor all round him was littered with
+torn sheets of paper. Turn from them which way he would, the old
+times still came back and faced him reproachfully. The spacious
+bed-chamber in which he sat, narrowed, in spite of him, to the
+sick usherÕs garret at the west-country inn. The kind hand that
+had once patted him on the shoulder touched him again; the kind
+voice that had cheered him spoke unchangeably in the old friendly
+tones. He flung his arms on the table and dropped his head on
+them in tearless despair. The parting words that his tongue was
+powerless to utter his pen was powerless to write. Mercilessly in
+earnest, his superstition pointed to him to go while the time was
+his own. Mercilessly in earnest, his love for Allan held him back
+till the farewell plea for pardon and pity was written.
+
+He rose with a sudden resolution, and rang for the servant, "When
+Mr. Armadale returns," he said, "ask him to excuse my coming
+downstairs, and say that I am trying to get to sleep." He locked
+the door and put out the light, and sat down alone in the
+darkness. "The night will keep us apart," he said; "and time may
+help me to write. I may go in the early morning; I may go
+while--" The thought died in him uncompleted; and the sharp agony
+of the struggle forced to his lips the first cry of suffering
+that had escaped him yet.
+
+He waited in the darkness.
+
+As the time stole on, his senses remained mechanically awake, but
+his mind began to sink slowly under the heavy strain that had now
+been laid on it for some hours past. A dull vacancy possessed
+him; he made no attempt to kindle the light and write once more.
+He never started; he never moved to the open window, when the
+first sound of approaching wheels broke in on the silence of the
+night. He heard the carriages draw up at the door; he heard the
+horses champing their bits; he heard the voices of Allan and
+young Pedgift on the steps; and still he sat quiet in the
+darkness, and still no interest was aroused in him by the sounds
+that reached his ear from outside.
+
+The voices remained audible after the carriages had been driven
+away; the two young men were evidently lingering on the steps
+before they took leave of each other. Every word they said
+reached Midwinter through the open window. Their one subject of
+conversation was the new governess. Allan's voice was loud in her
+praise. He had never passed such an hour of delight in his life
+as the hour he had spent with Miss Gwilt in the boat, on the way
+from Hurle Mere to the picnic party waiting at the other Broad.
+Agreeing, on his side, with all that his client said in praise of
+the charming stranger, young Pedgift appeared to treat the
+subject, when it fell into his hands, from a different point of
+view. Miss Gwilt's attractions had not so entirely absorbed his
+attention as to prevent him from noticing the impression which
+the new governess had produced on her employer and her pupil.
+
+"There's a screw loose somewhere, sir, in Major Milroy's family,"
+said the voice of young Pedgift. "Did you notice how the major
+and his daughter looked when Miss Gwilt made her excuses for
+being late at the Mere? You don't remember? Do you remember what
+Miss Gwilt said?"
+
+"Something about Mrs. Milroy, wasn't it?" Allan rejoined.
+
+Young Pedgift's voice dropped mysteriously a note lower.
+
+"Miss Gwilt reached the cottage this afternoon, sir, at the time
+when I told you she would reach it, and she would have joined us
+at the time I told you she would come, but for Mrs. Milroy. Mrs.
+Milroy sent for her upstairs as soon as she entered the house,
+and kept her upstairs a good half-hour and more. That was Miss
+Gwilt's excuse, Mr. Armadale, for being late at the Mere."
+
+"Well, and what then?"
+
+"You seem to forget, sir, what the whole neighborhood has heard
+about Mrs. Milroy ever since the major first settled among us. We
+have all been told, on the doctor's own authority, that she is
+too great a sufferer to see strangers. Isn't it a little odd that
+she should have suddenly turned out well enough to see Miss Gwilt
+(in her husband's absence) the moment Miss Gwilt entered the
+house?"
+
+"Not a bit of it! Of course she was anxious to make acquaintance
+with her daughter's governess."
+
+"Likely enough, Mr. Armadale. But the major and Miss Neelie don't
+see it in that light, at any rate. I had my eye on them both when
+the governess told them that Mrs. Milroy had sent for her. If
+ever I saw a girl look thoroughly frightened, Miss Milroy was
+that girl; and (if I may be allowed, in the strictest confidence,
+to libel a gallant soldier) I should say that the major himself
+was much in the same condition. Take my word for it, sir, there's
+something wrong upstairs in that pretty cottage of yours; and
+Miss Gwilt is mixed up in it already!"
+
+There was a minute of silence. When the voices were next heard by
+Midwinter, they were further away from the house--Allan was
+probably accompanying young Pedgift a few steps on his way back.
+
+After a while, Allan's voice was audible once more under the
+portico, making inquiries after his friend; answered by the
+servant's voice giving Midwinter's message. This brief
+interruption over, the silence was not broken again till the time
+came for shutting up the house. The servants' footsteps passing
+to and fro, the clang of closing doors, the barking of a
+disturbed dog in the stable-yard--these sounds warned Midwinter
+it was getting late. He rose mechanically to kindle a light. But
+his head was giddy, his hand trembled; he laid aside the
+match-box, and returned to his chair. The conversation between
+Allan and young Pedgift had ceased to occupy his attention the
+instant he ceased to hear it; and now again, the sense that the
+precious time was failing him became a lost sense as soon as the
+house noises which had awakened it had passed away. His energies
+of body and mind were both alike worn out; he waited with a
+stolid resignation for the trouble that was to come to him with
+the coming day.
+
+An interval passed, and the silence was once more disturbed by
+voices outside; the voices of a man and a woman this time. The
+first few words exchanged between them indicated plainly enough a
+meeting of the clandestine kind; and revealed the man as one of
+the servants at Thorpe Ambrose, and the woman as one of the
+servants at the cottage.
+
+Here again, after the first greetings were over, the subject of
+the new governess became the all-absorbing subject of
+conversation.
+
+The major's servant was brimful of forebodings (inspired solely
+by Miss Gwilt's good looks) which she poured out irrepressibly on
+her "sweetheart," try as he might to divert her to other topics.
+Sooner or later, let him mark her words, there would be an awful
+"upset" at the cottage. Her master, it might be mentioned in
+confidence, led a dreadful life with her mistress. The major was
+the best of men; he hadn't a thought in his heart beyond his
+daughter and his everlasting clock. But only let a nice-looking
+woman come near the place, and Mrs. Milroy was jealous of
+her--raging jealous, like a woman possessed, on that miserable
+sick-bed of hers. If Miss Gwilt (who was certainly good-looking,
+in spite of her hideous hair) didn't blow the fire into a flame
+before many days more were over their heads, the mistress was the
+mistress no longer, but somebody else. Whatever happened, the fau
+lt, this time, would lie at the door of the major's mother. The
+old lady and the mistress had had a dreadful quarrel two years
+since; and the old lady had gone away in a fury, telling her son,
+before all the servants, that, if he had a spark of spirit in
+him, he would never submit to his wife's temper as he did. It
+would be too much, perhaps, to accuse the major's mother of
+purposely picking out a handsome governess to spite the major's
+wife. But it might be safely said that the old lady was the last
+person in the world to humor the mistress's jealousy, by
+declining to engage a capable and respectable governess for her
+granddaughter because that governess happened to be blessed with
+good looks. How it was all to end (except that it was certain to
+end badly) no human creature could say. Things were looking as
+black already as things well could. Miss Neelie was crying, after
+the day's pleasure (which was one bad sign); the mistress had
+found fault with nobody (which was another); the master had
+wished her good-night through the door (which was a third); and
+the governess had locked herself up in her room (which was the
+worst sign of all, for it looked as if she distrusted the
+servants). Thus the stream of the woman's gossip ran on, and thus
+it reached Midwinter's ears through the window, till the clock in
+the stable-yard struck, and stopped the talking. When the last
+vibrations of the bell had died away, the voices were not audible
+again, and the silence was broken no more.
+
+Another interval passed, and Midwinter made a new effort to rouse
+himself. This time he kindled the light without hesitation, and
+took the pen in hand.
+
+He wrote at the first trial with a sudden facility of expression,
+which, surprising him as he went on, ended in rousing in him some
+vague suspicion of himself. He left the table, and bathed his
+head and face in water, and came back to read what he had
+written. The language was barely intelligible; sentences were
+left unfinished; words were misplaced one for the other. every
+line recorded the protest of the weary brain against the
+merciless will that had forced it into action. Midwinter tore up
+the sheet of paper as he had torn up the other sheets before it,
+and, sinking under the struggle at last, laid his weary head on
+the pillow. Almost on the instant, exhaustion overcame him, and
+before he could put the light out he fell asleep.
+
+He was roused by a noise at the door. The sunlight was pouring
+into the room, the candle had burned down into the socket, and
+the servant was waiting outside with a letter which had come for
+him by the morning's post.
+
+"I ventured to disturb you, sir," said the man, when Midwinter
+opened the door, "because the letter is marked 'Immediate,' and I
+didn't know but it might be of some consequence."
+
+Midwinter thanked him, and looked at the letter. It _was_ of some
+consequence--the handwriting was Mr. Brock's.
+
+He paused to collect his faculties. The torn sheets of paper on
+the floor recalled to him in a moment the position in which he
+stood. He locked the door again, in the fear that Allan might
+rise earlier than usual and come in to make inquiries.
+Then--feeling strangely little interest in anything that the
+rector could write to him now--he opened Mr. Brock's letter, and
+read these lines:
+
+"Tuesday.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--It is sometimes best to tell bad news
+plainly, in few words. Let me tell mine at once, in one sentence.
+My precautions have all been defeated: the woman has escaped me.
+
+"This misfortune--for it is nothing less--happened yesterday
+(Monday). Between eleven and twelve in the forenoon of that day,
+the business which originally brought me to London obliged me to
+go to Doctors' Commons, and to leave my servant Robert to watch
+the house opposite our lodging until my return. About an hour and
+a half after my departure he observed an empty cab drawn up at
+the door of the house. Boxes and bags made their appearance
+first; they were followed by the woman herself, in the dress I
+had first seen her in. Having previously secured a cab, Robert
+traced her to the terminus of the North-Western Railway, saw her
+pass through the ticket office, kept her in view till she reached
+the platform, and there, in the crowd and confusion caused by the
+starting of a large mixed train, lost her. I must do him the
+justice to say that he at once took the right course in this
+emergency. Instead of wasting time in searching for her on the
+platform, he looked along the line of carriages; and he
+positively declares that he failed to see her in any one of them.
+He admits, at the same time, that his search (conducted between
+two o'clock, when he lost sight of her, and ten minutes past,
+when the train started) was, in the confusion of the moment,
+necessarily an imperfect one. But this latter circumstance, in my
+opinion, matters little. I as firmly disbelieve in the woman's
+actual departure by that train as if I had searched every one of
+the carriages myself; and you, I have no doubt, will entirely
+agree with me.
+
+"You now know how the disaster happened. Let us not waste time
+and words in lamenting it. The evil is done, and you and I
+together must find the way to remedy it.
+
+"What I have accomplished already, on my side, may be told in two
+words. Any hesitation I might have previously felt at trusting
+this delicate business in strangers' hands was at an end the
+moment I heard Robert's news. I went back at once to the city,
+and placed the whole matter confidentially before my lawyers. The
+conference was a long one, and when I left the office it was past
+the post hour, or I should have written to you on Monday instead
+of writing today. My interview with the lawyers was not very
+encouraging. They warn me plainly that serious difficulties stand
+in the way of our recovering the lost trace. But they have
+promised to do their best, and we have decided on the course to
+be taken, excepting one point on which we totally differ. I must
+tell you what this difference is; for, while business keeps me
+away from Thorpe Ambrose, you are the only person whom I can
+trust to put my convictions to the test.
+
+"The lawyers are of opinion, then, that the woman has been aware
+from the first that I was watching her; that there is,
+consequently, no present hope of her being rash enough to appear
+personally at Thorpe Ambrose; that any mischief she may have it
+in contemplation to do will be done in the first instance by
+deputy; and that the only wise course for Allan's friends and
+guardians to take is to wait passively till events enlighten
+them. My own idea is diametrically opposed to this. After what
+has happened at the railway, I cannot deny that the woman must
+have discovered that I was watching her. But she has no reason to
+suppose that she has not succeeded in deceiving me; and I firmly
+believe she is bold enough to take us by surprise, and to win or
+force her way into Allan's confidence before we are prepared to
+prevent her.
+
+"You and you only (while I am detained in London) can decide
+whether I am right or wrong--and you can do it in this way.
+Ascertain at once whether any woman who is a stranger in the
+neighborhood has appeared since Monday last at or near Thorpe
+Ambrose. If any such person has been observed (and nobody escapes
+observation in the country), take the first opportunity you can
+get of seeing her, and ask yourself if her face does or does not
+answer certain plain questions which I am now about to write down
+for you. You may depend on my accuracy. I saw the woman unveiled
+on more than one occasion, and the last time through an excellent
+glass.
+
+"1. Is her hair light brown, and (apparently) not very plentiful?
+2. Is her forehead high, narrow, and sloping backward from the
+brow? 3. Are her eyebrows very faintly marked, and are her eyes
+small, and nearer dark than light--either gray or hazel (I have
+not seen her close enough to he certain which)? 4. Is her nose
+aquiline? 5 Are her lips thin, and is the upper lip long? 6. Does
+her complexion look like an originally fair complexion, which has
+deteriorated into a dull, sickly paleness? 7 (and lastly). Has
+she a retreating chin, and is there on the left side of it a mark
+of some k ind--a mole or a scar, I can't say which?
+
+"I add nothing about her expression, for you may see her under
+circumstances which may partially alter it as seen by me. Test
+her by her features, which no circumstances can change. If there
+is a stranger in the neighborhood, and if her face answers my
+seven questions, _you have found the woman!_ Go instantly, in
+that case, to the nearest lawyer, and pledge my name and credit
+for whatever expenses may be incurred in keeping her under
+inspection night and day. Having done this, take the speediest
+means of communicating with me; and whether my business is
+finished or not, I will start for Norfolk by the first train.
+
+"Always your friend, DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+
+Hardened by the fatalist conviction that now possessed him,
+Midwinter read the rector's confession of defeat, from the first
+line to the last, without the slightest betrayal either of
+interest or surprise. The one part of the letter at which he
+looked back was the closing part of it. "I owe much to Mr.
+Brock's kindness," he thought; "and I shall never see Mr. Brock
+again. It is useless and hopeless; but he asks me to do it, and
+it shall be done. A moment's look at her will be enough--a
+moment's look at her with his letter in my hand--and a line to
+tell him that the woman is here!"
+
+Again he stood hesitating at the half-opened door; again the
+cruel necessity of writing his farewell to Allan stopped him, and
+stared him in the face.
+
+He looked aside doubtingly at the rector's letter. "I will write
+the two together," he said. "One may help the other." His face
+flushed deep as the words escaped him. He was conscious of doing
+what he had not done yet--of voluntarily putting off the evil
+hour; of making Mr. Brock the pretext for gaining the last
+respite left, the respite of time.
+
+The only sound that reached him through the open door was the
+sound of Allan stirring noisily in the next room. He stepped at
+once into the empty corridor, and meeting no one on the stairs,
+made his way out of the house. The dread that his resolution to
+leave Allan might fail him if he saw Allan again was as vividly
+present to his mind in the morning as it had been all through the
+night. He drew a deep breath of relief as he descended the house
+steps--relief at having escaped the friendly greeting of the
+morning, from the one human creature whom he loved!
+
+He entered the shrubbery with Mr. Brock's letter in his hand, and
+took the nearest way that led to the major's cottage. Not the
+slightest recollection was in his mind of the talk which had
+found its way to his ears during the night. His one reason for
+determining to see the woman was the reason which the rector had
+put in his mind. The one remembrance that now guided him to the
+place in which she lived was the remembrance of Allan's
+exclamation when he first identified the governess with the
+figure at the pool.
+
+Arrived at the gate of the cottage, he stopped. The thought
+struck him that he might defeat his own object if he looked at
+the rector's questions in the woman's presence. Her suspicions
+would be probably roused, in the first instance, by his asking to
+see her (as he had determined to ask, with or without an excuse),
+and the appearance of the letter in his hand might confirm them.
+
+She might defeat him by instantly leaving the room. Determined to
+fix the description in his mind first, and then to confront her,
+he opened the letter; and, turning away slowly by the side of the
+house, read the seven questions which he felt absolutely assured
+beforehand the woman's face would answer.
+
+In the morning quiet of the park slight noises traveled far. A
+slight noise disturbed Midwinter over the letter.
+
+He looked up and found himself on the brink of a broad grassy
+trench, having the park on one side and the high laurel hedge of
+an inclosure on the other. The inclosure evidently surrounded the
+back garden of the cottage, and the trench was intended to
+protect it from being damaged by the cattle grazing in the park.
+
+Listening carefully as the slight sound which had disturbed him
+grew fainter, he recognized in it the rustling of women's
+dresses. A few paces ahead, the trench was crossed by a bridge
+(closed by a wicket gate) which connected the garden with the
+park. He passed through the gate, crossed the bridge, and,
+opening a door at the other end, found himself in a summer-house
+thickly covered with creepers, and commanding a full view of the
+garden from end to end.
+
+He looked, and saw the figures of two ladies walking slowly away
+from him toward the cottage. The shorter of the two failed to
+occupy his attention for an instant; he never stopped to think
+whether she was or was not the major's daughter. His eyes were
+riveted on the other figure--the figure that moved over the
+garden walk with the long, lightly falling dress and the easy,
+seductive grace. There, presented exactly as be had seen her once
+already--there, with her back again turned on him, was the Woman
+at the pool!
+
+There was a chance that they might take another turn in the
+garden--a turn back toward the summer-house. On that chance
+Midwinter waited. No consciousness of the intrusion that he was
+committing had stopped him at the door of the summer-house, and
+no consciousness of it troubled him even now. Every finer
+sensibility in his nature, sinking under the cruel laceration of
+the past night, had ceased to feel. The dogged resolution to do
+what he had come to do was the one animating influence left alive
+in him. He acted, he even looked, as the most stolid man living
+might have acted and looked in his place. He was self-possessed
+enough, in the interval of expectation before governess and pupil
+reached the end of the walk, to open Mr. Brock's letter, and to
+fortify his memory by a last look at the paragraph which
+described her face.
+
+He was still absorbed over the description when he heard the
+smooth rustle of the dresses traveling toward him again. Standing
+in the shadow of the summer-house, he waited while she lessened
+the distance between them. With her written portrait vividly
+impressed on his mind, and with the clear light of the morning to
+help him, his eyes questioned her as she came on; and these were
+the answers that her face gave him back.
+
+The hair in the rector's description was light brown and not
+plentiful. This woman's hair, superbly luxuriant in its growth,
+was of the one unpardonably remarkable shade of color which the
+prejudice of the Northern nations never entirely forgives--it was
+_red!_ The forehead in the rector's description was high, narrow,
+and sloping backward from the brow; the eyebrows were faintly
+marked; and the eyes small, and in color either gray or hazel.
+This woman's forehead was low, upright, and broad toward the
+temples; her eyebrows, at once strongly and delicately marked,
+were a shade darker than her hair; her eyes, large, bright, and
+well opened, were of that purely blue color, without a tinge in
+it of gray or green, so often presented to our admiration in
+pictures and books, so rarely met with in the living face. The
+nose in the rector's description was aquiline. The line of this
+woman's nose bent neither outward nor inward: it was the
+straight, delicately molded nose (with the short upper lip
+beneath) of the ancient statues and busts. The lips in the
+rector's description were thin and the upper lip long; the
+complexion was of a dull, sickly paleness; the chin retreating
+and the mark of a mole or a scar on the left side of it. This
+woman's lips were full, rich, and sensual. Her complexion was the
+lovely complexion which accompanies such hair as hers--so
+delicately bright in its rosier tints, so warmly and softly white
+in its gentler gradations of color on the forehead and the neck.
+Her chin, round and dimpled, was pure of the slightest blemish in
+every part of it, and perfectly in line with her forehead to the
+end. Nearer and nearer, and fairer and fairer she came, in the
+glow of the morning light--the most startling, the most
+unanswerable contradiction that eye could see or mind conceive to
+the description in the rector's letter.
+
+Both governess and pupil  were close to the summer-house before
+they looked that way, and noti ced Midwinter standing inside. The
+governess saw him first.
+
+"A friend of yours, Miss Milroy?" she asked, quietly, without
+starting or betraying any sign of surprise.
+
+Neelie recognized him instantly. Prejudiced against Midwinter by
+his conduct when his friend had introduced him at the cottage,
+she now fairly detested him as the unlucky first cause of her
+misunderstanding with Allan at the picnic. Her face flushed and
+she drew back from the summerhouse with an expression of
+merciless surprise.
+
+"He is a friend of Mr. Armadale's," she replied sharply. "I don't
+know what he wants, or why he is here."
+
+"A friend of Mr. Armadale's!" The governess's face lighted up
+with a suddenly roused interest as she repeated the words, She
+returned Midwinter's look, still steadily fixed on her, with
+equal steadiness on her side.
+
+"For my part," pursued Neelie, resenting Midwinter's
+insensibility to her presence on the scene, "I think it a great
+liberty to treat papa's garden as if it were the open park!"
+
+The governess turned round, and gently interposed.
+
+"My dear Miss Milroy," she remonstrated, "there are certain
+distinctions to be observed. This gentleman is a friend of Mr.
+Armadale's. You could hardly express yourself more strongly if he
+was a perfect stranger."
+
+"I express my opinion," retorted Neelie, chafing under the
+satirically indulgent tone in which the governess addressed her.
+"It's a matter of taste, Miss Gwilt; and tastes differ." She
+turned away petulantly, and walked back by herself to the
+cottage.
+
+"She is very young," said Miss Gwilt, appealing with a smile to
+Midwinter's forbearance; "and, as you must see for yourself, sir,
+she is a spoiled child." She paused--showed, for an instant only,
+her surprise at Midwinter's strange silence and strange
+persistency in keeping his eyes still fixed on her--then set
+herself, with a charming grace and readiness, to help him out of
+the false position in which he stood. "As you have extended your
+walk thus far," she resumed, "perhaps you will kindly favor me,
+on your return, by taking a message to your friend? Mr. Armadale
+has been so good as to invite me to see the Thorpe Ambrose
+gardens this morning. Will you say that Major Milroy permits me
+to accept the invitation (in company with Miss Milroy) between
+ten and eleven o'clock?" For a moment her eyes rested, with a
+renewed look of interest, on Midwinter's face. She waited, still
+in vain, for an answering word from him--smiled, as if his
+extraordinary silence amused rather than angered her--and
+followed her pupil back to the cottage.
+
+
+It was only when the last trace of her had disappeared that
+Midwinter roused himself, and attempted to realize the position
+in which he stood. The revelation of her beauty was in no respect
+answerable for the breathless astonishment which had held him
+spell-bound up to this moment. The one clear impression she had
+produce on him thus far began and ended with his discovery of the
+astounding contradiction that her face offered, in one feature
+after another, to the description in Mr. Brock's letter. All
+beyond this was vague and misty--a dim consciousness of a tall,
+elegant woman, and of kind words, modestly and gracefully spoken
+to him, and nothing more.
+
+He advanced a few steps into the garden without knowing
+why--stopped, glancing hither and thither like a man
+lost--recognized the summer-house by an effort, as if years had
+elapsed since he had seen it--and made his way out again, at
+last, into the park. Even here, he wandered first in one
+direction, then in another. His mind was still reeling under the
+shock that had fallen on it; his perceptions were all confused.
+Something kept him mechanically in action, walking eagerly
+without a motive, walking he knew not where.
+
+A far less sensitively organized man might have been overwhelmed,
+as he was overwhelmed now, by the immense, the instantaneous
+revulsion of feeling which the event of the last few minutes had
+wrought in his mind.
+
+At the memorable instant when he had opened the door of the
+summer-house, no confusing influence troubled his faculties. In
+all that related to his position toward his friend, he had
+reached an absolutely definite conclusion by an absolutely
+definite process of thought. The whole strength of the motive
+which had driven him into the resolution to part from Allan
+rooted itself in the belief that he had seen at Hurle Mere the
+fatal fulfillment of the first Vision of the Dream. And this
+belief, in its turn, rested, necessarily, on the conviction that
+the woman who was the one survivor of the tragedy in Madeira must
+be also inevitably the woman whom he had seen standing in the
+Shadow's place at the pool. Firm in that persuasion, he had
+himself compared the object of his distrust and of the rector's
+distrust with the description written by the rector himself--a
+description, carefully minute, by a man entirely trustworthy--and
+his own eyes had informed him that the woman whom he had seen at
+the Mere, and the woman whom Mr. Brock had identified in London,
+were not one, but Two. In the place of the Dream Shadow, there
+had stood, on the evidence of the rector's letter, not the
+instrument of the Fatality--but a stranger!
+
+No such doubts as might have troubled a less superstitious man,
+were started in _his_ mind by the discovery that had now opened
+on him.
+
+It never occurred to him to ask himself whether a stranger might
+not be the appointed instrument of the Fatality, now when the
+letter had persuaded him that a stranger had been revealed as the
+figure in the dream landscape. No such idea entered or could
+enter his mind. The one woman whom _his_ superstition dreaded was
+the woman who had entwined herself with the lives of the two
+Armadales in the first generation, and with the fortunes of the
+two Armadales in the second--who was at once the marked object of
+his father's death-bed warning, and the first cause of the family
+calamities which had opened Allan's way to the Thorpe Ambrose
+estate--the woman, in a word, whom he would have known
+instinctively, but for Mr. Brock's letter, to be the woman whom
+he had now actually seen.
+
+Looking at events as they had just happened, under the influence
+of the misapprehension into which the rector had innocently
+misled him, his mind saw and seized its new conclusion
+instantaneously, acting precisely as it had acted in the past
+time of his interview with Mr. Brock at the Isle of Man.
+
+Exactly as he had once declared it to be an all-sufficient
+refutation of the idea of the Fatality, that he had never met
+with the timber-ship in any of his voyages at sea, so he now
+seized on the similarly derived conclusion, that the whole claim
+of the Dream to a supernatural origin stood self-refuted by the
+disclosure of a stranger in the Shadow's place. Once started from
+this point--once encouraged to let his love for Allan influence
+him undividedly again, his mind hurried along the whole resulting
+chain of thought at lightning speed. If the Dream was proved to
+be no longer a warning from the other world, it followed
+inevitably that accident and not fate had led the way to the
+night on the Wreck, and that all the events which had happened
+since Allan and he had parted from Mr. Brock were events in
+themselves harmless, which his superstition had distorted from
+their proper shape. In less than a moment his mobile imagination
+had taken him back to the morning at Castletown when he had
+revealed to the rector the secret of his name; when he had
+declared to the rector, with his father's letter before his eyes,
+the better faith that was in him. Now once more he felt his heart
+holding firmly by the bond of brotherhood between Allan and
+himself; now once more he could say with the eager sincerity of
+the old time, "If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the
+thought of leaving him is wrong!" As that nobler conviction
+possessed itself again of his mind--quieting the tumult, clearing
+the confusion within him--the house at Thorpe Ambrose, with Allan
+on the steps, waiting, looking for him, opened on his eyes
+through the trees. A sense of illimitable relief lifted his eager
+spirit high above the cares, and doubts, and fears that had
+oppressed it so long, and showed him once more the better and
+brighter future of his early dreams. His eyes filled with tears,
+and he pressed the rector's letter, in his wild, passionate way,
+to his lips, as he looked at Allan through the vista of the
+trees. "But for this morsel of paper," he thought, "my life might
+have been one long sorrow to me, and my father's crime might have
+parted us forever!"
+
+
+Such was the result of the stratagem which had shown the
+housemaid's face to Mr. Brock as the face of Miss Gwilt. And
+so--by shaking Midwinter's trust in his own superstition, in the
+one case in which that superstition pointed to the truth--did
+Mother Oldershaw's cunning triumph over difficulties and dangers
+which had never been contemplated by Mother Oldershaw herself.
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MISS GWILT AMONG THE QUICKSANDS.
+
+1. _From the Rev. Decimus Brock to Ozias Midwinter._
+
+"Thursday.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--No words can tell what a relief it was to me
+to get your letter this morning, and what a happiness I honestly
+feel in having been thus far proved to be in the wrong. The
+precautions you have taken in case the woman should still confirm
+my apprehensions by venturing herself at Thorpe Ambrose seem to
+me to be all that can be desired. You are no doubt sure to hear
+of her from one or other of the people in the lawyer's office,
+whom you have asked to inform you of the appearance of a stranger
+in the town.
+
+"I am the more pleased at finding how entirely I can trust you in
+this matter; for I am likely to be obliged to leave Allan's
+interests longer than I supposed solely in your hands. My visit
+to Thorpe Ambrose must, I regret to say, be deferred for two
+months. The only one of my brother-clergymen in London who is
+able to take my duty for me cannot make it convenient to remove
+with his family to Somersetshire before that time. I have no
+alternative but to finish my business here, and be back at my
+rectory on Saturday next. If anything happens, you will, of
+course, instantly communicate with me; and, in that case, be the
+inconvenience what it may, I must leave home for Thorpe Ambrose.
+If, on the other hand, all goes more smoothly than my own
+obstinate apprehensions will allow me to suppose, then Allan (to
+whom I have written) must not expect to see me till this day two
+months.
+
+"No result has, up to this time, rewarded our exertions to
+recover the trace lost at the railway. I will keep my letter
+open, however, until post time, in case the next few hours bring
+any news.
+
+"Always truly yours,
+
+DECIMUS BROCK.
+
+"P. S.--I have just heard from the lawyers. They have found out
+the name the woman passed by in London. If this discovery (not a
+very important one, I am afraid) suggests any new course of
+proceeding to you, pray act on it at once. The name is--Miss
+Gwilt."
+
+2. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw._
+
+The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Saturday, June 28.
+
+"IF you will promise not to be alarmed, Mamma Oldershaw, I will
+begin this letter in a very odd way, by copying a page of a
+letter written by somebody else. You have an excellent memory,
+and you may not have forgotten that I received a note from Major
+Milroy's mother (after she had engaged me as governess) on Monday
+last. It was dated and signed; and here it is, as far as the
+first page: 'June 23d, 1851. Dear Madam--Pray excuse my troubling
+you, before you go to Thorpe Ambrose, with a word more about the
+habits observed in my son's household. When I had the pleasure of
+seeing you at two o'clock to-day, in Kingsdown Crescent, I had
+another appointment in a distant part of London at three; and, in
+the hurry of the moment, one or two little matters escaped me
+which I think I ought to impress on your attention.' The rest of
+the letter is not of the slightest importance, but the lines that
+I have just copied are well worthy of all the attention you can
+bestow on them. They have saved me from discovery, my dear,
+before I have been a week in Major Milroy's service!
+
+"It happened no later than yesterday evening, and it began and
+ended in this manner:
+
+"There is a gentleman here, (of whom I shall have more to say
+presently) who is an intimate friend of young Armadale's, and who
+bears the strange name of Midwinter. He contrived yesterday to
+speak to me alone in the park. Almost as soon as he opened his
+lips, I found that my name had been discovered in London (no
+doubt by the Somersetshire clergyman); and that Mr. Midwinter had
+been chosen (evidently by the same person) to identify the Miss
+Gwilt who had vanished from Brompton with the Miss Gwilt who had
+appeared at Thorpe Ambrose. You foresaw this danger, I remember;
+but you could scarcely have imagined that the exposure would
+threaten me so soon.
+
+"I spare you the details of our conversation to come to the end.
+Mr. Midwinter put the matter very delicately, declaring, to my
+great surprise, that he felt quite certain himself that I was not
+the Miss Gwilt of whom his friend was in search; and that he only
+acted as he did out of regard to the anxiety of a person whose
+wishes he was bound to respect. Would I assist him in setting
+that anxiety completely at rest, as far as I was concerned, by
+kindly answering one plain question--which he had no other right
+to ask me than the right my indulgence might give him? The lost
+'Miss Gwilt' had been missed on Monday last, at two o'clock, in
+the crowd on the platform of the North-western Railway, in Euston
+Square. Would I authorize him to say that on that day, and at
+that hour, the Miss Gwilt who was Major Milroy's governess had
+never been near the place?
+
+"I need hardly tell you that I seized the fine opportunity he had
+given me of disarming all future suspicion. I took a high tone on
+the spot, and met him with the old lady's letter. He politely
+refused to look at it. I insisted on his looking at it. 'I don't
+choose to be mistaken,' I said, 'for a woman who may be a bad
+character, because she happens to bear, or to have assumed, the
+same name as mine. I insist on your reading the first part of
+this letter for my satisfaction, if not for your own.' He was
+obliged to comply; and there was the proof, in the old lady's
+handwriting, that, at two o'clock on Monday last, she and I were
+together in Kingsdown Crescent, which any directory would tell
+him is a 'crescent' in Bayswater! I leave you to imagine his
+apologies, and the perfect sweetness with which I received them.
+
+"I might, of course, if I had not preserved the letter, have
+referred him to you, or to the major's mother, with similar
+results. As it is, the object has been gained without trouble or
+delay. _I have been proved not to be myself;_ and one of the many
+dangers that threatened me at Thorpe Ambrose is a danger blown
+over from this moment. Your house-maid's face may not be a very
+handsome one; but there is no denying that it has done us
+excellent service.
+
+
+"So much for the past; now for the future. You shall hear how I
+get on with the people about me; and you shall judge for yourself
+what the chances are for and against my becoming mistress of
+Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+"Let me begin with young Armadale--because it is beginning with
+good news. I have produced the right impression on him already,
+and Heaven knows _that_ is nothing to boast of! Any moderately
+good-looking woman who chose to take the trouble could make him
+fall in love with her. He is a rattle-pated young fool--one of
+those noisy, rosy, light-haired, good-tempered men whom I
+particularly detest. I had a whole hour alone with him in a boat,
+the first day I came here, and I have made good use of my time, I
+can tell you, from that day to this. The only difficulty with him
+is the difficulty of concealing my own feelings, especially when
+he turns my dislike of him into downright hatred by sometimes
+reminding me of his mother. I really never saw a man whom I could
+use so ill, if I had the opportunity. He will give me the
+opportunity, I believe, if no accident happens, sooner than we
+calculated on. I have just returned from a party at the great
+house, in celebration of the rent-day dinner, and the squire's
+attentions to me, and my modest reluctance to receive them, have
+already excited general remark.
+
+"My pupil, Miss Milroy, comes ne xt. She, too, is rosy and
+foolish; and, what is more, awkward and squat and freckled, and
+ill-tempered and ill-dressed. No fear of _her,_ though she hates
+me like poison, which is a great comfort, for I get rid of her
+out of lesson time and walking time. It is perfectly easy to see
+that she has made the most of her opportunities with young
+Armadale (opportunities, by-the-by, which we never calculated
+on), and that she has been stupid enough to let him slip through
+her fingers. When I tell you that she is obliged, for the sake of
+appearances, to go with her father and me to the little
+entertainments at Thorpe Ambrose, and to see how young Armadale
+admires me, you will understand the kind of place I hold in her
+affections. She would try me past all endurance if I didn't see
+that I aggravate her by keeping my temper, so, of course, I keep
+it. If I do break out, it will be over our lessons--not over our
+French, our grammar, history, and globes--but over our music. No
+words can say how I feel for her poor piano. Half the musical
+girls in England ought to have their fingers chopped off in the
+interests of society, and, if I had my way, Miss Milroy's fingers
+should be executed first.
+
+"As for the major, I can hardly stand higher in his estimation
+than I stand already. I am always ready to make his breakfast,
+and his daughter is not. I can always find things for him when he
+loses them, and his daughter can't. I never yawn when he proses,
+and his daughter does. I like the poor dear harmless old
+gentleman, so I won't say a word more about him.
+
+"Well, here is a fair prospect for the future surely? My good
+Oldershaw, there never was a prospect yet without an ugly place
+in it. _My_ prospect has two ugly places in it. The name of one
+of them is Mrs. Milroy, and the name of the other is Mr.
+Midwinter.
+
+"Mrs. Milroy first. Before I had been five minutes in the
+cottage, on the day of my arrival, what do you think she did? She
+sent downstairs and asked to see me. The message startled me a
+little, after hearing from the old lady, in London, that her
+daughter-in-law was too great a sufferer to see anybody; but, of
+course, when I got her message, I had no choice but to go up
+stairs to the sick-room. I found her bedridden with an incurable
+spinal complaint, and a really horrible object to look at, but
+with all her wits about her; and, if I am not greatly mistaken,
+as deceitful a woman, with as vile a temper, as you could find
+anywhere in all your long experience. Her excessive politeness,
+and her keeping her own face in the shade of the bed-curtains
+while she contrived to keep mine in the light, put me on my guard
+the moment I entered the room. We were more than half an hour
+together, without my stepping into any one of the many clever
+little traps she laid for me. The only mystery in her behavior,
+which I failed to see through at the time, was her perpetually
+asking me to bring her things (things she evidently did not want)
+from different parts of the room.
+
+"Since then events have enlightened me. My first suspicions were
+raised by overhearing some of the servants' gossip; and I have
+been confirmed in my opinion by the conduct of Mrs. Milroy's
+nurse.
+
+"On the few occasions when I have happened to be alone with the
+major, the nurse has also happened to want something of her
+master, and has invariably forgotten to announce her appearance
+by knocking, at the door. Do you understand now why Mrs. Milroy
+sent for me the moment I got into the house, and what she wanted
+when she kept me going backward and forward, first for one thing
+and then for another? There is hardly an attractive light in
+which my face and figure can be seen, in which that woman's
+jealous eyes have not studied them already. I am no longer
+puzzled to know why the father and daughter started, and looked
+at each other, when I was first presented to them; or why the
+servants still stare at me with a mischievous expectation in
+their eyes when I ring the bell and ask them to do anything. It
+is useless to disguise the truth, Mother Oldershaw, between you
+and me. When I went upstairs into that sickroom, I marched
+blindfold into the clutches of a jealous woman. If Mrs. Milroy
+_can_ turn me out of the house, Mrs. Milroy _will;_ and, morning
+and night, she has nothing else to do in that bed prison of hers
+but to find out the way.
+
+"In this awkward position, my own cautious conduct is admirably
+seconded by the dear old major's perfect insensibility. His
+wife's jealousy of him is as monstrous a delusion as any that
+could be found in a mad-house; it is the growth of her own vile
+temper, under the aggravation of an incurable illness. The poor
+man hasn't a thought beyond his mechanical pursuits; and I don't
+believe he knows at this moment whether I am a handsome woman or
+not. With this chance to help me, I may hope to set the nurse's
+intrusions and the mistress's contrivances at defiance--for a
+time, at any rate. But you know what a jealous woman is, and I
+think I know what Mrs. Milroy is; and I own I shall breathe more
+freely on the day when young Armadale opens his foolish lips to
+some purpose, and sets the major advertising for a new governess.
+
+"Armadale's name reminds me of Armadale's friend. There is more
+danger threatening in that quarter; and, what is worse, I don't
+feel half as well armed beforehand against Mr. Midwinter as I do
+against Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"Everything about this man is more or less mysterious, which I
+don't like, to begin with. How does he come to be in the
+confidence of the Somersetshire clergyman? How much has that
+clergyman told him? How is it that he was so firmly persuaded,
+when he spoke to me in the park, that I was not the Miss Gwilt of
+whom his friend was in search? I haven't the ghost of an answer
+to give to any of those three questions. I can't even discover
+who he is, or how he and young Armadale first became acquainted.
+I hate him. No, I don't; I only want to find out about him. He is
+very young, little and lean, and active and dark, with bright
+black eyes which say to me plainly, 'We belong to a man with
+brains in his head and a will of his own; a man who hasn't always
+been hanging about a country house, in attendance on a fool.'
+Yes; I am positively certain Mr. Midwinter has done something or
+suffered something in his past life, young as he is; and I would
+give I don't know what to get at it. Don't resent my taking up so
+much space in my writing about him. He has influence enough over
+young Armadale to be a very awkward obstacle in my way, unless I
+can secure his good opinion at starting.
+
+"Well, you may ask, and what is to prevent your securing his good
+opinion? I am sadly afraid, Mother Oldershaw, I have got it on
+terms I never bargained for. I am sadly afraid the man is in love
+with me already.
+
+"Don't toss your head and say, 'Just like her vanity!' After the
+horrors I have gone through, I have no vanity left; and a man who
+admires me is a man who makes me shudder. There was a time, I
+own--Pooh! what am I writing? Sentiment, I declare! Sentiment to
+_you!_ Laugh away, my dear. As for me, I neither laugh nor cry; I
+mend my pen, and get on with my--what do the men call it?--my
+report.
+
+"The only thing worth inquiring is, whether I am right or wrong
+in my idea of the impression I have made on him.
+
+"Let me see; I have been four times in his company. The first
+time was in the major's garden, where we met unexpectedly, face
+to face. He stood looking at me, like a man petrified, without
+speaking a word. The effect of my horrid red hair, perhaps? Quite
+likely; let us lay it on my hair. The second time was in going
+over the Thorpe Ambrose grounds, with young Armadale on one side
+of me, and my pupil (in the sulks) on the other. Out comes Mr.
+Midwinter to join us, though he had work to do in the steward's
+office, which he had never been known to neglect on any other
+occasion. Laziness, possibly? or an attachment to Miss Milroy? I
+can't say; we will lay it on Miss Milroy, if you like; I only
+know he did nothing but look at _me._ The third time was at the
+private interview in the park, which I have told you of already.
+I never saw a man so agitated at putting a delicate question to a
+woman in my life. But _that_ might have been only awkwardness;
+and his perpetually looking back after me when we had parted
+might have been only looking back at the view. Lay it on the
+view; by all means, lay it on the view! The fourth time was this
+very evening, at the little party. They made me play; and, as the
+piano was a good one, I did my best. All the company crowded
+round me, and paid me their compliments (my charming pupil paid
+hers, with a face like a cat's just before she spits), except Mr.
+Midwinter. _He_ waited till it was time to go, and then he caught
+me alone for a moment in the hall. There was just time for him to
+take my hand, and say two words. Shall I tell you _how_ he took
+my hand, and what his voice sounded like when he spoke? Quite
+needless! You have always told me that the late Mr. Oldershaw
+doted on you. Just recall the first time he took your hand, and
+whispered a word or two addressed to your private ear. To what
+did you attribute his behavior that occasion? I have no doubt, if
+you had been playing on the piano in the course of the evening,
+you would have attributed it entirely to the music!
+
+"No! you may take my word for it, the harm is done. _This_ man is
+no rattle-pated fool, who changes his fancies as readily as he
+changes his clothes. The fire that lights those big black eyes of
+his is not an easy fire, when a woman has once kindled it, for
+that woman to put out. I don't wish to discourage you; I don't
+say the changes are against us. But with Mrs. Milroy threatening
+me on one side, and Mr. Midwinter on the other, the worst of all
+risks to run is the risk of losing time. Young Armadale has
+hinted already, as well as such a lout can hint, at a private
+interview! Miss Milroy's eyes are sharp, and the nurse's eyes are
+sharper; and I shall lose my place if either of them find me out.
+No matter! I must take my chance, and give him the interview.
+Only let me get him alone, only let me escape the prying eyes of
+the women, and--if his friend doesn't come between us--I answer
+for the result!
+
+"In the meantime, have I anything more to tell you? Are there any
+other people in our way at Thorpe Ambrose? Not another creature!
+None of the resident families call here, young Armadale being,
+most fortunately, in bad odor in the neighborhood. There are no
+handsome highly-bred women to come to the house, and no persons
+of consequence to protest against his attentions to a governess.
+The only guests he could collect at his party to-night were the
+lawyer and his family (a wife, a son, and two daughters), and a
+deaf old woman and _her_ son--all perfectly unimportant people,
+and all obedient humble servants of the stupid young squire.
+
+"Talking of obedient humble servants, there is one other person
+established here, who is employed in the steward's office--a
+miserable, shabby, dilapidated old man, named Bashwood. He is a
+perfect stranger to me, and I am evidently a perfect stranger to
+him, for he has been asking the house-maid at the cottage who I
+am. It is paying no great compliment to myself to confess it, but
+it is not the less true that I produced the most extraordinary
+impression on this feeble old creature the first time he saw me.
+He turned all manner of colors, and stood trembling and staring
+at me, as if there was something perfectly frightful in my face.
+I felt quite startled for the moment, for, of all the ways in
+which men have looked at me, no man ever looked at me in that way
+before. Did you ever see the boa constrictor fed at the
+Zoological Gardens? They put a live rabbit into his cage, and
+there is a moment when the two creatures look at each other. I
+declare Mr. Bashwood reminded me of the rabbit.
+
+"Why do I mention this? I don't know why. Perhaps I have been
+writing too long, and my head is beginning to fail me. Perhaps
+Mr. Bashwood's manner of admiring me strikes my fancy by its
+novelty. Absurd! I am exciting myself, and troubling you about
+nothing. Oh, what a weary, long letter I have written! and how
+brightly the stars look at me through the window, and how awfully
+quiet the night is! Send me some more of those sleeping drops,
+and write me one of your nice, wicked, amusing letters. You shall
+hear from me again as soon as I know a little better how it is
+all likely to end. Good-night, and keep a corner in your stony
+old heart for
+
+L. G."
+
+3. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Diana Street, Pimlico, Monday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--I am in no state of mind to write you an amusing
+letter. Your news is very discouraging, and the recklessness of
+your tone quite alarms me. Consider the money I have already
+advanced, and the interests we both have at stake. Whatever else
+you are, don't be reckless, for Heaven's sake!
+
+"What can I do? I ask myself, as a woman of business, what can I
+do to help you? I can't give you advice, for I am not on the
+spot, and I don't know how circumstances may alter from one day
+to another. Situated as we are now, I can only be useful in one
+way. I can discover a new obstacle that threatens you, and I
+think I can remove it.
+
+"You say, with great truth, that there never was a prospect yet
+without an ugly place in it, and that there are two ugly places
+in your prospect. My dear, there may be _three_ ugly places, if I
+don't bestir myself to prevent it; and the name of the third
+place will be--Brock! Is it possible you can refer, as you have
+done, to the Somersetshire clergyman, and not see that the
+progress you make with young Armadale will be, sooner or later,
+reported to him by young Armadale's friend? Why, now I think of
+it, you are doubly at the parson's mercy! You are at the mercy of
+any fresh suspicion which may bring him into the neighborhood
+himself at a day's notice; and you are at the mercy of his
+interference the moment he hears that the squire is committing
+himself with a neighbor's governess. If I can do nothing else, I
+can keep this additional difficulty out of your way. And oh,
+Lydia, with what alacrity I shall exert myself, after the manner
+in which the old wretch insulted me when I told him that pitiable
+story in the street! I declare I tingle with pleasure at this new
+prospect of making a fool of Mr. Brock.
+
+"And how is it to be done? Just as we have done it already, to be
+sure. He has lost 'Miss Gwilt' (otherwise my house-maid), hasn't
+he? Very well. He shall find her again, wherever he is now,
+suddenly settled within easy reach of him. As long as _she_ stops
+in the place, _he_ will stop in it; and as we know he is not at
+Thorpe Ambrose, there you are free of him! The old gentleman's
+suspicions have given us a great deal of trouble so far. Let us
+turn them to some profitable account at last; let us tie him, by
+his suspicions, to my house-maid's apron-string. Most refreshing.
+Quite a moral retribution, isn't it?
+
+"The only help I need trouble you for is help you can easily
+give. Find out from Mr. Midwinter where the parson is now, and
+let me know by return of post. If he is in London, I will
+personally assist my housemaid in the necessary mystification of
+him. If he is anywhere else, I will send her after him,
+accompanied by a person on whose discretion I can implicitly
+rely.
+
+"You shall have the sleeping drops to-morrow. In the meantime, I
+say at the end what I said at the beginning--no recklessness.
+Don't encourage poetical feelings by looking at the stars; and
+don't talk about the night being awfully quiet. There are people
+(in observatories) paid to look at the stars for you; leave it to
+them. And as for the night, do what Providence intended you to do
+with the night when Providence provided you with eyelids--go to
+sleep in it. Affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+4. _From the Reverend Decimus Brock to Ozias Midwinter._
+
+"Bascombe Rectory, West Somerset, Thursday, July 8.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--One line before the post goes out, to relieve
+you of all sense of responsibility at Thorpe Ambrose, and to make
+my apologies to the lady who lives as governess in Major Milroy's
+family.
+
+"_The_ Miss Gwilt--or perhaps I ought to say, the woman calling
+herself by that name--has, to my unspeakable astonishment, openly
+made her appearance here, in my own parish! She is staying at the
+i nn, accompanied by a plausible-looking man, who passes as her
+brother. What this audacious proceeding really means--unless it
+marks a new step in the conspiracy against Allan, taken under new
+advice--is, of course, more than I can yet find out.
+
+"My own idea is, that they have recognized the impossibility of
+getting at Allan, without finding me (or you) as an obstacle in
+their way; and that they are going to make a virtue of necessity
+by boldly trying to open their communications through me. The man
+looks capable of any stretch of audacity; and both he and the
+woman had the impudence to bow when I met them in the village
+half an hour since. They have been making inquiries already about
+Allan's mother here, where her exemplary life may set their
+closest scrutiny at defiance. If they will only attempt to extort
+money, as the price of the woman's silence on the subject of poor
+Mrs. Armadale's conduct in Madeira at the time of her marriage,
+they will find me well prepared for them beforehand. I have
+written by this post to my lawyers to send a competent man to
+assist me, and he will stay at the rectory, in any character
+which he thinks it safest to assume under present circumstances.
+
+"You shall hear what happens in the next day or two.
+
+"Always truly yours, DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE CLOUDING OF THE SKY.
+
+NINE days had passed, and the tenth day was nearly at an end,
+since Miss Gwilt and her pupil had taken their morning walk in
+the cottage garden.
+
+The night was overcast. Since sunset, there had been signs in the
+sky from which the popular forecast had predicted rain. The
+reception-rooms at the great house were all empty and dark. Allan
+was away, passing the evening with the Milroys; and Midwinter was
+waiting his return--not where Midwinter usually waited, among the
+books in the library, but in the little back room which Allan's
+mother had inhabited in the last days of her residence at Thorpe
+Ambrose.
+
+Nothing had been taken away, but much had been added to the room,
+since Midwinter had first seen it. The books which Mrs. Armadale
+had left behind her, the furniture, the old matting on the floor,
+the old paper on the walls, were all undisturbed. The statuette
+of Niobe still stood on its bracket, and the French window still
+opened on the garden. But now, to the relics left by the mother,
+were added the personal possessions belonging to the son. The
+wall, bare hitherto, was decorated with water-color
+drawings--with a portrait of Mrs. Armadale supported on one side
+by a view of the old house in Somersetshire, and on the other by
+a picture of the yacht. Among the books which bore in faded ink
+Mrs. Armadale's inscriptions, "From my father," were other books
+inscribed in the same handwriting, in brighter ink, "To my son."
+Hanging to the wall, ranged on the chimney-piece, scattered over
+the table, were a host of little objects, some associated with
+Allan's past life, others necessary to his daily pleasures and
+pursuits, and all plainly testifying that the room which he
+habitually occupied at Thorpe Ambrose was the very room which had
+once recalled to Midwinter the second vision of the dream. Here,
+strangely unmoved by the scene around him, so lately the object
+of his superstitious distrust, Allan's friend now waited
+composedly for Allan's return; and here, more strangely still, he
+looked on a change in the household arrangements, due in the
+first instance entirely to himself. His own lips had revealed the
+discovery which he had made on the first morning in the new
+house; his own voluntary act had induced the son to establish
+himself in the mother's room.
+
+Under what motives had he spoken the words? Under no motives
+which were not the natural growth of the new interests and the
+new hopes that now animated him.
+
+The entire change wrought in his convictions by the memorable
+event that had brought him face to face with Miss Gwilt was a
+change which it was not in his nature to hide from Allan's
+knowledge. He had spoken openly, and had spoken as it was in his
+character to speak. The merit of conquering his superstition was
+a merit which he shrank from claiming, until he had first
+unsparingly exposed that superstition in its worst and weakest
+aspects to view.
+
+It was only after he had unreservedly acknowledged the impulse
+under which he had left Allan at the Mere, that he had taken
+credit to himself for the new point of view from which he could
+now look at the Dream. Then, and not till then, he had spoken of
+the fulfillment of the first Vision as the doctor at the Isle of
+Man might have spoken of it. He had asked, as the doctor might
+have asked, Where was the wonder of their seeing a pool at
+sunset, when they had a whole network of pools within a few
+hours' drive of them? and what was there extraordinary in
+discovering a woman at the Mere, when there were roads that led
+to it, and villages in its neighborhood, and boats employed on
+it, and pleasure parties visiting it? So again, he had waited to
+vindicate the firmer resolution with which he looked to the
+future, until he had first revealed all that he now saw himself
+of the errors of the past. The abandonment of his friend's
+interests, the unworthiness of the confidence that had given him
+the steward's place, the forgetfulness of the trust that Mr.
+Brock had reposed in him all implied in the one idea of leaving
+Allan--were all pointed out. The glaring self-contradictions
+betrayed in accepting the Dream as the revelation of a fatality,
+and in attempting to escape that fatality by an exertion of
+free-will--in toiling to store up knowledge of the steward's
+duties for the future, and in shrinking from letting the future
+find him in Allan's house--were, in their turn, unsparingly
+exposed. To every error, to every inconsistency, he resolutely
+confessed, before he ventured on the last simple appeal which
+closed all, "Will you trust me in the future? Will you forgive
+and forget the past?"
+
+A man who could thus open his whole heart, without one lurking
+reserve inspired by consideration for himself, was not a man to
+forget any minor act of concealment of which his weakness might
+have led him to be guilty toward his friend. It lay heavy on
+Midwinter's conscience that he had kept secret from Allan a
+discovery which he ought in Allan's dearest interests to have
+revealed--the discovery of his mother's room.
+
+But one doubt still closed his lips--the doubt whether Mrs.
+Armadale's conduct in Madeira had been kept secret on her return
+to England.
+
+Careful inquiry, first among the servants, then among the
+tenantry, careful consideration of the few reports current at the
+time, as repeated to him by the few persons left who remembered
+them, convinced him at last that the family secret had been
+successfully kept within the family limits. Once satisfied that
+whatever inquiries the son might make would lead to no disclosure
+which could shake his respect for his mother's memory, Midwinter
+had hesitated no longer. He had taken Allan into the room, and
+had shown him the books on the shelves, and all that the writing
+in the books disclosed. He had said plainly, "My one motive for
+not telling you this before sprang from my dread of interesting
+you in the room which I looked at with horror as the second of
+the scenes pointed at in the Dream. Forgive me this also, and you
+will have forgiven me all."
+
+With Allan's love for his mother's memory, but one result could
+follow such an avowal as this. He had liked the little room from
+the first, as a pleasant contrast to the oppressive grandeur of
+the other rooms at Thorpe Ambrose, and, now that he knew what
+associations were connected with it, his resolution was at once
+taken to make it especially his own. The same day, all his
+personal possessions were collected and arranged in his mother's
+room--in Midwinter's presence, and with Midwinter's assistance
+given to the work.
+
+Under those circumstances had the change now wrought in the
+household arrangements been produced; and in this way had
+Midwinter's victory over his own fatalism--by making Allan the
+daily occupant of a room which he might otherwise hardly ever
+have entered--actually favored the fulfillment of the Second
+Vision of th e Dream.
+
+
+The hour wore on quietly as Allan's friend sat waiting for
+Allan's return. Sometimes reading, sometimes thinking placidly,
+he whiled away the time. No vexing cares, no boding doubts,
+troubled him now. The rent-day, which he had once dreaded, had
+come and gone harmlessly. A friendlier understanding had been
+established between Allan and his tenants; Mr. Bashwood had
+proved himself to be worthy of the confidence reposed in him; the
+Pedgifts, father and son, had amply justified their client's good
+opinion of them. Wherever Midwinter looked, the prospect was
+bright, the future was without a cloud.
+
+He trimmed the lamp on the table beside him and looked out at the
+night. The stable clock was chiming the half-hour past eleven as
+he walked to the window, and the first rain-drops were beginning
+to fall. He had his hand on the bell to summon the servant, and
+send him over to the cottage with an umbrella, when he was
+stopped by hearing the familiar footstep on the walk outside.
+
+"How late you are!" said Midwinter, as Allan entered through the
+open French window. "Was there a party at the cottage?"
+
+"No! only ourselves. The time slipped away somehow." He answered
+in lower tones than usual, and sighed as he took his chair.
+
+"You seem to be out of spirits?" pursued Midwinter. "What's the
+matter?"
+
+Allan hesitated. "I may as well tell you," he said, after a
+moment. "It's nothing to be ashamed of; I only wonder you haven't
+noticed it before! There's a woman in it, as usual--I'm in love."
+
+Midwinter laughed. "Has Miss Milroy been more charming to-night
+than ever?" he asked, gayly.
+
+"Miss Milroy!" repeated Allan. "What are you thinking of! I'm not
+in love with Miss Milroy."
+
+"Who is it, then?"
+
+"Who is it! What a question to ask! Who can it be but Miss
+Gwilt?"
+
+There was a sudden silence. Allan sat listlessly, with his hands
+in his pockets, looking out through the open window at the
+falling rain. If he had turned toward his friend when he
+mentioned Miss Gwilt's name he might possibly have been a little
+startled by the change he would have seen in Midwinter's face.
+
+"I suppose you don't approve of it?" he said, after waiting a
+little.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"It's too late to make objections," proceeded Allan. "I really
+mean it when I tell you I'm in love with her."
+
+"A fortnight since you were in love with Miss Milroy," said the
+other, in quiet, measured tones.
+
+"Pooh! a mere flirtation. It's different this time. I'm in
+earnest about Miss Gwilt."
+
+He looked round as he spoke. Midwinter turned his face aside on
+the instant, and bent it over a book.
+
+"I see you don't approve of the thing," Allan went on. "Do you
+object to her being only a governess? You can't do that, I'm
+sure. If you were in my place, her being only a governess
+wouldn't stand in the way with _you?_"
+
+"No," said Midwinter; "I can't honestly say it would stand in the
+way with me." He gave the answer reluctantly, and pushed his
+chair back out of the light of the lamp.
+
+"A governess is a lady who is not rich," said Allan, in an
+oracular manner; "and a duchess is a lady who is not poor. And
+that's all the difference I acknowledge between them. Miss Gwilt
+is older than I am--I don't deny that. What age do you guess her
+at, Midwinter? I say, seven or eight and twenty. What do you
+say?"
+
+"Nothing. I agree with you."
+
+"Do you think seven or eight and twenty is too old for me? If you
+were in love with a woman yourself, you wouldn't think seven or
+eight and twenty too old--would you?"
+
+"I can't say I should think it too old, if--"
+
+"If you were really fond of her?"
+
+Once more there was no answer.
+
+"Well," resumed Allan, "if there's no harm in her being only a
+governess, and no harm in her being a little older than I am,
+what's the objection to Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"I have made no objection."
+
+"I don't say you have. But you don't seem to like the notion of
+it, for all that."
+
+There was another pause. Midwinter was the first to break the
+silence this time.
+
+"Are you sure of yourself, Allan?" he asked, with his face bent
+once more over the book. "Are you really attached to this lady?
+Have you thought seriously already of asking her to be your
+wife?"
+
+"I am thinking seriously of it at this moment," said Allan. "I
+can't be happy--I can't live without her. Upon my soul, I worship
+the very ground she treads on!"
+
+"How long--" His voice faltered, and he stopped. "How long," he
+reiterated, "have you worshipped the very ground she treads on?"
+
+"Longer than you think for. I know I can trust you with all my
+secrets--"
+
+"Don't trust me!"
+
+"Nonsense! I _will_ trust you. There is a little difficulty in
+the way which I haven't mentioned yet. It's a matter of some
+delicacy, and I want to consult you about it. Between ourselves,
+I have had private opportunities with Miss Gwilt--"
+
+Midwinter suddenly started to his feet, and opened the door.
+
+"We'll talk of this to-morrow," he said. "Good-night."
+
+Allan looked round in astonishment. The door was closed again,
+and he was alone in the room.
+
+"He has never shaken hands with me!" exclaimed Allan, looking
+bewildered at the empty chair.
+
+As the words passed his lips the door opened, and Midwinter
+appeared again.
+
+"We haven't shaken hands," he said, abruptly. "God bless you,
+Allan! We'll talk of it to-morrow. Good-night."
+
+Allan stood alone at the window, looking out at the pouring rain.
+He felt ill at ease, without knowing why. "Midwinter's ways get
+stranger and stranger," he thought. "What can he mean by putting
+me off till to-morrow, when I wanted to speak to him to-night?"
+He took up his bedroom candle a little impatiently, put it down
+again, and, walking back to the open window, stood looking out in
+the direction of the cottage. "I wonder if she's thinking of me?"
+he said to himself softly.
+
+She _was_ thinking of him. She had just opened her desk to write
+to Mrs. Oldershaw; and her pen had that moment traced the opening
+line: "Make your mind easy. I have got him!"
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+EXIT.
+
+IT rained all through the night, and when the morning came it was
+raining still.
+
+Contrary to his ordinary habit, Midwinter was waiting in the
+breakfast-room when Allan entered it. He looked worn and weary,
+but his smile was gentler and his manner more composed than
+usual. To Allan's surprise he approached the subject of the
+previous night's conversation of his own accord as soon as the
+servant was out of the room.
+
+"I am afraid you thought me very impatient and very abrupt with
+you last night," he said. "I will try to make amends for it this
+morning. I will hear everything you wish to say to me on the
+subject of Miss Gwilt."
+
+"I hardly like to worry you," said Allan. "You look as if you had
+had a bad night's rest."
+
+"I have not slept well for some time past," replied Midwinter,
+quietly. "Something has been wrong with me. But I believe I have
+found out the way to put myself right again without troubling the
+doctors. Late in the morning I shall have something to say to you
+about this. Let us get back first to what you were talking of
+last night. You were speaking of some difficulty--" He hesitated,
+and finished the sentence in a tone so low that Allan failed to
+hear him. "Perhaps it would be better," he went on, "if, instead
+of speaking to me, you spoke to Mr. Brock?"
+
+"I would rather speak to _you,_" said Allan. "But tell me first,
+was I right or wrong last night in thinking you disapproved of my
+falling in love with Miss Gwilt?"
+
+Midwinter's lean, nervous fingers began to crumble the bread in
+his plate. His eyes looked away from Allan for the first time.
+
+"If you have any objection," persisted Allan, "I should like to
+hear it."
+
+Midwinter suddenly looked up again, his cheeks turning ashy pale,
+and his glittering black eyes fixed full on Allan's face.
+
+"You love her," he said. "Does _she_ love _you?_"
+
+"You won't think me vain?" returned Allan. "I told you yesterday
+I had had private opportunities with her--"
+
+Midwinter's eyes dropped again to the crumbs on his plate. "I
+understand," he interposed, quickly. "You were wrong last night.
+I had no objections to make."
+
+"Don't you congratulate me?" asked Allan, a little uneasily.
+"Such a beautiful woman! such a clever woman!"
+
+Midwinter h eld out his hand. "I owe you more than mere
+congratulations," he said. "In anything which is for your
+happiness I owe you help." He took Allan's hand, and wrung it
+hard. "Can I help you?" he asked, growing paler and paler as he
+spoke.
+
+"My dear fellow," exclaimed Allan, "what is the matter with you?
+Your hand is as cold as ice."
+
+Midwinter smiled faintly. "I am always in extremes," he said; "my
+hand was as hot as fire the first time you took it at the old
+west-country inn. Come to that difficulty which you have not come
+to yet. You are young, rich, your own master--and she loves you.
+What difficulty can there be?"
+
+Allan hesitated. "I hardly know how to put it," he replied. "As
+you said just now, I love her, and she loves me; and yet there is
+a sort of strangeness between us. One talks a good deal about
+one's self when one is in love, at least I do. I've told her all
+about myself and my mother, and how I came in for this place, and
+the rest of it. Well--though it doesn't strike me when we are
+together--it comes across me now and then, when I'm away from
+her, that she doesn't say much on her side. In fact, I know no
+more about her than you do."
+
+"Do you mean that you know nothing about Miss Gwilt's family and
+friends?"
+
+"That's it, exactly."
+
+"Have you never asked her about them?"
+
+"I said something of the sort the other day," returned Allan:
+"and I'm afraid, as usual, I said it in the wrong way. She
+looked--I can't quite tell you how; not exactly displeased,
+but--oh, what things words are! I'd give the world, Midwinter, if
+I could only find the right word when I want it as well as you
+do."
+
+"Did Miss Gwilt say anything to you in the way of a reply?"
+
+"That's just what I was coming to. She said, 'I shall have a
+melancholy story to tell you one of these days, Mr. Armadale,
+about myself and my family; but you look so happy, and the
+circumstances are so distressing, that I have hardly the heart to
+speak of it now.' Ah, _she_ can express herself--with the tears
+in her eyes, my dear fellow, with the tears in her eyes! Of
+course, I changed the subject directly. And now the difficulty is
+how to get back to it, delicately, without making her cry again.
+We _must_ get back to it, you know. Not on my account; I am quite
+content to marry her first and hear of her family misfortunes,
+poor thing, afterward. But I know Mr. Brock. If I can't satisfy
+him about her family when I write to tell him of this (which, of
+course, I must do), he will be dead against the whole thing. I'm
+my own master, of course, and I can do as I like about it. But
+dear old Brock was such a good friend to my poor mother, and he
+has been such a good friend to me--you see what I mean, don't
+you?"
+
+"Certainly, Allan; Mr. Brock has been your second father. Any
+disagreement between you about such a serious matter as this
+would be the saddest thing that could happen. You ought to
+satisfy him that Miss Gwilt is (what I am sure Miss Gwilt will
+prove to be) worthy, in every way worthy--" His voice sank in
+spite of him, and he left the sentence unfinished.
+
+"Just my feeling in the matter!" Allan struck in, glibly. "Now we
+can come to what I particularly wanted to consult you about. If
+this was your case, Midwinter, you would be able to say the right
+words to her--you would put it delicately, even though you were
+putting it quite in the dark. I can't do that. I 'm a blundering
+sort of fellow; and I'm horribly afraid, if I can't get some hint
+at the truth to help me at starting, of saying something to
+distress her. Family misfortunes are such tender subjects to
+touch on, especially with such a refined woman, such a
+tender-hearted woman, as Miss Gwilt. There may have been some
+dreadful death in the family--some relation who has disgraced
+himself--some infernal cruelty which has forced the poor thing
+out on the world as a governess. Well, turning it over in my
+mind, it struck me that the major might be able to put me on the
+right tack. It is quite possible that he might have been informed
+of Miss Gwilt's family circumstances before he engaged her, isn't
+it?"
+
+"It is possible, Allan, certainly."
+
+"Just my feeling again! My notion is to speak to the major. If I
+could only get the story from him first, I should know so much
+better how to speak to Miss Gwilt about it afterward. You advise
+me to try the major, don't you?"
+
+There was a pause before Midwinter replied. When he did answer,
+it was a little reluctantly.
+
+"I hardly know how to advise you, Allan," he said. "This is a
+very delicate matter."
+
+"I believe you would try the major, if you were in my place,"
+returned Allan, reverting to his inveterately personal way of
+putting the question.
+
+"Perhaps I might," said Midwinter, more and more unwillingly.
+"But if I did speak to the major, I should be very careful, in
+your place, not to put myself in a false position. I should be
+very careful to let no one suspect me of the meanness of prying
+into a woman's secrets behind her back."
+
+Allan's face flushed. "Good heavens, Midwinter," he exclaimed,
+"who could suspect me of that?"
+
+"Nobody, Allan, who really knows you."
+
+"The major knows me. The major is the last man in the world to
+misunderstand me. All I want him to do is to help me (if he can)
+to speak about a delicate subject to Miss Gwilt, without hurting
+her feelings. Can anything be simpler between two gentlemen?"
+
+Instead of replying, Midwinter, still speaking as constrainedly
+as ever, asked a question on his side. "Do you mean to tell Major
+Milroy," he said, "what your intentions really are toward Miss
+Gwilt?"
+
+Allan's manner altered. He hesitated, and looked confused.
+
+"I have been thinking of that," he replied; "and I mean to feel
+my way first, and then tell him or not afterward, as matters turn
+out?"
+
+A proceeding so cautious as this was too strikingly inconsistent
+with Allan's character not to surprise any one who knew him.
+Midwinter showed his surprise plainly.
+
+"You forget that foolish flirtation of mine with Miss Milroy,"
+Allan went on, more and more confusedly. "The major may have
+noticed it, and may have thought I meant--well, what I didn't
+mean. It might be rather awkward, mightn't it, to propose to his
+face for his governess instead of his daughter?"
+
+He waited for a word of answer, but none came. Midwinter opened
+his lips to speak, and suddenly checked himself. Allan, uneasy at
+his silence, doubly uneasy under certain recollections of the
+major's daughter which the conversation had called up, rose from
+the table and shortened the interview a little impatiently.
+
+"Come! come!" he said, "don't sit there looking unutterable
+things; don't make mountains out of mole-hills. You have such an
+old, old head, Midwinter, on those young shoulders of yours!
+Let's have done with all these _pros_ and _cons._. Do you mean to
+tell me in plain words that it won't do to speak to the major?"
+
+"I can't take the responsibility, Allan, of telling you that. To
+be plainer still, I can't feel confident of the soundness of any
+advice I may give you in--in our present position toward each
+other. All I am sure of is that I cannot possibly be wrong in
+entreating you to do two things."
+
+"What are they?"
+
+"If you speak to Major Milroy, pray remember the caution I have
+given you! Pray think of what you say before you say it!"
+
+"I'll think, never fear! What next?"
+
+"Before you take any serious step in this matter, write and tell
+Mr. Brock. Will you promise me to do that?"
+
+"With all my heart. Anything more?"
+
+"Nothing more. I have said my last words."
+
+Allan led the way to the door. "Come into my room," he said, "and
+I'll give you a cigar. The servants will be in here directly to
+clear away, and I want to go on talking about Miss Gwilt."
+
+"Don't wait for me," said Midwinter; "I'll follow you in a minute
+or two."
+
+He remained seated until Allan had closed the door, then rose,
+and took from a corner of the room, where it lay hidden behind
+one of the curtains, a knapsack ready packed for traveling. As he
+stood at the window thinking, with the knapsack in his hand, a
+strangely old, care-worn look stole over his face: he seemed to
+lose the last of his youth in an instant.
+
+
+What the woman's quicker insight had discovered days since, the
+man's slower perception had only realized in the past night. The
+pang that had wrung him when he heard Allan's avowal had set the
+truth self-revealed before Midwinter for the first time. He had
+been conscious of looking at Miss Gwilt with new eyes and a new
+mind, on the next occasion when they met after the memorable
+interview in Major Milroy's garden; but he had never until now
+known the passion that she had roused in him for what it really
+was. Knowing it at last, feeling it consciously in full
+possession of him, he had the courage which no man with a happier
+experience of life would have possessed--the courage to recall
+what Allan had confided to him, and to look resolutely at the
+future through his own grateful remembrances of the past.
+
+Steadfastly, through the sleepless hours of the night, he had
+bent his mind to the conviction that he must conquer the passion
+which had taken possession of him, for Allan's sake; and that the
+one way to conquer it was--to go. No after-doubt as to the
+sacrifice had troubled him when morning came; and no after-doubt
+troubled him now. The one question that kept him hesitating was
+the question of leaving Thorpe Ambrose. Though Mr. Brock's letter
+relieved him from all necessity of keeping watch in Norfolk for a
+woman who was known to be in Somersetshire; though the duties of
+the steward's office were duties which might be safely left in
+Mr. Bashwood's tried and trustworthy hands--still, admitting
+these considerations, his mind was not easy at the thought of
+leaving Allan, at a time when a crisis was approaching in Allan's
+life.
+
+He slung the knapsack loosely over his shoulder and put the
+question to his conscience for the last time. "Can you trust
+yourself to see her, day by day as you must see her--can you
+trust yourself to hear him talk of her, hour by hour, as you must
+hear him--if you stay in this house?" Again the answer came, as
+it had come all through the night. Again his heart warned him, in
+the very interests of the friendship that he held sacred, to go
+while the time was his own; to go before the woman who had
+possessed herself of his love had possessed herself of his power
+of self-sacrifice and his sense of gratitude as well.
+
+He looked round the room mechanically before he turned to leave
+it. Every remembrance of the conversation that had just taken
+place between Allan and himself pointed to the same conclusion,
+and warned him, as his own conscience had warned him, to go.
+
+Had he honestly mentioned any one of the objections which he, or
+any man, must have seen to Allan's attachment? Had he--as his
+knowledge of his friend's facile character bound him to
+do--warned Allan to distrust his own hasty impulses, and to test
+himself by time and absence, before he made sure that the
+happiness of his whole life was bound up in Miss Gwilt? No. The
+bare doubt whether, in speaking of these things, he could feel
+that he was speaking disinterestedly, had closed his lips, and
+would close his lips for the future, till the time for speaking
+had gone by. Was the right man to restrain Allan the man who
+would have given the world, if he had it, to stand in Allan's
+place? There was but one plain course of action that an honest
+man and a grateful man could follow in the position in which he
+stood. Far removed from all chance of seeing her, and from all
+chance of hearing of her--alone with his own faithful
+recollection of what he owed to his friend--he might hope to
+fight it down, as he had fought down the tears in his childhood
+under his gypsy master's stick; as he had fought down the misery
+of his lonely youth time in the country bookseller's shop. "I
+must go," he said, as he turned wearily from the window, "before
+she comes to the house again. I must go before another hour is
+over my head."
+
+With that resolution he left the room; and, in leaving it, took
+the irrevocable step from Present to Future.
+
+
+The rain was still falling. The sullen sky, all round the
+horizon, still lowered watery and dark, when Midwinter, equipped
+for traveling, appeared in Allan's room.
+
+"Good heavens!" cried Allan, pointing to the knapsack, "what does
+_that_ mean?"
+
+"Nothing very extraordinary," said Midwinter. "It only
+means--good-by."
+
+"Good-by!" repeated Allan, starting to his feet in astonishment.
+
+Midwinter put him back gently into his chair, and drew a seat
+near to it for himself.
+
+"When you noticed that I looked ill this morning," he said, "I
+told you that I had been thinking of a way to recover my health,
+and that I meant to speak to you about it later in the day. That
+latter time has come. I have been out of sorts, as the phrase is,
+for some time past. You have remarked it yourself, Allan, more
+than once; and, with your usual kindness, you have allowed it to
+excuse many things in my conduct which would have been otherwise
+unpardonable, even in your friendly eyes."
+
+"My dear fellow," interposed Allan, "you don't mean to say you
+are going out on a walking tour in this pouring rain!"
+
+"Never mind the rain," rejoined Midwinter. "The rain and I are
+old friends. You know something, Allan, of the life I led before
+you met with me. From the time when I was a child, I have been
+used to hardship and exposure. Night and day, sometimes for
+months together, I never had my head under a roof. For years and
+years, the life of a wild animal--perhaps I ought to say, the
+life of a savage--was the life I led, while you were at home and
+happy. I have the leaven of the vagabond--the vagabond animal, or
+the vagabond man, I hardly know which--in me still. Does it
+distress you to hear me talk of myself in this way? I won't
+distress you. I will only say that the comfort and the luxury of
+our life here are, at times, I think, a little too much for a man
+to whom comforts and luxuries come as strange things. I want
+nothing to put me right again but more air and exercise; fewer
+good breakfasts and dinners, my dear friend, than I get here. Let
+me go back to some of the hardships which this comfortable house
+is expressly made to shut out. Let me meet the wind and weather
+as I used to meet them when I was a boy; let me feel weary again
+for a little while, without a carriage near to pick me up; and
+hungry when the night falls, with miles of walking between my
+supper and me. Give me a week or two away, Allan--up northward,
+on foot, to the Yorkshire moors--and I promise to return to
+Thorpe Ambrose, better company for you and for your friends. I
+shall be back before you have time to miss me. Mr. Bashwood will
+take care of the business in the office; it is only for a
+fortnight, and it is for my own good--let me go!"
+
+"I don't like it," said Allan. "I don't like your leaving me in
+this sudden manner. There's something so strange and dreary about
+it. Why not try riding, if you want more exercise; all the horses
+in the stables are at your disposal. At all events, you can't
+possibly go to-day. Look at the rain!"
+
+Midwinter looked toward the window, and gently shook his head.
+
+"I thought nothing of the rain," he said, "when I was a mere
+child, getting my living with the dancing dogs--why should I
+think anything of it now? _My_ getting wet, and _your_ getting
+wet, Allan, are two very different things. When I was a
+fisherman's boy in the Hebrides, I hadn't a dry thread on me for
+weeks together. "
+
+"But you're not in the Hebrides now," persisted Allan; "and I
+expect our friends from the cottage to-morrow evening. You can't
+start till after to-morrow. Miss Gwilt is going to give us some
+more music, and you know you like Miss Gwilt's playing."
+
+Midwinter turned aside to buckle the straps of his knapsack.
+"Give me another chance of hearing Miss Gwilt when I come back,"
+he said, with his head down, and his fingers busy at the straps.
+
+"You have one fault, my dear fellow, and it grows on you,"
+remonstrated Allan; "when you have once taken a thing into our
+head, you're the most obstinate man alive. There's no persuading
+you to listen to reason. If you _will_ go," added Allan, suddenly
+rising, as Midwinter took up his hat and stick in silence, "I
+have half a mind to go with you, and try a little roughing it
+too!"
+
+"Go with _me!_" repeated Midwinter, with a momentar y bitterness
+in his tone, "and leave Miss Gwilt!"
+
+Allan sat down again, and admitted the force of the objection in
+significant silence. Without a word more on his side, Midwinter
+held out his hand to take leave. They were both deeply moved, and
+each was anxious to hide his agitation from the other. Allan took
+the last refuge which his friend's firmness left to him: he tried
+to lighten the farewell moment by a joke.
+
+"I'll tell you what," he said, "I begin to doubt if you're quite
+cured yet of your belief in the Dream. I suspect you're running
+away from me, after all!"
+
+Midwinter looked at him, uncertain whether he was in jest or
+earnest. "What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"What did you tell me," retorted Allan, "when you took me in here
+the other day, and made a clean breast of it? What did you say
+about this room, and the second vision of the dream? By Jupiter!"
+he exclaimed, starting to his feet once more, "now I look again,
+here _is_ the Second Vision! There's the rain pattering against
+the window-there's the lawn and the garden outside--here am I
+where I stood in the Dream--and there are you where the Shadow
+stood. The whole scene complete, out-of-doors and in; and _I've_
+discovered it this time!"
+
+A moment's life stirred again in the dead remains of Midwinter's
+superstition. His color changed, and he eagerly, almost fiercely,
+disputed Allan's conclusion.
+
+"No!" he said, pointing to the little marble figure on the
+bracket, "the scene is _not_ complete--you have forgotten
+something, as usual. The Dream is wrong this time, thank
+God--utterly wrong! In the vision you saw, the statue was lying
+in fragments on the floor, and you were stooping over them with a
+troubled and an angry mind. There stands the statue safe and
+sound! and you haven't the vestige of an angry feeling in your
+mind, have you?" He seized Allan impulsively by the hand. At the
+same moment the consciousness came to him that he was speaking
+and acting as earnestly as if he still believed in the Dream. The
+color rushed back over his face, and he turned away in confused
+silence.
+
+"What did I tell you?" said Allan, laughing, a little uneasily.
+"That night on the Wreck is hanging on your mind as heavily as
+ever."
+
+"Nothing hangs heavy on me," retorted Midwinter, with a sudden
+outburst of impatience, "but the knapsack on my back, and the
+time I'm wasting here. I'll go out, and see if it's likely to
+clear up."
+
+"You'll come back?" interposed Allan.
+
+Midwinter opened the French window, and stepped out into the
+garden.
+
+"Yes," he said, answering with all his former gentleness of
+manner; "I'll come back in a fortnight. Good-by, Allan; and good
+luck with Miss Gwilt!"
+
+He pushed the window to, and was away across the garden before
+his friend could open it again and follow him.
+
+Allan rose, and took one step into the garden; then checked
+himself at the window, and returned to his chair. He knew
+Midwinter well enough to feel the total uselessness of attempting
+to follow him or to call him back. He was gone, and for two weeks
+to come there was no hope of seeing him again. An hour or more
+passed, the rain still fell, and the sky still threatened. A
+heavier and heavier sense of loneliness and despondency--the
+sense of all others which his previous life had least fitted him
+to understand and endure--possessed itself of Allan's mind. In
+sheer horror of his own uninhabitably solitary house, he rang for
+his hat and umbrella, and resolved to take refuge in the major's
+cottage.
+
+"I might have gone a little way with him," thought Allan, his
+mind still running on Midwinter as he put on his hat. "I should
+like to have seen the dear old fellow fairly started on his
+journey."
+
+He took his umbrella. If he had noticed the face of the servant
+who gave it to him, he might possibly have asked some questions,
+and might have heard some news to interest him in his present
+frame of mind. As it was, he went out without looking at the man,
+and without suspecting that his servants knew more of Midwinter's
+last moments at Thorpe Ambrose than he knew himself. Not ten
+minutes since, the grocer and butcher had called in to receive
+payment of their bills, and the grocer and the butcher had seen
+how Midwinter started on his journey.
+
+The grocer had met him first, not far from the house, stopping on
+his way, in the pouring rain, to speak to a little ragged imp of
+a boy, the pest of the neighborhood. The boy's customary
+impudence had broken out even more unrestrainedly than usual at
+the sight of the gentleman's knapsack. And what had the gentleman
+done in return? He had stopped and looked distressed, and had put
+his two hands gently on the boy's shoulders. The grocer's own
+eyes had seen that; and the grocer's own ears had heard him say,
+"Poor little chap! I know how the wind gnaws and the rain wets
+through a ragged jacket, better than most people who have got a
+good coat on their backs." And with those words he had put his
+hand in his pocket, and had rewarded the boy's impudence with a
+present of a shilling. "Wrong here-abouts," said the grocer,
+touching his forehead. "That's my opinion of Mr. Armadale's
+friend!"
+
+The butcher had seen him further on in the journey, at the other
+end of the town. He had stopped--again in the pouring rain--and
+this time to look at nothing more remarkable than a half-starved
+cur, shivering on a doorstep. "I had my eye on him," said the
+butcher; "and what do you think he did? He crossed the road over
+to my shop, and bought a bit of meat fit for a Christian. Very
+well. He says good-morning, and crosses back again; and, on the
+word of a man, down he goes on his knees on the wet doorstep, and
+out he takes his knife, and cuts up the meat, and gives it to the
+dog. Meat, I tell you again, fit for a Christian! I'm not a hard
+man, ma'am," concluded the butcher, addressing the cook, "but
+meat's meat; and it will serve your master's friend right if he
+lives to want it."
+
+With those old unforgotten sympathies of the old unforgotten time
+to keep him company on his lonely road, he had left the town
+behind him, and had been lost to view in the misty rain. The
+grocer and the butcher had seen the last of him, and had judged a
+great nature, as all natures _are_ judged from the grocer and the
+butcher point of view.
+
+THE END OF THE SECOND BOOK.
+
+BOOK THE THIRD.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MRS. MILROY.
+
+Two days after Midwinter's departure from Thorpe Ambrose, Mrs.
+Milroy, having completed her morning toilet, and having dismissed
+her nurse, rang the bell again five minutes afterward, and on the
+woman's re-appearance asked impatiently if the post had come in
+
+"Post?" echoed the nurse. "Haven't you got your watch? Don't you
+know that it's a good half-hour too soon to ask for your
+letters?" She spoke with the confident insolence of a servant
+long accustomed to presume on her mistress's weakness and her
+mistress's necessities. Mrs. Milroy, on her side, appeared to be
+well used to her nurses manner; she gave her orders composedly,
+without noticing it.
+
+"When the postman does come," she said, "see him yourself. I am
+expecting a letter which I ought to have had two days since. I
+don't understand it. I'm beginning to suspect the servants."
+
+The nurse smiled contemptuously. "Whom will you suspect next?"
+she asked. "There! don't put yourself out. I'll answer the
+gate-bell this morning; and we'll see if I can't bring you a
+letter when the postman comes." Saying those words, with the tone
+and manner of a woman who is quieting a fractious child, the
+nurse, without waiting to be dismissed, left the room.
+
+Mrs. Milroy turned slowly and wearily on her bed, when she was
+left by herself again, and let the light from the window fall on
+her face. It was the face of a woman who had once been handsome,
+and who was still, so far as years went, in the prime of her
+life. Long-continued suffering of body and long-continued
+irritation of mind had worn her away--in the roughly expressive
+popular phrase--to skin and bone. The utter wreck of her beauty
+was made a wreck horrible to behold, by her desperate efforts to
+conceal the sight of it from her own eyes, from the eyes of her
+husband and her child, from the eyes even of the doctor who
+attended her, and whose business it was to penetrate to the
+truth. Her head, from which the greater part of the hair had
+fallen off; would have been less shocking to see than the
+hideously youthful wig by which she tried to hide the loss. No
+deterioration of her complexion, no wrinkling of her skin, could
+have been so dreadful to look at as the rouge that lay thick on
+her cheeks, and the white enamel plastered on her forehead. The
+delicate lace, and the bright trimming on her dressing-gown, the
+ribbons in her cap, and the rings on her bony fingers, all
+intended to draw the eye away from the change that had passed
+over her, directed the eye to it, on the contrary; emphasized it;
+made it by sheer force of contrast more hopeless and more
+horrible than it really was. An illustrated book of the fashions,
+in which women were represented exhibiting their finery by means
+of the free use of their limbs, lay on the bed, from which she
+had not moved for years without being lifted by her nurse. A
+hand-glass was placed with the book so that she could reach it
+easily. She took up the glass after her attendant had left the
+room, and looked at her face with an unblushing interest and
+attention which she would have been ashamed of herself at the age
+of eighteen.
+
+"Older and older, and thinner and thinner!" she said. "The major
+will soon be a free man; but I'll have that red-haired hussy out
+of the house first!"
+
+She dropped the looking-glass on the counterpane, and clinched
+the hand that held it. Her eyes suddenly riveted themselves on a
+little crayon portrait of her husband hanging on the opposite
+wall; they looked at the likeness with the hard and cruel
+brightness of the eyes of a bird of prey. "Red is your taste in
+your old age is it?" she said to the portrait. "Red hair, and a
+scrofulous complexion, and a padded figure, a ballet-girl's walk,
+and a pickpocket's light fingers. _Miss_ Gwilt! _Miss,_ with
+those eyes, and that walk!" She turned her head suddenly on the
+pillow, and burst into a harsh, jeering laugh. "_Miss!_" she
+repeated over and over again, with the venomously pointed
+emphasis of the most merciless of all human forms of
+contempt--the contempt of one woman for another.
+
+The age we live in is an age which finds no human creature
+inexcusable. Is there an excuse for Mrs. Milroy? Let the story of
+her life answer the question.
+
+She had married the major at an unusually early age; and, in
+marrying him, had taken a man for her husband who was old enough
+to be her father--a man who, at that time, had the reputation,
+and not unjustly, of having made the freest use of his social
+gifts and his advantages of personal appearance in the society of
+women. Indifferently educated, and below her husband in station,
+she had begun by accepting his addresses under the influence of
+her own flattered vanity, and had ended by feeling the
+fascination which Major Milroy had exercised over women
+infinitely her mental superiors in his earlier life. He had been
+touched, on his side, by her devotion, and had felt, in his turn,
+the attraction of her beauty, her freshness, and her youth. Up to
+the time when their little daughter and only child had reached
+the age of eight years, their married life had been an unusually
+happy one. At that period the double misfortune fell on the
+household, of the failure of the wife's health, and the almost
+total loss of the husband's fortune; and from that moment the
+domestic happiness of the married pair was virtually at an end.
+
+Having reached the age when men in general are readier, under the
+pressure of calamity, to resign themselves than to resist, the
+major had secured the little relics of his property, had retired
+into the country, and had patiently taken refuge in his
+mechanical pursuits. A woman nearer to him in age, or a woman
+with a better training and more patience of disposition than his
+wife possessed, would have understood the major's conduct, and
+have found consolation in the major's submission. Mrs. Milroy
+found consolation in nothing. Neither nature nor training helped
+her to meet resignedly the cruel calamity which had struck at her
+in the bloom of womanhood and the prime of beauty. The curse of
+incurable sickness blighted her at once and for life.
+
+Suffering can, and does, develop the latent evil that there is in
+humanity, as well as the latent good. The good that was in Mrs.
+Milroy's nature shrank up, under that subtly deteriorating
+influence in which the evil grew and flourished. Month by month,
+as she became the weaker woman physically, she became the worse
+woman morally. All that was mean, cruel, and false in her
+expanded in steady proportion to the contraction of all that had
+once been generous, gentle, and true. Old suspicions of her
+husband's readiness to relapse into the irregularities of his
+bachelor life, which, in her healthier days of mind and body, she
+had openly confessed to him--which she had always sooner or later
+seen to be suspicions that he had not deserved--came back, now
+that sickness had divorced her from him, in the form of that
+baser conjugal distrust which keeps itself cunningly secret;
+which gathers together its inflammatory particles atom by atom
+into a heap, and sets the slowly burning frenzy of jealousy
+alight in the mind. No proof of her husband's blameless and
+patient life that could now be shown to Mrs. Milroy; no appeal
+that could be made to her respect for herself, or for her child
+growing up to womanhood, availed to dissipate the terrible
+delusion born of her hopeless illness, and growing steadily with
+its growth. Like all other madness, it had its ebb and flow, its
+time of spasmodic outburst, and its time of deceitful repose;
+but, active or passive, it was always in her. It had injured
+innocent servants, and insulted blameless strangers. It had
+brought the first tears of shame and sorrow into her daughter's
+eyes, and had set the deepest lines that scored it in her
+husband's face. It had made the secret misery of the little
+household for years; and it was now to pass beyond the family
+limits, and to influence coming events at Thorpe Ambrose, in
+which the future interests of Allan and Allan's friend were
+vitally concerned.
+
+A moment's glance at the posture of domestic affairs in the
+cottage, prior to the engagement of the new governess, is
+necessary to the due appreciation of the serious consequences
+that followed Miss Gwilt's appearance on the scene.
+
+On the marriage of the governess who had lived in his service for
+many years (a woman of an age and an appearance to set even Mrs.
+Milroy's jealousy at defiance), the major had considered the
+question of sending his daughter away from home far more
+seriously than his wife supposed. He was conscious that scenes
+took place in the house at which no young girl should be present;
+but he felt an invincible reluctance to apply the one efficient
+remedy--the keeping his daughter away from home in school time
+and holiday time alike. The struggle thus raised in his mind once
+set at rest, by the resolution to advertise for a new governess,
+Major Milroy's natural tendency to avoid trouble rather than to
+meet it had declared itself in its customary manner. He had
+closed his eyes again on his home anxieties as quietly as usual,
+and had gone back, as he had gone back on hundreds of previous
+occasions, to the consoling society of his old friend the clock.
+
+It was far otherwise with the major's wife. The chance which her
+husband had entirely overlooked, that the new governess who was
+to come might be a younger and a more attractive woman than the
+old governess who had gone, was the first chance that presented
+itself as possible to Mrs. Milroy's mind. She had said nothing.
+Secretly waiting, and secretly nursing her inveterate distrust,
+she had encouraged her husband and her daughter to leave her on
+the occasion of the picnic, with the express purpose of making an
+opportunity for seeing the new governess alone. The governess had
+shown herself; and the smoldering fire of Mrs. Milroy's jealousy
+had burst into flame in the moment when she and the handsome
+stranger first set eyes on each other.
+
+The interview over, Mrs. Milroy's suspicions fastened at once and
+immovably on he r husband's mother.
+
+She was well aware that there was no one else in London on whom
+the major could depend to make the necessary inquiries; she was
+well aware that Miss Gwilt had applied for the situation, in the
+first instance, as a stranger answering an advertisement
+published in a newspaper. Yet knowing this, she had obstinately
+closed her eyes, with the blind frenzy of the blindest of all the
+passions, to the facts straight before her; and, looking back to
+the last of many quarrels between them which had ended in
+separating the elder lady and herself, had seized on the
+conclusion that Miss Gwilt's engagement was due to her
+mother-in-law's vindictive enjoyment of making mischief in her
+household. The inference which the very servants themselves,
+witnesses of the family scandal, had correctly drawn--that the
+major's mother, in securing the services of a well-recommended
+governess for her son, had thought it no part of her duty to
+consider that governess's looks in the purely fanciful interests
+of the major's wife--was an inference which it was simply
+impossible to convey into Mrs. Milroy's mind. Miss Gwilt had
+barely closed the sick-room door when the whispered words hissed
+out of Mrs. Milroy's lips, "Before another week is over your
+head, my lady, you go!"
+
+From that moment, through the wakeful night and the weary day,
+the one object of the bedridden woman's life was to procure the
+new governess's dismissal from the house.
+
+The assistance of the nurse, in the capacity of spy, was
+secured--as Mrs. Milroy had been accustomed to secure other extra
+services which her attendant was not bound to render her--by a
+present of a dress from the mistress's wardrobe. One after
+another articles of wearing apparel which were now useless to
+Mrs. Milroy had ministered in this way to feed the nurse's
+greed--the insatiable greed of an ugly woman for fine clothes.
+Bribed with the smartest dress she had secured yet, the household
+spy took her secret orders, and applied herself with a vile
+enjoyment of it to her secret work.
+
+The days passed, the work went on; but nothing had come of it.
+Mistress and servant had a woman to deal with who was a match for
+both of them.
+
+Repeated intrusions on the major, when the governess happened to
+be in the same room with him, failed to discover the slightest
+impropriety of word, look, or action, on either side. Stealthy
+watching and listening at the governess's bedroom door detected
+that she kept a light in her room at late hours of the night, and
+that she groaned and ground her teeth in her sleep--and detected
+nothing more. Careful superintendence in the day-time proved that
+she regularly posted her own letters, instead of giving them to
+the servant; and that on certain occasions, when the occupation
+of her hours out of lesson time and walking time was left at her
+own disposal, she had been suddenly missed from the garden, and
+then caught coming back alone to it from the park. Once and once
+only, the nurse had found an opportunity of following her out of
+the garden, had been detected immediately in the park, and had
+been asked with the most exasperating politeness if she wished to
+join Miss Gwilt in a walk. Small circumstances of this kind,
+which were sufficiently suspicious to the mind of a jealous
+woman, were discovered in abundance. But circumstances, on which
+to found a valid ground of complaint that might be laid before
+the major, proved to be utterly wanting. Day followed day, and
+Miss Gwilt remained persistently correct in her conduct, and
+persistently irreproachable in her relations toward her employer
+and her pupil.
+
+Foiled in this direction, Mrs. Milroy tried next to find an
+assailable place in the statement which the governess's reference
+had made on the subject of the governess's character.
+
+Obtaining from the major the minutely careful report which his
+mother had addressed to him on this topic, Mrs. Milroy read and
+reread it, and failed to find the weak point of which she was in
+search in any part of the letter. All the customary questions on
+such occasions had been asked, and all had been scrupulously and
+plainly answered. The one sole opening for an attack which it was
+possible to discover was an opening which showed itself, after
+more practical matters had been all disposed of, in the closing
+sentences of the letter.
+
+"I was so struck," the passage ran, "by the grace and distinction
+of Miss Gwilt's manners that I took an opportunity, when she was
+out of the room, of asking how she first came to be governess.
+'In the usual way,' I was told. 'A sad family misfortune, in
+which she behaved nobly. She is a very sensitive person, and
+shrinks from speaking of it among strangers--a natural reluctance
+which I have always felt it a matter of delicacy to respect.'
+Hearing this, of course, I felt the same delicacy on my side. It
+was no part of my duty to intrude on the poor thing's private
+sorrows; my only business was to do what I have now done, to make
+sure that I was engaging a capable and respectable governess to
+instruct my grandchild."
+
+After careful consideration of these lines, Mrs. Milroy, having a
+strong desire to find circumstances suspicious, found them
+suspicious accordingly. She determined to sift the mystery of
+Miss Gwilt's family misfortunes to the bottom, on the chance of
+extracting from it something useful to her purpose. There were
+two ways of doing this. She might begin by questioning the
+governess herself, or she might begin by questioning the
+governess's reference. Experience of Miss Gwilt's quickness of
+resource in dealing with awkward questions at their introductory
+interview decided her on taking the latter course. "I'll get the
+particulars from the reference first," thought Mrs. Milroy, "and
+then question the creature herself, and see if the two stories
+agree."
+
+The letter of inquiry was short, and scrupuously to the point.
+
+Mrs. Milroy began by informing her correspondent that the state
+of her health necessitated leaving her daughter entirely under
+the governess's influence and control. On that account she was
+more anxious than most mothers to be thoroughly informed in every
+respect about the person to whom she confided the entire charge
+of an only child; and feeling this anxiety, she might perhaps be
+excused for putting what might be thought, after the excellent
+character Miss Gwilt had received, a somewhat unnecessary
+question. With that preface, Mrs. Milroy came to the point, and
+requested to be informed of the circumstances which had obliged
+Miss Gwilt to go out as a governess.
+
+The letter, expressed in these terms, was posted the same day. On
+the morning when the answer was due, no answer appeared. The next
+morning arrived, and still there was no reply. When the third
+morning came, Mrs. Milroy's impatience had broken loose from all
+restraint. She had rung for the nurse in the manner which has
+been already recorded, and had ordered the woman to be in waiting
+to receive the letters of the morning with her own hands. In this
+position matters now stood; and in these domestic circumstances
+the new series of events at Thorpe Ambrose took their rise.
+
+
+Mrs. Milroy had just looked at her watch, and had just put her
+hand once more to the bell-pull, when the door opened and the
+nurse entered the room.
+
+"Has the postman come?" asked Mrs. Milroy.
+
+The nurse laid a letter on the bed without answering, and waited,
+with unconcealed curiosity, to watch the effect which it produced
+on her mistress.
+
+Mrs. Milroy tore open the envelope the instant it was in her
+hand. A printed paper appeared (which she threw aside),
+surrounding a letter (which she looked at) in her own
+handwriting! She snatched up the printed paper. It was the
+customary Post- office circular, informing her that her letter
+had been duly presented at the right address, and that the person
+whom she had written to was not to be found.
+
+"Something wrong?" asked the nurse, detecting a change in her
+mistress's face.
+
+The question passed unheeded. Mrs. Milroy's writing-desk was on
+the table at the bedside. She took from it the letter which the
+major's mother had written to her son, and turned to the page
+containing the name and address of Miss
+ Gwilt's reference. "Mrs. Mandeville, 18 Kingsdown Crescent,
+Bayswater," she read, eagerly to herself, and then looked at the
+address on her own returned letter. No error had been committed:
+the directions were identically the same.
+
+"Something wrong?" reiterated the nurse, advancing a step nearer
+to the bed.
+
+"Thank God--yes!" cried Mrs. Milroy, with a sudden outburst of
+exultation. She tossed the Post-office circular to the nurse, and
+beat her bony hands on the bedclothes in an ecstasy of
+anticipated triumph. "Miss Gwilt's an impostor! Miss Gwilt's an
+impostor! If I die for it, Rachel, I'll be carried to the window
+to see the police take her away!"
+
+"It's one thing to say she's an impostor behind her back, and
+another thing to prove it to her face," remarked the nurse. She
+put her hand as she spoke into her apron pocket, and, with a
+significant look at her mistress, silently produced a second
+letter.
+
+"For me?" asked Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"No!" said the nurse; "for Miss Gwilt."
+
+The two women eyed each other, and understood each other without
+another word.
+
+"Where is she?" said Mrs. Milroy.
+
+The nurse pointed in the direction of the park. "Out again, for
+another walk before breakfast--by herself."
+
+Mrs. Milroy beckoned to the nurse to stoop close over her. "Can
+you open it, Rachel?" she whispered.
+
+Rachel nodded.
+
+"Can you close it again, so that nobody would know?"
+
+"Can you spare the scarf that matches your pearl gray dress?"
+asked Rachel.
+
+"Take it!" said Mrs. Milroy, impatiently.
+
+The nurse opened the wardrobe in silence, took the scarf in
+silence, and left the room in silence. In less than five minutes
+she came back with the envelope of Miss Gwilt's letter open in
+her hand.
+
+"Thank you, ma'am, for the scarf," said Rachel, putting the open
+letter composedly on the counterpane of the bed.
+
+Mrs. Milroy looked at the envelope. It had been closed as usual
+by means of adhesive gum, which had been made to give way by the
+application of steam. As Mrs. Milroy took out the letter, her
+hand trembled violently, and the white enamel parted into cracks
+over the wrinkles on her forehead.
+
+Rachel withdrew to the window to keep watch on the park. "Don't
+hurry," she said. "No signs of her yet."
+
+Mrs. Milroy still paused, keeping the all-important morsel of
+paper folded in her hand. She could have taken Miss Gwilt's life,
+but she hesitated at reading Miss Gwilt's letter.
+
+"Are you troubled with scruples?" asked the nurse, with a sneer.
+"Consider it a duty you owe to your daughter."
+
+"You wretch!" said Mrs. Milroy. With that expression of opinion,
+she opened the letter.
+
+It was evidently written in great haste, was undated, and was
+signed in initials only. Thus it ran:
+
+"Diana Street.
+
+"BY DEAR LYDIA--The cab is waiting at the door, and I have only a
+moment to tell you that I am obliged to leave London, on
+business, for three or four days, or a week at longest. My
+letters will be forwarded if you write. I got yours yesterday,
+and I agree with you that it is very important to put him off the
+awkward subject of yourself and your family as long as you safely
+can. The better you know him, the better you will be able to make
+up the sort of story that will do. Once told, you will have to
+stick to it; and, _having_ to stick to it, beware of making it
+complicated, and beware of making it in a hurry. I will write
+again about this, and give you my own ideas. In the meantime,
+don't risk meeting him too often in the park.
+
+"Yours, M. O."
+
+"Well?" asked the nurse, returning to the bedside. "Have you done
+with it?"
+
+"Meeting him in the park!" repeated Mrs. Milroy, with her eyes
+still fastened on the letter. "_Him!_ Rachel, where is the
+major?"
+
+"In his own room."
+
+"I don't believe it! "
+
+"Have your own way. I want the letter and the envelope."
+
+"Can you close it again so that she won't know?"
+
+"What I can open I can shut. Anything more?"
+
+"Nothing more."
+
+Mrs. Milroy was left alone again, to review her plan of attack by
+the new light that had now been thrown on Miss Gwilt.
+
+The information that had been gained by opening the governess's
+letter pointed plainly to the conclusion that an adventuress had
+stolen her way into the house by means of a false reference. But
+having been obtained by an act of treachery which it was
+impossible to acknowledge, it was not information that could be
+used either for warning the major or for exposing Miss Gwilt. The
+one available weapon in Mrs. Milroy's hands was the weapon
+furnished by her own returned letter, and the one question to
+decide was how to make the best and speediest use of it.
+
+The longer she turned the matter over in her mind, the more hasty
+and premature seemed the exultation which she had felt at the
+first sight of the Post-office circular. That a lady acting as
+reference to a governess should have quitted her residence
+without leaving any trace behind her, and without even mentioning
+an address to which her letters could be forwarded, was a
+circumstance in itself sufficiently suspicious to be mentioned to
+the major. But Mrs. Milroy, however perverted her estimate of her
+husband might be in some respects, knew enough of his character
+to be assured that, if she told him what had happened, he would
+frankly appeal to the governess herself for an explanation. Miss
+Gwilt's quickness and cunning would, in that case, produce some
+plausible answer on the spot, which the major's partiality would
+be only too ready to accept; and she would at the same time, no
+doubt, place matters in train, by means of the post, for the due
+arrival of all needful confirmation on the part of her accomplice
+in London. To keep strict silence for the present, and to
+institute (without the governess's knowledge) such inquiries as
+might be necessary to the discovery of undeniable evidence, was
+plainly the only safe course to take with such a man as the
+major, and with such a woman as Miss Gwilt. Helpless herself, to
+whom could Mrs. Milroy commit the difficult and dangerous task of
+investigation? The nurse, even if she was to be trusted, could
+not be spared at a day's notice, and could not be sent away
+without the risk of exciting remark. Was there any other
+competent and reliable person to employ, either at Thorpe Ambrose
+or in London? Mrs. Milroy turned from side to side of the bed,
+searching every corner of her mind for the needful discovery, And
+searching in vain. "Oh, if I could only lay my hand on some man I
+could trust!" she thought, despairingly. "If I only knew where to
+look for somebody to help me!"
+
+As the idea passed through her mind, the sound of her daughter's
+voice startled her from the other side of the door.
+
+"May I come in?" asked Neelie.
+
+"What do you want?" returned Mrs. Milroy, impatiently.
+
+"I have brought up your breakfast, mamma."
+
+"My breakfast?" repeated Mrs. Milroy, in surprise. "Why doesn't
+Rachel bring it up as usual?" She considered a moment, and then
+called out, sharply, "Come in!"
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE MAN IS FOUND.
+
+NEELIE entered the room, carrying the tray with the tea, the dry
+toast, and the pat of butter which composed the invalid's
+invariable breakfast.
+
+"What does this mean?" asked Mrs. Milroy, speaking and looking as
+she might have spoken and looked if the wrong servant had come
+into the room.
+
+Neelie put the tray down on the bedside table. "I thought I
+should like to bring you up your breakfast, mamma, for once in a
+way," she replied, "and I asked Rachel to let me."
+
+"Come here," said Mrs. Milroy, "and wish me good-morning."
+
+Neelie obeyed. As she stooped to kiss her mother, Mrs. Milroy
+caught her by the arm, and turned her roughly to the light. There
+were plain signs of disturbance and distress in her daughter's
+face. A deadly thrill of terror ran through Mrs. Milroy on the
+instant. She suspected that the opening of the letter had been
+discovered by Miss Gwilt, and that the nurse was keeping out of
+the way in consequence.
+
+"Let me go, mamma," said Neelie, shrinking under her mother's
+grasp. "You hurt me."
+
+"Tell me why you have brought up my breakfast this morning,"
+persisted Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"I have told you, mamma."
+
+"You have not! You have made  an excuse; I see it in your face.
+Come! what is it?"
+
+Neelie's resolution ga ve way before her mother's. She looked
+aside uneasily at the things in the tray. "I have been vexed,"
+she said, with an effort; "and I didn't want to stop in the
+breakfast-room. I wanted to come up here, and to speak to you."
+
+"Vexed? Who has vexed you? What has happened? Has Miss Gwilt
+anything to do with it?"
+
+Neelie looked round again at her mother in sudden curiosity and
+alarm. "Mamma!" she said, "you read my thoughts. I declare you
+frighten me. It _was_ Miss Gwilt."
+
+Before Mrs. Milroy could say a word more on her side, the door
+opened and the nurse looked in.
+
+"Have you got what you want?" she asked, as composedly as usual.
+"Miss, there, insisted on taking your tray up this morning. Has
+she broken anything?"
+
+"Go to the window. I want to speak to Rachel." said Mrs. Milroy.
+
+As soon as her daughter's back was turned, she beckoned eagerly
+to the nurse. "Anything wrong?" she asked, in a whisper. "Do you
+think she suspects us?"
+
+The nurse turned away with her hard, sneering smile. "I told you
+it should be done," she said, "and it _has_ been done. She hasn't
+the ghost of a suspicion. I waited in the room; and I saw her
+take up the letter and open it."
+
+Mrs. Milroy drew a deep breath of relief. "Thank you," she said,
+loud enough for her daughter to hear. "I want nothing more."
+
+The nurse withdrew; and Neelie came back from the window. Mrs.
+Milroy took her by the hand, and looked at her more attentively
+and more kindly than usual. Her daughter interested her that
+morning; for her daughter had something to say on the subject of
+Miss Gwilt.
+
+"I used to think that you promised to be pretty, child," she
+said, cautiously resuming the interrupted conversation in the
+least direct way. "But you don't seem to be keeping your promise.
+You look out of health and out of spirits. What is the matter
+with you?"
+
+If there had been any sympathy between mother and child, Neelie
+might have owned the truth. She might have said frankly: "I am
+looking ill, because my life is miserable to me. I am fond of Mr.
+Armadale, and Mr. Armadale was once fond of me. We had one little
+disagreement, only one, in which I was to blame. I wanted to tell
+him so at the time, and I have wanted to tell him so ever since;
+and Miss Gwilt stands between us and prevents me. She has made us
+like strangers; she has altered him, and taken him away from me.
+He doesn't look at me as he did; he doesn't speak to me as he
+did; he is never alone with me as he used to be; I can't say the
+words to him that I long to say; and I can't write to him, for it
+would look as if I wanted to get him back. It is all over between
+me and Mr. Armadale; and it is that woman's fault. There is
+ill-blood between Miss Gwilt and me the whole day long; and say
+what I may, and do what I may, she always gets the better of me,
+and always puts me in the wrong. Everything I saw at Thorpe
+Ambrose pleased me, everything I did at Thorpe Ambrose made me
+happy, before she came. Nothing pleases me, and nothing makes me
+happy now!" If Neelie had ever been accustomed to ask her
+mother's advice and to trust herself to her mother's love, she
+might have said such words as these. As. it was, the tears came
+into her eyes, and she hung her head in silence.
+
+"Come!" said Mrs. Milroy, beginning to lose patience. "You have
+something to say to me about Miss Gwilt. What is it?"
+
+Neelie forced back her tears, and made an effort to answer.
+
+"She aggravates me beyond endurance, mamma; I can't bear her; I
+shall do something--" Neelie stopped, and stamped her foot
+angrily on the floor. "I shall throw something at her head if we
+go on much longer like this! I should have thrown something this
+morning if I hadn't left the room. Oh, do speak to papa about it!
+Do find out some reason for sending her away! I'll go to
+school--I'll do anything in the world to get rid of Miss Gwilt!"
+
+To get rid of Miss Gwilt! At those words--at that echo from her
+daughter's lips of the one dominant desire kept secret in her own
+heart--Mrs. Milroy slowly raised herself in bed. What did it
+mean? Was the help she wanted coming from the very last of all
+quarters in which she could have thought of looking for it?
+
+"Why do you want to get rid of Miss Gwilt?" she asked. "What have
+you got to complain of?"
+
+"Nothing!" said Neelie. "That's the aggravation of it. Miss Gwilt
+won't let me have anything to complain of. She is perfectly
+detestable; she is driving me mad; and she is the pink of
+propriety all the time. I dare say it's wrong, but I don't
+care--I hate her!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy's eyes questioned her daughter's face as they had
+never questioned it yet. There was something under the surface,
+evidently--something which it might be of vital importance to her
+own purpose to discover--which had not risen into view. She went
+on probing her way deeper and deeper into Neelie's mind, with a
+warmer and warmer interest in Neelie's secret.
+
+"Pour me out a cup of tea," she said; "and don't excite yourself,
+my dear. Why do you speak to _me_ about this? Why don't you speak
+to your father?"
+
+"I have tried to speak to papa," said Neelie. "But it's no use;
+he is too good to know what a wretch she is. She is always on her
+best behavior with him; she is always contriving to be useful to
+him. I can't make him understand why I dislike Miss Gwilt; I
+can't make _you_ understand--I only understand it myself." She
+tried to pour out the tea, and in trying upset the cup. "I'll go
+downstairs again!" exclaimed Neelie, with a burst of tears. "I'm
+not fit for anything; I can't even pour out a cup of tea!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy seized her hand and stopped her. Trifling as it was,
+Neelie's reference to the relations between the major and Miss
+Gwilt had roused her mother's ready jealousy. The restraints
+which Mrs. Milroy had laid on herself thus far vanished in a
+moment--vanished even in the presence of a girl of sixteen, and
+that girl her own child!
+
+"Wait here!" she said, eagerly. "You have come to the right place
+and the right person. Go on abusing Miss Gwilt. I like to hear
+you--I hate her, too!"
+
+"You, mamma!" exclaimed Neelie, looking at her mother in
+astonishment.
+
+For a moment Mrs. Milroy hesitated before she said more. Some
+last-left instinct of her married life in its earlier and happier
+time pleaded hard with her to respect the youth and the sex of
+her child. But jealousy respects nothing; in the heaven above and
+on the earth beneath, nothing but itself. The slow fire of
+self-torment, burning night and day in the miserable woman's
+breast, flashed its deadly light into her eyes, as the next words
+dropped slowly and venomously from her lips.
+
+"If you had had eyes in your head, you would never have gone to
+your father," she said. "Your father has reasons of his own for
+hearing nothing that you can say, or that anybody can say,
+against Miss Gwilt."
+
+Many girls at Neelie's age would have failed to see the meaning
+hidden under those words. It was the daughter's misfortune, in
+this instance, to have had experience enough of the mother to
+understand her. Neelie started back from the bedside, with her
+face in a glow. "Mamma!" she said, "you are talking horribly!
+Papa is the best, and dearest, and kindest--oh, I won't hear it!
+I won't hear it!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy's fierce temper broke out in an instant--broke out
+all the more violently from her feeling herself, in spite of
+herself, to have been in the wrong.
+
+"You impudent little fool!" she retorted, furiously. "Do you
+think I want _you_ to remind me of what I owe to your father? Am
+I to learn how to speak of your father, and how to think of your
+father, and how to love and honor your father, from a forward
+little minx like you! I was finely disappointed, I can tell you,
+when you were born--I wished for a boy, you impudent hussy! If
+you ever find a man who is fool enough to marry you, he will be a
+lucky man if you only love him half as well, a quarter as well, a
+hundred-thousandth part as well, as I loved your father. Ah, you
+can cry when it's too late; you can come creeping back to beg
+your mother's pardon after you have insulted her. You little
+dowdy, half-grown creature! I was handsomer than ever you will be
+when I married your father. I would have gone through fire and
+water to serve your father! If he had asked me to cut off one of
+my arms, I would have done it--I would have done it to please
+him!" She turned suddenly with her face to the wall, forgetting
+her daughter, forgetting her husband, forgetting everything but
+the torturing remembrance of her lost beauty. "My arms!" she
+repeated to herself, faintly. "What arms I had when I was young!"
+She snatched up the sleeve of her dressing-gown furtively, with a
+shudder. "Oh, look at it now! look at it now!"
+
+Neelie fell on her knees at the bedside and hid her face. In
+sheer despair of finding comfort and help anywhere else, she had
+cast herself impulsively on her mother's mercy; and this was how
+it had ended! "Oh, mamma," she pleaded, "you know I didn't mean
+to offend you! I couldn't help it when you spoke so of my father.
+Oh, do, do forgive me!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy turned again on her pillow, and looked at her
+daughter vacantly. "Forgive you?" she repeated, with her mind
+still in the past, groping its way back darkly to the present.
+
+"I beg your pardon, mamma--I beg your pardon on my knees. I am so
+unhappy; I do so want a little kindness! Won't you forgive me?"
+
+"Wait a little," rejoined Mrs. Milroy. "Ah," she said, after an
+interval, "now I know! Forgive you? Yes; I'll forgive you on one
+condition." She lifted Neelie's head, and looked her searchingly
+in the face. "Tell me why you hate Miss Gwilt! You've a reason of
+your own for hating her, and you haven't confessed it yet."
+
+Neelie's head dropped again. The burning color that she was
+hiding by hiding her face showed itself on her neck. Her mother
+saw it, and gave her time.
+
+"Tell me," reiterated Mrs. Milroy, more gently, "why do you hate
+her?"
+
+The answer came reluctantly, a word at a time, in fragments.
+
+"Because she is trying--"
+
+"Trying what?"
+
+"Trying to make somebody who is much--"
+
+"Much what?"
+
+"Much too young for her--"
+
+"Marry her?"
+
+"Yes, mamma."
+
+Breathlessly interested, Mrs. Milroy leaned forward, and twined
+her hand caressingly in her daughter's hair.
+
+"Who is it, Neelie?" she asked, in a whisper.
+
+"You will never say I told you, mamma?"
+
+"Never! Who is it?"
+
+"Mr. Armadale."
+
+Mrs. Milroy leaned back on her pillow in dead silence. The plain
+betrayal of her daughter's first love, by her daughter's own
+lips, which would have absorbed the whole attention of other
+mothers, failed to occupy her for a moment. Her jealousy,
+distorting all things to fit its own conclusions, was busied in
+distorting what she had just heard. "A blind," she thought,
+"which has deceived my girl. It doesn't deceive _me._ Is Miss
+Gwilt likely to succeed?" she asked, aloud. "Does Mr. Armadale
+show any sort of interest in her?"
+
+Neelie looked up at her mother for the first time. The hardest
+part of the confession was over now. She had revealed the truth
+about Miss Gwilt, and she had openly mentioned Allan's name.
+
+"He shows the most unaccountable interest," she said. "It's
+impossible to understand it. It's downright infatuation. I
+haven't patience to talk about it!"
+
+"How do _you_ come to be in Mr. Armadale's secrets?" inquired
+Mrs. Milroy. "Has he informed _you,_ of all the people in the
+world, of his interest in Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"Me!" exclaimed Neelie, indignantly. "It's quite bad enough that
+he should have told papa."
+
+At the re-appearance of the major in the narrative, Mrs. Milroy's
+interest in the conversation rose to its climax. She raised
+herself again from the pillow. "Get a chair," she said. "Sit
+down, child, and tell me all about it. Every word, mind--every
+word!"
+
+"I can only tell you, mamma, what papa told me."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Saturday. I went in with papa's lunch to the workshop, and he
+said, 'I have just had a visit from Mr. Armadale; and I want to
+give you a caution while I think of it.' I didn't say anything,
+mamma; I only waited. Papa went on, and told me that Mr. Armadale
+had been speaking to him on the subject of Miss Gwilt, and that
+he had been asking a question about her which nobody in his
+position had a right to ask. Papa said he had been obliged,
+good-humoredly, to warn Mr. Armadale to be a little more
+delicate, and a little more careful next time. I didn't feel much
+interested, mamma; it didn't matter to _me_ what Mr. Armadale
+said or did. Why should I care about it?"
+
+"Never mind yourself," interposed Mrs. Milroy, sharply. "Go on
+with what your father said. What was he doing when he was talking
+about Miss Gwilt? How did he look?"
+
+"Much as usual, mamma. He was walking up and down the workshop;
+and I took his arm and walked up and down with him."
+
+"I don't care what _you_ were doing," said Mrs. Milroy, more and
+more irritably. "Did your father tell you what Mr. Armadale's
+question was, or did he not?"
+
+"Yes, mamma. He said Mr. Armadale began by mentioning that he was
+very much interested in Miss Gwilt, and he then went on to ask
+whether papa could tell him anything about her family
+misfortunes--"
+
+"What!" cried Mrs. Milroy. The word burst from her almost in a
+scream, and the white enamel on her face cracked in all
+directions. "Mr. Armadale said _that?_" she went on, leaning out
+further and further over the side of the bed.
+
+Neelie started up, and tried to put her mother back on the
+pillow.
+
+"Mamma!" she exclaimed, "are you in pain? Are you ill? You
+frighten me!"
+
+"Nothing, nothing, nothing," said Mrs. Milroy. She was too
+violently agitated to make any other than the commonest excuse.
+"My nerves are bad this morning; don't notice it. I'll try the
+other side of the pillow. Go on! go on!. I'm listening, though
+I'm not looking at you." She turned her face to the wall, and
+clinched her trembling hands convulsively beneath the bedclothes.
+"I've got her!" she whispered to herself, under her breath. "I've
+got her at last!"
+
+"I'm afraid I've been talking too much," said Neelie. "I'm afraid
+I've been stopping here too long. Shall I go downstairs, mamma,
+and come back later in the day?"
+
+"Go on," repeated Mrs. Milroy, mechanically. "What did your
+father say next? Anything more about Mr. Armadale?"
+
+"Nothing more, except how papa answered him," replied Neelie.
+"Papa repeated his own words when he told me about it. He said,
+'In the absence of any confidence volunteered by the lady
+herself, Mr. Armadale, all I know or wish to know--and you must
+excuse me for saying, all any one else need know or wish to
+know--is that Miss Gwilt gave me a perfectly satisfactory
+reference before she entered my house.' Severe, mamma, wasn't it?
+I don't pity him in the least; he richly deserved it. The next
+thing was papa's caution to _me._ He told me to check Mr.
+Armadale's curiosity if he applied to me next. As if he was
+likely to apply to me! And as if I should listen to him if he
+did! That's all, mamma. You won't suppose, will you, that I have
+told you this because I want to hinder Mr. Armadale from marrying
+Miss Gwilt? Let him marry her if he pleases; I don't care!" said
+Neelie, in a voice that faltered a little, and with a face which
+was hardly composed enough to be in perfect harmony with a
+declaration of indifference. "All I want is to be relieved from
+the misery of having Miss Gwilt for my governess. I'd rather go
+to school. I should like to go to school. My mind's quite changed
+about all that, only I haven't the heart to tell papa. I don't
+know what's come to me, I don't seem to have heart enough for
+anything now; and when papa takes me on his knee in the evening,
+and says, 'Let's have a talk, Neelie,' he makes me cry. Would you
+mind breaking it to him, mamma, that I've changed my mind, and I
+want to go to school?" The tears rose thickly in her eyes, and
+she failed to see that her mother never even turned on the pillow
+to look round at her.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Milroy, vacantly. "You're a good girl; you
+shall go to school."
+
+The cruel brevity of the reply, and the tone in which it was
+spoken, told Neelie plainly that her mother's attention had been
+wandering far away from her, and that it was useless and needless
+to prolong the interview. She turned aside quietly, without a
+word of remonstrance. It was nothing new in her experience to
+find herself shut out from her mother's sympathies. She looked at
+her eyes in the glass, and, pouring
+ out some cold water, bathed her face. "Miss Gwilt shan't see
+I've been crying!" thought Neelie, as she went back to the
+bedside to take her leave. "I've tired you out," mamma," she
+said, gently. "Let me go now; and let me come back a little later
+when you have had some rest."
+
+"Yes," repeated her mother, as mechanically as ever; "a little
+later when I have had some rest."
+
+Neelie left the room. The minute after the door had closed on
+her, Mrs. Milroy rang the bell for her nurse. In the face of the
+narrative she had just heard, in the face of every reasonable
+estimate of probabilities, she held to her own jealous
+conclusions as firmly as ever. "Mr. Armadale may believe her, and
+my daughter may believe her," thought the furious woman. "But I
+know the major; and she can't deceive _me!_"
+
+The nurse came in. "Prop me up," said Mrs. Milroy. "And give me
+my desk. I want to write."
+
+"You're excited," replied the nurse. "You're not fit to write."
+
+"Give me the desk," reiterated Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"Anything more?" asked Rachel, repeating her invariable formula
+as she placed the desk on the bed.
+
+"Yes. Come back in half an hour. I shall want you to take a
+letter to the great house."
+
+The nurse's sardonic composure deserted her for once. "Mercy on
+us!" she exclaimed, with an accent of genuine surprise. "What
+next? You don't mean to say you're going to write--?"
+
+"I am going to write to Mr. Armadale," interposed Mrs. Milroy;
+"and you are going to take the letter to him, and wait for an
+answer; and, mind this, not a living soul but our two selves must
+know of it in the house."
+
+"Why are you writing to Mr. Armadale?" asked Rachel. "And why is
+nobody to know of it but our two selves?"
+
+"Wait," rejoined Mrs. Milroy, "and you will see."
+
+The nurse's curiosity, being a woman's curiosity, declined to
+wait.
+
+"I'll help you with my eyes open," she said; "but I won't help
+you blindfold."
+
+"Oh, if I only had the use of my limbs!" groaned Mrs. Milroy.
+"You wretch, if I could only do without you!"
+
+"You have the use of your head," retorted the impenetrable nurse.
+"And you ought to know better than to trust me by halves, at this
+time of day."
+
+It was brutally put; but it was true--doubly true, after the
+opening of Miss Gwilt's letter. Mrs. Milroy gave way.
+
+"What do you want to know?" she asked. "Tell me, and leave me."
+
+"I want to know what you are writing to Mr. Armadale about?"
+
+"About Miss Gwilt."
+
+"What has Mr. Armadale to do with you and Miss Gwilt?"
+
+Mrs. Milroy held up the letter that had been returned to her by
+the authorities at the Post-office.
+
+"Stoop," she said. "Miss Gwilt may be listening at the door. I'll
+whisper."
+
+The nurse stooped, with her eye on the door. "You know that the
+postman went with this letter to Kingsdown Crescent?" said Mrs.
+Milroy. "And you know that he found Mrs. Mandeville gone away,
+nobody could tell where?"
+
+"Well," whispered Rachel "what next?"
+
+"This, next. When Mr. Armadale gets the letter that I am going to
+write to him, he will follow the same road as the postman; and
+we'll see what happens when he knocks at Mrs. Mandeville's door."
+
+"How do you get him to the door?"
+
+"I tell him to go to Miss Gwilt's reference."
+
+"Is he sweet on Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!" said the nurse. "I see!"
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE BRINK OF DISCOVERY.
+
+THE morning of the interview between Mrs. Milroy and her daughter
+at the cottage was a morning of serious reflection for the squire
+at the great house.
+
+Even Allan's easy-tempered nature had not been proof against the
+disturbing influences exercised on it by the events of the last
+three days. Midwinter's abrupt departure had vexed him; and Major
+Milroy's reception of his inquiries relating to Miss Gwilt
+weighed unpleasantly on his mind. Since his visit to the cottage,
+he had felt impatient and ill at ease, for the first time in his
+life, with everybody who came near him. Impatient with Pedgift
+Junior, who had called on the previous evening to announce his
+departure for London, on business, the next day, and to place his
+services at the disposal of his client; ill at ease with Miss
+Gwilt, at a secret meeting with her in the park that morning; and
+ill at ease in his own company, as he now sat moodily smoking in
+the solitude of his room. "I can't live this sort of life much
+longer," thought Allan. "If nobody will help me to put the
+awkward question to Miss Gwilt, I must stumble on some way of
+putting it for myself."
+
+What way? The answer to that question was as hard to find as
+ever. Allan tried to stimulate his sluggish invention by walking
+up and down the room, and was disturbed by the appearance of the
+footman at the first turn.
+
+"Now then! what is it?" he asked, impatiently.
+
+"A letter, sir; and the person waits for an answer."
+
+Allan looked at the address. It was in a strange handwriting. He
+opened the letter, and a little note inclosed in it dropped to
+the ground. The note was directed, still in the strange
+handwriting, to "Mrs. Mandeville, 18 Kingsdown Crescent,
+Bayswater. Favored by Mr. Armadale." More and more surprised,
+Allan turned for information to the signature at the end of the
+letter. It was "Anne Milroy."
+
+"Anne Milroy?" he repeated. "It must be the major's wife. What
+can she possibly want with me?" By way of discovering what she
+wanted, Allan did at last what he might more wisely have done at
+first. He sat down to read the letter.
+
+["Private."] "The Cottage, Monday.
+
+"DEAR SIR--The name at the end of these lines will, I fear,
+recall to you a very rude return made on my part, some time
+since, for an act of neighborly kindness on yours. I can only say
+in excuse that I am a great sufferer, and that, if I was
+ill-tempered enough, in a moment of irritation under severe pain,
+to send back your present of fruit, I have regretted doing so
+ever since. Attribute this letter, if you please, to my desire to
+make some atonement, and to my wish to be of service to our good
+friend and landlord, if I possibly can.
+
+"I have been informed of the question which you addressed to my
+husband, the day before yesterday, on the subject of Miss Gwilt.
+From all I have heard of you, I am quite sure that your anxiety
+to know more of this charming person than you know now is an
+anxiety proceeding from the most honorable motives. Believing
+this, I feel a woman's interest--incurable invalid as I am--in
+assisting you. If you are desirous of becoming acquainted with
+Miss Gwilt's family circumstances without directly appealing to
+Miss Gwilt herself, it rests with you to make the discovery; and
+I will tell you how.
+
+"It so happens that, some few days since, I wrote privately to
+Miss Gwilt's reference on this very subject. I had long observed
+that my governess was singularly reluctant to speak of her family
+and her friends; and, without attributing her silence to other
+than perfectly proper motives, I felt it my duty to my daughter
+to make some inquiry on the subject. The answer that I have
+received is satisfactory as far as it goes. My correspondent
+informs me that Miss Gwilt's story is a very sad one, and that
+her own conduct throughout has been praiseworthy in the extreme.
+The circumstances (of a domestic nature, as I gather) are all
+plainly stated in a collection of letters now in the possession
+of Miss Gwilt's reference. This lady is perfectly willing to let
+me see the letters; but not possessing copies of them, and being
+personally responsible for their security, she is reluctant, if
+it can be avoided, to trust them to the post; and she begs me to
+wait until she or I can find some reliable person who can be
+employed to transmit the packet from her hands to mine.
+
+"Under these circumstances, it has struck me that you might
+possibly, with your interest in the matter, be not unwilling to
+take charge of the papers. If I am wrong in this idea, and if you
+are not disposed, after what I have told you, to go to the
+trouble and expense of a journey to London, you have only to burn
+my letter and inclosure, and to think no more about it. If you
+decide on becoming my envoy, I gladly provide you with the
+necessary introduction to Mrs. Mandeville. You have only, on
+presenting it, to receive the letters in a sealed packet, to send
+them her e on your return to Thorpe Ambrose, and to wait an early
+communication from me acquainting you with the result.
+
+"In conclusion, I have only to add that I see no impropriety in
+your taking (if you feel so inclined) the course that I propose
+to you. Miss Gwilt's manner of receiving such allusions as I have
+made to her family circumstances has rendered it unpleasant for
+me (and would render it quite impossible for you) to seek
+information in the first instance from herself. I am certainly
+justified in applying to her reference; and you are certainly not
+to blame for being the medium of safely transmitting a sealed
+communication with one lady to another. If I find in that
+communication family secrets which cannot honorably be mentioned
+to any third person, I shall, of course, be obliged to keep you
+waiting until I have first appealed to Miss Gwilt. If I find
+nothing recorded but what is to her honor, and what is sure to
+raise her still higher in your estimation, I am undeniably doing
+her a service by taking you into my confidence. This is how I
+look at the matter; but pray don't allow me to influence _you._
+
+"In any case, I have one condition to make, which I am sure you
+will understand to be indispensable. The most innocent actions
+are liable, in this wicked world, to the worst possible
+interpretation I must, therefore, request that you will consider
+this communication as strictly _private._. I write to you in a
+confidence which is on no account (until circumstances may, in my
+opinion, justify the revelation of it) to extend beyond our two
+selves,
+
+"Believe me, dear sir, truly yours,
+
+"ANNE MILROY."
+
+In this tempting form the unscrupulous ingenuity of the major's
+wife had set the trap. Without a moment's hesitation, Allan
+followed his impulses, as usual, and walked straight into it,
+writing his answer and pursuing his own reflections
+simultaneously in a highly characteristic state of mental
+confusion.
+
+"By Jupiter, this is kind of Mrs. Milroy!" ("My dear madam.")
+"Just the thing I wanted, at the time when I needed it most!" ("I
+don't know how to express my sense of your kindness, except by
+saying that I will go to London and fetch the letters with the
+greatest pleasure.") "She shall have a basket of fruit regularly
+every day, all through the season. " ("I will go at once, dear
+madam, and be back to-morrow.") "Ah, nothing like the women for
+helping one when one is in love! This is just what my poor mother
+would have done in Mrs. Milroy's place." ("On my word of honor as
+a gentleman, I will take the utmost care of the letters; and keep
+the thing strictly private, as you request.") "I would have given
+five hundred pounds to anybody who would have put me up to the
+right way to speak to Miss Gwilt; and here is this blessed woman
+does it for nothing." ("Believe me, my dear madam, gratefully
+yours, Allan Armadale.")
+
+Having sent his reply out to Mrs. Milroy's messenger, Allan
+paused in a momentary perplexity. He had an appointment with Miss
+Gwilt in the park for the next morning. It was absolutely
+necessary to let her know that he would be unable to keep it; she
+had forbidden him to write, and he had no chance that day of
+seeing her alone. In this difficulty, he determined to let the
+necessary intimation reach her through the medium of a message to
+the major, announcing his departure for London on business, and
+asking if he could be of service to any member of the family.
+Having thus removed the only obstacle to his freedom of action,
+Allan consulted the time-table, and found, to his disappointment,
+that there was a good hour to spare before it would be necessary
+to drive to the railway station. In his existing frame of mind he
+would infinitely have preferred starting for London in a violent
+hurry.
+
+When the time came at last, Allan, on passing the steward's
+office, drummed at the door, and called through it to Mr.
+Bashwood, "I'm going to town; back to-morrow." There was no
+answer from within; and the servant, interposing, informed his
+master that Mr. Bashwood, having no business to attend to that
+day, had locked up the office, and had left some hours since.
+
+On reaching the station, the first person whom Allan encountered
+was Pedgift Junior, going to London on the legal business which
+he had mentioned on the previous evening at the great house. The
+necessary explanations exchanged, and it was decided that the two
+should travel in the same carriage. Allan was glad to have a
+companion; and Pedgift, enchanted as usual to make himself useful
+to his client, bustled away to get the tickets and see to the
+luggage. Sauntering to and fro on the platform, until his
+faithful follower returned, Allan came suddenly upon no less a
+person than Mr. Bashwood himself, standing back in a corner with
+the guard of the train, and putting a letter (accompanied, to all
+appearance, by a fee) privately into the man's hand.
+
+"Halloo!" cried Allan, in his hearty way. "Something important
+there, Mr. Bashwood, eh?"
+
+If Mr. Bashwood had been caught in the act of committing murder,
+he could hardly have shown greater alarm than he now testified at
+Allan's sudden discovery of him. Snatching off his dingy old hat,
+he bowed bare-headed, in a palsy of nervous trembling from head
+to foot. "No, sir--no, sir; only a little letter, a little
+letter, a little letter," said the deputy-steward, taking refuge
+in reiteration, and bowing himself swiftly backward out of his
+employer's sight.
+
+Allan turned carelessly on his heel. "I wish I could take to that
+fellow," he thought, "but I can't; he's such a sneak! What the
+deuce was there to tremble about? Does he think I want to pry
+into his secrets?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood's secret on this occasion concerned Allan more
+nearly than Allan supposed. The letter which he had just placed
+in charge of the guard was nothing less than a word of warning
+addressed to Mrs. Oldershaw, and written by Miss Gwilt.
+
+"If you can hurry your business" (wrote the major's governess)
+"do so, and come back to London immediately. Things are going
+wrong here, and Miss Milroy is at the bottom of the mischief.
+This morning she insisted on taking up her mother's breakfast,
+always on other occasions taken up by the nurse. They had a long
+confabulation in private; and half an hour later I saw the nurse
+slip out with a letter, and take the path that leads to the great
+house. The sending of the letter has been followed by young
+Armadale's sudden departure for London--in the face of an
+appointment which he had with me for tomorrow morning. This looks
+serious. The girl is evidently bold enough to make a fight of it
+for the position of Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose, and she has
+found out some way of getting her mother to help her. Don't
+suppose I am in the least nervous or discouraged, and don't do
+anything till you hear from me again. Only get back to London,
+for I may have serious need of your assistance in the course of
+the next day or two.
+
+"I send this letter to town (to save a post) by the midday train,
+in charge of the guard. As you insist on knowing every step I
+take at Thorpe Ambrose, I may as well tell you that my messenger
+(for I can't go to the station myself) is that curious old
+creature whom I mentioned to you in my first letter. Ever since
+that time he has been perpetually hanging about here for a look
+at me. I am not sure whether I frighten him or fascinate him;
+perhaps I do both together. All you need care to know is that I
+can trust him with my trifling errands, and possibly, as time
+goes on, with something more. L. G."
+
+
+Meanwhile the train had started from the Thorpe Ambrose station,
+and the squire and his traveling companion were on their way to
+London.
+
+Some men, finding themselves in Allan's company under present
+circumstances, might have felt curious to know the nature of his
+business in the metropolis. Young Pedgift's unerring instinct as
+a man of the world penetrated the secret without the slightest
+difficulty. "The old story," thought this wary old head, wagging
+privately on its lusty young shoulders, "There's a woman in the
+case, as usual. Any other business would have been turned  over to
+me." Perfectly satisfied with this conclusion, Mr. Pedgift the
+younger proceeded, with an eye to his professional interest, to
+make himself agreeable to his client in the capacity of volunteer
+courier. He seized on the whole administrative business of the
+journey to London, as he had seized on the whole administrative
+business of the picnic at the Broads. On reaching the terminus,
+Allan was ready to go to any hotel that might be recommended. His
+invaluable solicitor straight-way drove him to a hotel at which
+the Pedgift family had been accustomed to put up for three
+generations.
+
+"You don't object to vegetables, sir?" said the cheerful Pedgift,
+as the cab stopped at a hotel in Covent Garden Market. "Very
+good; you may leave the rest to my grandfather, my father, and
+me. I don't know which of the three is most beloved and respected
+in this house. How d'ye do, William? (Our head-waiter, Mr.
+Armadale.) Is your wife's rheumatism better, and does the little
+boy get on nicely at school? Your master's out, is he? Never
+mind, you'll do. This, William, is Mr. Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose. I have prevailed on Mr. Armadale to try our house. Have
+you got the bedroom I wrote for? Very good. Let Mr. Armadale have
+it instead of me (my grandfather's favorite bedroom, sir; No. 57,
+on the second floor); pray take it; I can sleep anywhere. Will
+you have the mattress on the top of the feather-bed? You hear,
+William? Tell Matilda, the mattress on the top of the
+feather-bed. How is Matilda? Has she got the toothache, as usual?
+The head-chambermaid, Mr. Armadale, and a most extraordinary
+woman; she will _not_ part with a hollow tooth in her lower jaw.
+My grandfather says, 'Have it out;' my father says, 'Have it
+out;' I say, 'Have it out;' and Matilda turns a deaf ear to all
+three of us. Yes, William, yes; if Mr. Armadale approves, this
+sitting-room will do. About dinner, sir? Shall we say, in that
+case, half-past seven? William, half-past seven. Not the least
+need to order anything, Mr. Armadale. The head-waiter has only to
+give my compliments to the cook, and the best dinner in London
+will be sent up, punctual to the minute, as a necessary
+consequence. Say, Mr. Pedgift Junior, if you please, William;
+otherwise, sir, we might get my grandfather's dinner or my
+father's dinner, and they _might_ turn out a little too heavy and
+old-fashioned in their way of feeding for you and me. As to the
+wine, William. At dinner, _my_ Champagne, and the sherry that my
+father thinks nasty. After dinner, the claret with the blue
+seal--the wine my innocent grandfather said wasn't worth sixpence
+a bottle. Ha! ha! poor old boy! You will send up the evening
+papers and the play-bills, just as usual, and--that will do? I
+think, William, for the present. An invaluable servant, Mr.
+Armadale; they're all invaluable servants in this house. We may
+not be fashionable here, sir, but by the Lord Harry we are snug!
+A cab? you would like a cab? Don't stir! I've rung the bell
+twice--that means, Cab wanted in a hurry. Might I ask, Mr.
+Armadale, which way your business takes you? Toward Bayswater?
+Would you mind dropping me in the park? It's a habit of mine when
+I'm in London to air myself among the aristocracy. Yours truly,
+sir, has an eye for a fine woman and a fine horse; and when he's
+in Hyde Park he's quite in his native element." Thus the
+all-accomplished Pedgift ran on; and by these little arts did he
+recommend himself to the good opinion of his client.
+
+When the dinner hour united the traveling companions again in
+their sitting-room at the hotel, a far less acute observer than
+young Pedgift must have noticed the marked change that appeared
+in Allan's manner. He looked vexed and puzzled, and sat drumming
+with his fingers on the dining-table without uttering a word.
+
+"I'm afraid something has happened to annoy you, sir, since we
+parted company in the Park?" said Pedgift Junior. "Excuse the
+question; I only ask it in case I can be of any use."
+
+"Something that I never expected has happened," returned Allan;
+"I don't know what to make of it. I should like to have your
+opinion," he added, after a little hesitation; "that is to say,
+if you will excuse my not entering into any particulars?"
+
+"Certainly!" assented young Pedgift. "Sketch it in outline, sir.
+The merest hint will do; I wasn't born yesterday." ("Oh, these
+women!" thought the youthful philosopher, in parenthesis.)
+
+"Well," began Allan, "you know what I said when we got to this
+hotel; I said I had a place to go to in Bayswater" (Pedgift
+mentally checked off the first point: Case in the suburbs,
+Bayswater); "and a person--that is to say--no--as I said before,
+a person to inquire after." (Pedgift checked off the next point:
+Person in the case. She-person, or he-person ? She-person,
+unquestionably!) "Well, I went to the house, and when I asked for
+her--I mean the person--she--that is to say, the person--oh,
+confound it!" cried Allan, "I shall drive myself mad, and you,
+too, if I try to tell my story in this roundabout way. Here it is
+in two words. I went to No. 18 Kingsdown Crescent, to see a lady
+named Mandeville; and, when I asked for her, the servant said
+Mrs. Mandeville had gone away, without telling anybody where, and
+without even leaving an address at which letters could be sent to
+her. There! it's out at last. And what do you think of it now?"
+
+"Tell me first, sir," said the wary Pedgift, "what inquiries you
+made when you found this lady had vanished?"
+
+"Inquiries!" repeated Allan. "I was utterly staggered; I didn't
+say anything. What inquiries ought I to have made?"
+
+Pedgift Junior cleared his throat, and crossed his legs in a
+strictly professional manner.
+
+"I have no wish, Mr. Armadale," he began, "to inquire into your
+business with Mrs. Mandeville--"
+
+"No," interposed Allan, bluntly; "I hope you won't inquire into
+that. My business with Mrs. Mandeville must remain a secret."
+
+"But," pursued Pedgift, laying down the law with the forefinger
+of one hand on the outstretched palm of the other, "I may,
+perhaps, be allowed to ask generally whether your business with
+Mrs. Mandeville is of a nature to interest you in tracing her
+from Kingsdown Crescent to her present residence?"
+
+"Certainly!" said Allan. "I have a very particular reason for
+wishing to see her."
+
+"In that case, sir," returned Pedgift Junior, "there were two
+obvious questions which you ought to have asked, to begin
+with--namely, on what date Mrs. Mandeville left, and how she
+left. Having discovered this, you should have ascertained next
+under what domestic circumstances she went away--whether there
+was a misunderstanding with anybody; say a difficulty about money
+matters. Also, whether she went away alone, or with somebody
+else. Also, whether the house was her own, or whether she only
+lodged in it. Also, in the latter event--"
+
+"Stop! stop! you're making my head swim," cried Allan. "I don't
+understand all these ins and outs. I'm not used to this sort of
+thing."
+
+"I've been used to it myself from my childhood upward, sir,"
+remarked Pedgift. "And if I can be of any assistance, say the
+word."
+
+"You're very kind," returned Allan. "If you could only help me to
+find Mrs. Mandeville; and if you wouldn't mind leaving the thing
+afterward entirely in my hands--?"
+
+"I'll leave it in your hands, sir, with all the pleasure in
+life," said Pedgift Junior. ("And I'll lay five to one," he
+added, mentally, "when the time comes, you'll leave it in mine!")
+"We'll go to Bayswater together, Mr. Armadale, tomorrow morning.
+In the meantime. here's the soup. The case now before the court
+is, Pleasure versus Business. I don't know what you say, sir; I
+say, without a moment's hesitation, Verdict for the plaintiff.
+Let us gather our rosebuds while we may. Excuse my high spirits,
+Mr. Armadale. Though buried in the country, I was made for a
+London life; the very air of the metropolis intoxicates me." With
+that avowal the irresistible Pedgift placed a chair for his
+patron, and issued his orders cheerfully to his viceroy, the
+head-waiter. "Iced punch, William, after the soup. I answer for
+the punch, Mr. Armadale; it's made after a recipe of my
+great-uncle's. He kept a tavern, and founded the fortunes of the
+family. I don't mind telling you the Pedgifts have had a publican
+amon g them; there's no false pride about me. 'Worth makes the
+man (as Pope says) and want of it the fellow; the rest is all but
+leather and prunella.' I cultivate poetry as well as music, sir,
+in my leisure hours; in fact, I'm more or less on familiar terms
+with the whole of the nine Muses. Aha! here's the punch! The
+memory of my great-uncle, the publican, Mr. Armadale--drunk in
+solemn silence!"
+
+Allan tried hard to emulate his companion's gayety and good
+humor, but with very indifferent success. His visit to Kingsdown
+Crescent recurred ominously again and again to his memory all
+through the dinner, and all through the public amusements to
+which he and his legal adviser repaired at a later hour of the
+evening. When Pedgift Junior put out his candle that night, he
+shook his wary head, and regretfully apostrophized "the women"
+for the second time.
+
+By ten o'clock the next morning the indefatigable Pedgift was on
+the scene of action. To Allan's great relief, he proposed making
+the necessary inquiries at Kingsdown Crescent in his own person,
+while his patron waited near at hand, in the cab which had
+brought them from the hotel. After a delay of little more than
+five minutes, he reappeared, in full possession of all attainable
+particulars. His first proceeding was to request Allan to step
+out of the cab, and to pay the driver. Next, he politely offered
+his arm, and led the way round the corner of the crescent, across
+a square, and into a by-street, which was rendered exceptionally
+lively by the presence of the local cab-stand. Here he stopped,
+and asked jocosely whether Mr. Armadale saw his way now, or
+whether it would be necessary to test his patience by making an
+explanation.
+
+"See my way?" repeated Allan, in bewilderment. "I see nothing but
+a cab-stand."
+
+Pedgift Junior smiled compassionately, and entered on his
+explanation. It was a lodging-house at Kingsdown Crescent, he
+begged to state to begin with. He had insisted on seeing the
+landlady. A very nice person, with all the remains of having been
+a fine girl about fifty years ago; quite in Pedgift's style--if
+he had only been alive at the beginning of the present
+century--quite in Pedgift's style. But perhaps Mr. Armadale would
+prefer hearing about Mrs. Mandeville? Unfortunately, there was
+nothing to tell. There had been no quarreling, and not a farthing
+left unpaid: the lodger had gone, and there wasn't an explanatory
+circumstance to lay hold of anywhere. It was either Mrs.
+Mandeville's way to vanish, or there was something under the
+rose, quite undiscoverable so far. Pedgift had got the date on
+which she left, and the time of day at which she left, and the
+means by which she left. The means might help to trace her. She
+had gone away in a cab which the servant had fetched from the
+nearest stand. The stand was now before their eyes; and the
+waterman was the first person to apply to--going to the waterman
+for information being clearly (if Mr. Armadale would excuse the
+joke) going to the fountain-head. Treating the subject in this
+airy manner, and telling Allan that he would be back in a moment,
+Pedgift Junior sauntered down the street, and beckoned the
+waterman confidentially into the nearest public-house.
+
+In a little while the two re-appeared, the waterman taking
+Pedgift in succession to the first, third, fourth, and sixth of
+the cabmen whose vehicles were on the stand. The longest
+conference was held with the sixth man; and it ended in the
+sudden approach of the sixth cab to the part of the street where
+Allan was waiting.
+
+"Get in, sir," said Pedgift, opening the door; "I've found the
+man. He remembers the lady; and, though he has forgotten the name
+of the street, he believes he can find the place he drove her to
+when he once gets back into the neighborhood. I am charmed to
+inform you, Mr. Armadale, that we are in luck's way so far. I
+asked the waterman to show me the regular men on the stand; and
+it turns out that one of the regular men drove Mrs. Mandeville.
+The waterman vouches for him; he's quite an anomaly--a
+respectable cabman; drives his own horse, and has never been in
+any trouble. These are the sort of men, sir, who sustain one's
+belief in human nature. I've had a look at our friend, and I
+agree with the waterman; I think we can depend on him."
+
+The investigation required some exercise of patience at the
+outset. It was not till the cab had traversed the distance
+between Bayswater and Pimlico that the driver began to slacken
+his pace and look about him. After once or twice retracing its
+course, the vehicle entered a quiet by-street, ending in a dead
+wall, with a door in it; and stopped at the last house on the
+left-hand side, the house next to the wall.
+
+"Here it is, gentlemen," said the man, opening the cab door.
+
+Allan and Allan's adviser both got out, and both looked at the
+house, with the same feeling of instinctive distrust.
+
+Buildings have their physiognomy--especially buildings in great
+cities--and the face of this house was essentially furtive in its
+expression. The front windows were all shut, and the front blinds
+were all drawn down. It looked no larger than the other houses in
+the street, seen in front; but it ran back deceitfully and gained
+its greater accommodation by means of its greater depth. It
+affected to be a shop on the ground-floor; but it exhibited
+absolutely nothing in the space that intervened between the
+window and an inner row of red curtains, which hid the interior
+entirely from view. At one side was the shop door, having more
+red curtains behind the glazed part of it, and bearing a brass
+plate on the wooden part of it, inscribed with the name of
+"Oldershaw." On the other side was the private door, with a bell
+marked Professional; and another brass plate, indicating a
+medical occupant on this side of the house, for the name on it
+was, "Doctor Downward." If ever brick and mortar spoke yet, the
+brick and mortar here said plainly, "We have got our secrets
+inside, and we mean to keep them."
+
+"This can't be the place," said Allan; "there must be some
+mistake."
+
+'You know best, sir," remarked Pedgift Junior, with his sardonic
+gravity. "You know Mrs. Mandeville's habits."
+
+"I!" exclaimed Allan. "You may be surprised to hear it; but Mrs.
+Mandeville is a total stranger to me."
+
+"I'm not in the least surprised to hear it, sir; the landlady at
+Kingsdown Crescent informed me that Mrs. Mandeville was an old
+woman. Suppose we inquire?" added the impenetrable Pedgift,
+looking at the red curtains in the shop window with a strong
+suspicion that Mrs. Mandeville's granddaughter might possibly be
+behind them.
+
+They tried the shop door first. It was locked. They rang. A lean
+and yellow young woman, with a tattered French novel in her hand,
+opened it.
+
+"Good-morning, miss," said Pedgift. "Is Mrs. Mandeville at home?"
+
+The yellow young woman stared at him in astonishment. "No person
+of that name is known here," she answered, sharply, in a foreign
+accent.
+
+"Perhaps they know her at the private door?" suggested Pedgift
+Junior.
+
+"Perhaps they do," said the yellow young woman, and shut the door
+in his face.
+
+"Rather a quick-tempered young person that, sir," said Pedgift.
+"I congratulate Mrs. Mandeville on not being acquainted with
+her." He led the way, as he spoke, to Doctor Downward's side of
+the premises, and rang the bell.
+
+The door was opened this time by a man in a shabby livery. He,
+too, stared when Mrs. Mandeville's name was mentioned; and he,
+too, knew of no such person in the house.
+
+"Very odd," said Pedgift, appealing to Allan.
+
+"What is odd?" asked a softly stepping, softly speaking gentleman
+in black, suddenly appearing on the threshold of the parlor door.
+
+Pedgift Junior politely explained the circumstances, and begged
+to know whether he had the pleasure of speaking to Doctor
+Downward.
+
+The doctor bowed. If the expression may be pardoned, he was one
+of those carefully constructed physicians in whom the
+public--especially the female public--implicitly trust. He had
+the necessary bald head, the necessary double eyeglass, the
+necessary black clothes, and the necessary blandness of manner,
+all  complete. His voice was soothing, his ways were deliberate,
+his smile was confid ential. What particular branch of his
+profession Doctor Downward followed was not indicated on his
+door-plate; but he had utterly mistaken his vocation if he was
+not a ladies' medical man.
+
+"Are you quite sure there is no mistake about the name?" asked
+the doctor, with a strong underlying anxiety in his manner. "I
+have known very serious inconvenience to arise sometimes from
+mistakes about names. No? There is really no mistake? In that
+case, gentlemen, I can only repeat what my servant has already
+told you. Don't apologize, pray. Good-morning." The doctor
+withdrew as noiselessly as he had appeared; the man in the shabby
+livery silently opened the door; and Allan and his companion
+found themselves in the street again.
+
+"Mr. Armadale," said Pedgift, "I don't know how you feel; I feel
+puzzled."
+
+"That's awkward," returned Allan. "I was just going to ask you
+what we ought to do next."
+
+"I don't like the look of the place, the look of the shop-woman,
+or the look of the doctor," pursued the other. "And yet I can't
+say I think they are deceiving us; I can't say I think they
+really know Mrs. Mandeville's name."
+
+The impressions of Pedgift Junior seldom misled him; and they had
+not misled him in this case. The caution which had dictated Mrs.
+Oldershaw's private removal from Bayswater was the caution which
+frequently overreaches itself. It had warned her to trust nobody
+at Pimlico with the secret of the name she had assumed as Miss
+Gwilt's reference; but it had entirely failed to prepare her for
+the emergency that had really happened. In a word, Mrs. Oldershaw
+had provided for everything except for the one unimaginable
+contingency of an after-inquiry into the character of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"We must do something," said Allan; "it seems useless to stop
+here."
+
+Nobody had ever yet caught Pedgift Junior at the end of his
+resources; and Allan failed to catch him at the end of them now.
+"I quite agree with you, sir," he said; "we must do something.
+We'll cross-examine the cabman."
+
+The cabman proved to be immovable. Charged with mistaking the
+place, he pointed to the empty shop window. "I don't know what
+you may have seen, gentlemen," he remarked; "but there's the only
+shop window I ever saw with nothing at all inside it. _That_
+fixed the place in my mind at the time, and I know it again when
+I see it." Charged with mistaking the person or the day, or the
+house at which he had taken the person up, the cabman proved to
+be still unassailable. The servant who fetched him was marked as
+a girl well known on the stand. The day was marked as the
+unluckiest working-day he had had since the first of the year;
+and the lady was marked as having had her money ready at the
+right moment (which not one elderly lady in a hundred usually
+had), and having paid him his fare on demand without disputing it
+(which not one elderly lady in a hundred usually did). "Take my
+number, gentlemen," concluded the cabman, "and pay me for my
+time; and what I've said to you, I'll swear to anywhere."
+
+Pedgift made a note in his pocket-book of the man's number.
+Having added to it the name of the street, and the names on the
+two brass plates, he quietly opened the cab door. "We are quite
+in the dark, thus far," he said. "Suppose we grope our way back
+to the hotel?"
+
+He spoke and looked more seriously than usual The mere fact of
+"Mrs. Mandeville's" having changed her lodging without telling
+any one where she was going, and without leaving any address at
+which letters could be forwarded to her--which the jealous
+malignity of Mrs. Milroy had interpreted as being undeniably
+suspicious in itself--had produced no great impression on the
+more impartial judgment of Allan's solicitor. People frequently
+left their lodgings in a private manner, with perfectly
+producible reasons for doing so. But the appearance of the place
+to which the cabman persisted in declaring that he had driven
+"Mrs. Mandeville" set the character and proceedings of that
+mysterious lady before Pedgift Junior in a new light. His
+personal interest in the inquiry suddenly strengthened, and he
+began to feel a curiosity to know the real nature of Allan's
+business which he had not felt yet.
+
+"Our next move, Mr. Armadale, is not a very easy move to see," he
+said, as they drove back to the hotel. "Do you think you could
+put me in possession of any further particulars?"
+
+Allan hesitated; and Pedgift Junior saw that he had advanced a
+little too far. "I mustn't force it," he thought; "I must give it
+time, and let it come of its own accord." "In the absence of any
+other information, sir," he resumed, "what do you say to my
+making some inquiry about that queer shop, and about those two
+names on the door-plate? My business in London, when I leave you,
+is of a professional nature; and I am going into the right
+quarter for getting information, if it is to be got."
+
+"There can't be any harm, I suppose, in making inquiries,"
+replied Allan.
+
+He, too, spoke more seriously than usual; he, too, was beginning
+to feel an all-mastering curiosity to know more. Some vague
+connection, not to be distinctly realized or traced out, began to
+establish itself in his mind between the difficulty of
+approaching Miss Gwilt's family circumstances and the difficulty
+of approaching Miss Gwilt's reference. "I'll get down and walk,
+and leave you to go on to your business," he said. "I want to
+consider a little about this, and a walk and a cigar will help
+me."
+
+"My business will be done, sir, between one and two," said
+Pedgift, when the cab had been stopped, and Allan had got out.
+"Shall we meet again at two o'clock, at the hotel?"
+
+Allan nodded, and the cab drove off.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ALLAN AT BAY.
+
+Two o'clock came; and Pedgift Junior, punctual to his time, came
+with it. His vivacity of the morning had all sparkled out; he
+greeted Allan with his customary politeness, but without his
+customary smile; and, when the headwaiter came in for orders, his
+dismissal was instantly pronounced in words never yet heard to
+issue from the lips of Pedgift in that hotel: "Nothing at
+present."
+
+"You seem to be in low spirits," said Allan. "Can't we get our
+information? Can nobody tell you anything about the house in
+Pimlico?"
+
+"Three different people have told me about it, Mr. Armadale, and
+they have all three said the same thing."
+
+Allan eagerly drew his chair nearer to the place occupied by his
+traveling companion. His reflections in the interval since they
+had last seen each other had not tended to compose him. That
+strange connection, so easy to feel, so hard to trace, between
+the difficulty of approaching Miss Gwilt's family circumstances
+and the difficulty of approaching Miss Gwilt's reference, which
+had already established itself in his thoughts, had by this time
+stealthily taken a firmer and firmer hold on his mind. Doubts
+troubled him which he could neither understand nor express.
+Curiosity filled him, which he half longed and half dreaded to
+satisfy.
+
+"I am afraid I must trouble you with a question or two, sir,
+before I can come to the point," said Pedgift Junior. "I don't
+want to force myself into your confidence. I only want to see my
+way, in what looks to me like a very awkward business. Do you
+mind telling me whether others besides yourself are interested in
+this inquiry of ours?"
+
+"Other people _are_ interested in it," replied Allan. "There's no
+objection to telling you that."
+
+"Is there any other person who is the object of the inquiry
+besides Mrs. Mandeville, herself?" pursued Pedgift, winding his
+way a little deeper into the secret.
+
+"Yes; there is another person," said Allan, answering rather
+unwillingly.
+
+"Is the person a young woman, Mr. Armadale?"
+
+Allan started. "How do you come to guess that?" he began, then
+checked himself, when it was too late. "Don't ask me any more
+questions," he resumed. "I'm a bad hand at defending myself
+against a sharp fellow like you; and I'm bound in honor toward
+other people to keep the particulars of this business to myself."
+
+Pedgift Junior had apparently heard enough for his purpose. He
+drew his chair, in his turn, nearer to Allan. He was evidently
+anxious and  embarrassed; but his professional manner began to
+show itself again from sheer fo rce of habit.
+
+"I've done with my questions, sir," he said; "and I have
+something to say now on my side. In my father's absence, perhaps
+you may be kindly disposed to consider me as your legal adviser.
+If you will take my advice, you will not stir another step in
+this inquiry."
+
+"What do you mean?" interposed Allan.
+
+"It is just possible, Mr. Armadale, that the cabman, positive as
+he is, may have been mistaken. I strongly recommend you to take
+it for granted that he _is_ mistaken, and to drop it there."
+
+The caution was kindly intended; but it came too late. Allan did
+what ninety-nine men out of a hundred in his position would have
+done--he declined to take his lawyer's advice.
+
+"Very well, sir," said Pedgift Junior; "if you will have it, you
+must have it."
+
+He leaned forward close to Allan's ear, and whispered what he had
+heard of the house in Pimlico, and of the people who occupied it.
+
+"Don't blame me, Mr. Armadale," he added, when the irrevocable
+words had been spoken. "I tried to spare you."
+
+Allan suffered the shock, as all great shocks are suffered, in
+silence. His first impulse would have driven him headlong for
+refuge to that very view of the cabman's assertion which had just
+been recommended to him, but for one damning circumstance which
+placed itself inexorably in his way. Miss Gwilt's marked
+reluctance to approach the story of her past life rose
+irrepressibly on his memory, in indirect but horrible
+confirmation of the evidence which connected Miss Gwilt's
+reference with the house in Pimlico. One conclusion, and one
+only--the conclusion which any man must have drawn, hearing what
+he had just heard, and knowing no more than he knew--forced
+itself into his mind. A miserable, fallen woman, who had
+abandoned herself in her extremity to the help of wretches
+skilled in criminal concealment, who had stolen her way back to
+decent society and a reputable employment by means of a false
+character, and whose position now imposed on her the dreadful
+necessity of perpetual secrecy and perpetual deceit in relation
+to her past life--such was the aspect in which the beautiful
+governess at Thorpe Ambrose now stood revealed to Allan's eyes!
+
+Falsely revealed, or truly revealed? Had she stolen her way back
+to decent society and a reputable employment by means of a false
+character? She had. Did her position impose on her the dreadful
+necessity of perpetual secrecy and perpetual deceit in relation
+to her past life? It did. Was she some such pitiable victim to
+the treachery of a man unknown as Allan had supposed? _She was no
+such pitiable victim._ The conclusion which Allan had drawn--the
+conclusion literally forced into his mind by the facts before
+him--was, nevertheless, the conclusion of all others that was
+furthest even from touching on the truth. The true story of Miss
+Gwilt's connection with the house in Pimlico and the people who
+inhabited it--a house rightly described as filled with wicked
+secrets, and people rightly represented as perpetually in danger
+of feeling the grasp of the law--was a story which coming events
+were yet to disclose: a story infinitely less revolting, and yet
+infinitely more terrible, than Allan or Allan's companion had
+either of them supposed.
+
+"I tried to spare you, Mr. Armadale," repeated Pedgift. "I was
+anxious, if I could possibly avoid it, not to distress you."
+
+Allan looked up, and made an effort to control himself. "You have
+distressed me dreadfully," he said. "You have quite crushed me
+down. But it is not your fault. I ought to feel you have done me
+a service; and what I ought to do I will do, when I am my own man
+again. There is one thing," Allan added, after a moment's painful
+consideration, "which ought to be understood between us at once.
+The advice you offered me just now was very kindly meant, and it
+was the best advice that could be given. I will take it
+gratefully. We will never talk of this again, if you please; and
+I beg and entreat you will never speak about it to any other
+person. Will you promise me that?"
+
+Pedgift gave the promise with very evident sincerity, but without
+his professional confidence of manner. The distress in Allan's
+face seemed to daunt him. After a moment of very uncharacteristic
+hesitation, he considerately quitted the room.
+
+Left by himself, Allan rang for writing materials, and took out
+of his pocket-book the fatal letter of introduction to "Mrs.
+Mandeville" which he had received from the major's wife.
+
+A man accustomed to consider consequences and to prepare himself
+for action by previous thought would, in Allan's present
+circumstances, have felt some difficulty as to the course which
+it might now be least embarrassing and least dangerous to pursue.
+Accustomed to let his impulses direct him on all other occasions,
+Allan acted on impulse in the serious emergency that now
+confronted him. Though his attachment to Miss Gwilt was nothing
+like the deeply rooted feeling which he had himself honestly
+believed it to be, she had taken no common place in his
+admiration, and she filled him with no common grief when he
+thought of her now. His one dominant desire, at that critical
+moment in his life, was a man's merciful desire to protect from
+exposure and ruin the unhappy woman who had lost her place in his
+estimation, without losing her claim to the forbearance that
+could spare, and to the compassion that could shield her. "I
+can't go back to Thorpe Ambrose; I can't trust myself to speak to
+her, or to see her again. But I can keep her miserable secret;
+and I will!" With that thought in his heart, Allan set himself to
+perform the first and foremost duty which now claimed him--the
+duty of communicating with Mrs. Milroy. If he had possessed a
+higher mental capacity and a clearer mental view, he might have
+found the letter no easy one to write. As it was, he calculated
+no consequences, and felt no difficulty. His instinct warned him
+to withdraw at once from the position in which he now stood
+toward the major's wife, and he wrote what his instinct counseled
+him to write under those circumstances, as rapidly as the pen
+could travel over the paper:
+
+
+"Dunn's Hotel, Covent Garden, Tuesday.
+
+"DEAR MADAM--Pray excuse my not returning to Thorpe Ambrose
+today, as I said I would. Unforeseen circumstances oblige me to
+stop in London. I am sorry to say I have not succeeded in seeing
+Mrs. Mandeville, for which reason I cannot perform your errand;
+and I beg, therefore, with many apologies, to return the letter
+of introduction. I hope you will allow me to conclude by saying
+that I am very much obliged to you for your kindness, and that I
+will not venture to trespass on it any further.
+
+"I remain, dear madam, yours truly,
+
+"ALLAN ARMADALE."
+
+
+In those artless words, still entirely unsuspicious of the
+character of the woman he had to deal with, Allan put the weapon
+she wanted into Mrs. Milroy's hands.
+
+The letter and its inclosure once sealed up and addressed, he was
+free to think of himself and his future. As he sat idly drawing
+lines with his pen on the blotting-paper, the tears came into his
+eyes for the first time--tears in which the woman who had
+deceived him had no share. His heart had gone back to his dead
+mother. "If she had been alive," he thought, "I might have
+trusted _her,_ and she would have comforted me." It was useless
+to dwell on it; he dashed away the tears, and turned his
+thoughts, with the heart-sick resignation that we all know, to
+living and present things.
+
+He wrote a line to Mr. Bashwood, briefly informing the deputy
+steward that his absence from Thorpe Ambrose was likely to be
+prolonged for some little time, and that any further instructions
+which might be necessary, under those circumstances, would reach
+him through Mr. Pedgift the elder. This done, and the letters
+sent to the post, his thoughts were forced back once more on
+himself. Again the blank future waited before him to be filled
+up; and again his heart shrank from it to the refuge of the past.
+
+This time other images than the image of his mother filled his
+mind. The one all-absorbing interest of his earlier days stirred
+living and eager in him again. He thought of the sea; he thought
+of his yacht lying idle in the fishing h arbor at his
+west-country home. The old longing got possession of him to hear
+the wash of the waves,; to see the filling of the sails; to feel
+the vessel that his own hands had helped to build bounding under
+him once more. He rose in his impetuous way to call for the
+time-table, and to start for Somersetshire by the first train,
+when the dread of the questions which Mr. Brock might ask, the
+suspicion of the change which Mr. Brock might see in him, drew
+him back to his chair. "I'll write," he thought, "to have the
+yacht rigged and refitted, and I'll wait to go to Somersetshire
+myself till Midwinter can go with me." He sighed as his memory
+reverted to his absent friend. Never had he fell the void made in
+his life by Midwinter's departure so painfully as he felt it now,
+in the dreariest of all social solitudes--the solitude of a
+stranger in London, left by himself at a hotel.
+
+Before long, Pedgift Junior looked in, with an apology for his
+intrusion. Allan felt too lonely and too friendless not to
+welcome his companion's re-appearance gratefully. "I'm not going
+back to Thorpe Ambrose," he said; "I'm going to stay a little
+while in London. I hope you will be able to stay with me?" To do
+him justice, Pedgift was touched by the solitary position in
+which the owner of the great Thorpe Ambrose estate now appeared
+before him. He had never, in his relations with Allan, so
+entirely forgotten his business interests as he forgot them now.
+
+"You are quite right, sir, to stop here; London's the place to
+divert your mind," said Pedgift, cheerfully. "All business is
+more or less elastic in its nature, Mr. Armadale; I'll spin _my_
+business out, and keep you company with the greatest pleasure. We
+are both of us on the right side of thirty, sir; let's enjoy
+ourselves. What do you say to dining early, and going to the
+play, and trying the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park to-morrow
+morning, after breakfast? If we only live like fighting-cocks,
+and go in perpetually for public amusements, we shall arrive in
+no time at the _mens sana in corpore sano_ of the ancients. Don't
+be alarmed at the quotation, sir. I dabble a little in Latin
+after business hours, and enlarge my sympathies by occasional
+perusal of the Pagan writers, assisted by a crib. William, dinner
+at five; and, as it's particularly important to-day, I'll see the
+cook myself."
+
+The evening passed; the next day passed; Thursday morning came,
+and brought with it a letter for Allan. The direction was in Mrs.
+Milroy's handwriting; and the form of address adopted in the
+letter warned Allan, the moment he opened it, that something had
+gone wrong.
+
+
+["Private."]
+
+"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Wednesday.
+
+"SIR--I have just received your mysterious letter. It has more
+than surprised, it has really alarmed me. After having made the
+friendliest advances to you on my side, I find myself suddenly
+shut out from your confidence in the most unintelligible, and, I
+must add, the most discourteous manner. It is quite impossible
+that I can allow the matter to rest where you have left it. The
+only conclusion I can draw from your letter is that my confidence
+must have been abused in some way, and that you know a great deal
+more than you are willing to tell me. Speaking in the interest of
+my daughter's welfare, I request that you will inform me what the
+circumstances are which have prevented your seeing Mrs.
+Mandeville, and which have led to the withdrawal of the
+assistance that you unconditionally promised me in your letter of
+Monday last.
+
+"In my state of health, I cannot involve myself in a lengthened
+correspondence. I must endeavor to anticipate any objections you
+may make, and I must say all that I have to say in my present
+letter. In the event (which I am most unwilling to consider
+possible) of your declining to accede to the request that I have
+just addressed to you, I beg to say that I shall consider it my
+duty to my daughter to have this very unpleasant matter cleared
+up. If I don't hear from you to my full satisfaction by return of
+post, I shall be obliged to tell my husband that circumstances
+have happened which justify us in immediately testing the
+respectability of Miss Gwilt's reference. And when he asks me for
+my authority, I will refer him to you.
+
+"Your obedient servant, ANNE MILROY."
+
+
+In those terms the major's wife threw off the mask, and left her
+victim to survey at his leisure the trap in which she had caught
+him. Allan's belief in Mrs. Milroy's good faith had been so
+implicitly sincere that her letter simply bewildered him. He saw
+vaguely that he had been deceived in some way, and that Mrs.
+Milroy's neighborly interest in him was not what it had looked on
+the surface; and he saw no more. The threat of appealing to the
+major--on which, with a woman's ignorance of the natures of men,
+Mrs. Milroy had relied for producing its effect--was the only
+part of the letter to which Allan reverted with any satisfaction:
+it relieved instead of alarming him. "If there _is_ to be a
+quarrel," he thought, "it will be a comfort, at any rate, to have
+it out with a man."
+
+Firm in his resolution to shield the unhappy woman whose secret
+he wrongly believed himself to have surprised, Allan sat down to
+write his apologies to the major's wife. After setting up three
+polite declarations, in close marching order, he retired from the
+field. "He was extremely sorry to have offended Mrs. Milroy. He
+was innocent of all intention to offend Mrs. Milroy. And he
+begged to remain Mrs. Milroy's truly." Never had Allan's habitual
+brevity as a letter-writer done him better service than it did
+him now. With a little more skillfulness in the use of his pen,
+he might have given his enemy even a stronger hold on him than
+the hold she had got already.
+
+The interval day passed, and with the next morning's post Mrs.
+Milroy's threat came realized in the shape of a letter from her
+husband. The major wrote less formally than his wife had written,
+but his questions were mercilessly to the point:
+
+
+["Private."]
+
+"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Friday, July 11, 1851.
+
+"DEAR SIR--When you did me the favor of calling here a few days
+since, you asked a question relating to my governess, Miss Gwilt,
+which I thought rather a strange one at the time, and which
+caused, as you may remember, a momentary embarrassment between
+us.
+
+"This morning the subject of Miss Gwilt has been brought to my
+notice again in a manner which has caused me the utmost
+astonishment. In plain words, Mrs. Milroy has informed me that
+Miss Gwilt has exposed herself to the suspicion of having
+deceived us by a false reference. On my expressing the surprise
+which such an extraordinary statement caused me, and requesting
+that it might be instantly substantiated, I was still further
+astonished by being told to apply for all particulars to no less
+a person than Mr. Armadale. I have vainly requested some further
+explanation from Mrs. Milroy; she persists in maintaining
+silence, and in referring me to yourself.
+
+"Under these extraordinary circumstances, I am compelled, in
+justice to all parties, to ask you certain questions which I will
+endeavor to put as plainly as possible, and which I am quite
+ready to believe (from my previous experience of you) that you
+will answer frankly on your side.
+
+"I beg to inquire, in the first place, whether you admit or deny
+Mrs. Milroy's assertion that you have made yourself acquainted
+with particulars relating either to Miss Gwilt or to Miss Gwilt's
+reference, of which I am entirely ignorant? In the second place,
+if you admit the truth of Mrs. Milroy's statement, I request to
+know how you became acquainted with those particulars? Thirdly,
+and lastly, I beg to ask you what the particulars are?
+
+"If any special justification for putting these questions be
+needed--which, purely as a matter of courtesy toward yourself, I
+am willing to admit--I beg to remind you that the most precious
+charge in my house, the charge of my daughter, is confided to
+Miss Gwilt; and that Mrs. Milroy's statement places you, to all
+appearance, in the position of being competent to tell me whether
+that charge is properly bestowed or not.
+
+"I have only to add that, as nothing has thus far occurred to
+justify me in entertaining the slightest suspicion either of my
+governess or her reference, I shall wait before I make any appeal
+to Miss Gwilt until I have received your answer--which I shall
+expect by return of post. Believe me, dear sir, faithfully yours,
+
+"DAVID MILROY."
+
+
+This transparently straightforward letter at once dissipated the
+confusion which had thus far existed in Allan's mind. He saw the
+snare in which he had been caught (though he was still
+necessarily at a loss to understand why it had been set for him)
+as he had not seen it yet. Mrs. Milroy had clearly placed him
+between two alternatives--the alternative of putting himself in
+the wrong, by declining to answer her husband's questions; or the
+alternative of meanly sheltering his responsibility behind the
+responsibility of a woman, by acknowledging to the major's own
+face that the major's wife had deceived him.
+
+In this difficulty Allan acted as usual, without hesitation. His
+pledge to Mrs. Milroy to consider their correspondence private
+still bound him, disgracefully as she had abused it. And his
+resolution was as immovable as ever to let no earthly
+consideration tempt him into betraying Miss Gwilt. "I may have
+behaved like a fool," he thought, "but I won't break my word; and
+I won't be the means of turning that miserable woman adrift in
+the world again."
+
+He wrote to the major as artlessly and briefly as he had written
+to the major's wife. He declared his unwillingness to cause a
+friend and neighbor any disappointment, if he could possibly help
+it. On this occasion he had no other choice. The questions the
+major asked him were questions which he could not consent to
+answer. He was not very clever at explaining himself, and he
+hoped he might be excused for putting it in that way, and saying
+no more.
+
+Monday's post brought with it Major Milroy's rejoinder, and
+closed the correspondence.
+
+
+"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Sunday.
+
+"SIR--Your refusal to answer my questions, unaccompanied as it is
+by even the shadow of an excuse for such a proceeding, can be
+interpreted but in one way. Besides being an implied
+acknowledgment of the correctness of Mrs. Milroy's statement, it
+is also an implied reflection on my governess's character. As an
+act of justice toward a lady who lives under the protection of my
+roof, and who has given me no reason whatever to distrust her, I
+shall now show our correspondence to Miss Gwilt; and I shall
+repeat to her the conversation which I had with Mrs. Milroy on
+the subject, in Mrs. Milroy's presence.
+
+"One word more respecting the future relations between us, and I
+have done. My ideas on certain subjects are, I dare say, the
+ideas of an old-fashioned man. In my time, we had a code of honor
+by which we regulated our actions. According to that code, if a
+man made private inquiries into a lady's affairs, without being
+either her husband, her father, or her brother, he subjected
+himself to the responsibility of justifying his conduct in the
+estimation of others; and, if he evaded that responsibility, he
+abdicated the position of a gentleman. It is quite possible that
+this antiquated way of thinking exists no longer; but it is too
+late for me, at my time of life, to adopt more modern views. I am
+scrupulously anxious, seeing that we live in a country and a time
+in which the only court of honor is a police-court, to express
+myself with the utmost moderation of language upon this the last
+occasion that I shall have to communicate with you. Allow me,
+therefore, merely to remark that our ideas of the conduct which
+is becoming in a gentleman differ seriously; and permit me on
+this account to request that you will consider yourself for the
+future as a stranger to my family and to myself.
+
+"Your obedient servant,
+
+"DAVID MILROY."
+
+
+The Monday morning on which his client received the major's
+letter was the blackest Monday that had yet been marked in
+Pedgift's calendar. When Allan's first angry sense of the tone of
+contempt in which his friend and neighbor pronounced sentence on
+him had subsided, it left him sunk in a state of depression from
+which no efforts made by his traveling companion could rouse him
+for the rest of the day. Reverting naturally, now that his
+sentence of banishment had been pronounced, to his early
+intercourse with the cottage, his memory went back to Neelie,
+more regretfully and more penitently than it had gone back to her
+yet." If _she_ had shut the door on me, instead of her father,"
+was the bitter reflection with which Allan now reviewed the past,
+"I shouldn't have had a word to say against it; I should have
+felt it served me right."
+
+The next day brought another letter--a welcome letter this time,
+from Mr. Brock. Allan had written to Somersetshire on the subject
+of refitting the yacht some days since. The letter had found the
+rector engaged, as he innocently supposed, in protecting his old
+pupil against the woman whom he had watched in London, and whom
+he now believed to have followed him back to his own home. Acting
+under the directions sent to her, Mrs. Oldershaw's house-maid had
+completed the mystification of Mr. Brock. She had tranquilized
+all further anxiety on the rector's part by giving him a written
+undertaking (in the character of Miss Gwilt), engaging never to
+approach Mr. Armadale, either personally or by letter! Firmly
+persuaded that he had won the victory at last, poor Mr. Brock
+answered Allan's note in the highest spirits, expressing some
+natural surprise at his leaving Thorpe Ambrose, but readily
+promising that the yacht should be refitted, and offering the
+hospitality of the rectory in the heartiest manner.
+
+This letter did wonders in raising Allan's spirits. It gave him a
+new interest to look to, entirely disassociated from his past
+life in Norfolk. He began to count the days that were still to
+pass before the return of his absent friend. It was then Tuesday.
+If Midwinter came back from his walking trip, as he had engaged
+to come back, in a fortnight, Saturday would find him at Thorpe
+Ambrose. A note sent to meet the traveler might bring him to
+London the same night; and, if all went well, before another week
+was over they might be afloat together in the yacht.
+
+The next day passed, to Allan's relief, without bringing any
+letters. The spirits of Pedgift rose sympathetically with the
+spirits of his client. Toward dinner time he reverted to the
+_mens sana in corpore sano_ of the ancients, and issued his
+orders to the head-waiter more royally than ever.
+
+Thursday came, and brought the fatal postman with more news from
+Norfolk. A letter-writer now stepped on the scene who had not
+appeared there yet; and the total overthrow of all Allan's plans
+for a visit to Somersetshire was accomplished on the spot.
+
+Pedgift Junior happened that morning to be the first at the
+breakfast table. When Allan came in, he relapsed into his
+professional manner, and offered a letter to his patron with a
+bow performed in dreary silence.
+
+"For me?" inquired Allan, shrinking instinctively from a new
+correspondent.
+
+"For you, sir--from my father," replied Pedgift, "inclosed in one
+to myself. Perhaps you will allow me to suggest, by way of
+preparing you for--for something a little unpleasant--that we
+shall want a particularly good dinner to-day; and (if they're not
+performing any modern German music to-night) I think we should do
+well to finish the evening melodiously at the Opera."
+
+"Something wrong at Thorpe Ambrose?" asked Allen.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Armadale; something wrong at Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+Allan sat down resignedly, and opened the letter.
+
+
+["Private and Confidential."]
+
+"High Street Thorpe Ambrose, 17th July, 1851.
+
+"DEAR SIR--I cannot reconcile it with my sense of duty to your
+interests to leave you any longer in ignorance of reports current
+in this town and its neighborhood, which, I regret to say, are
+reports affecting yourself.
+
+"The first intimation of anything unpleasant reached me on Monday
+last. It was widely rumored in the town that something had gone
+wrong at Major Milroy's with the new governess, and that Mr.
+Armadale was mixed up in it. I paid no heed to this, believing it
+to be one of the many trumpery pieces of scandal perpetually set
+going here, and as necessary as the air they breathe to the
+comfort of the inhabitants of this highly respectable place.
+
+"Tuesday, however, put the matter in a new light. The most
+interesting particulars were circulated on the highest authority.
+On Wednesday, the gentry in the neighborhood took the matter up,
+and universally sanctioned the view adopted by the town. To-day
+the public feeling has reached its climax, and I find myself
+under the necessity of making you acquainted with what has
+happened.
+
+"To begin at the beginning. It is asserted that a correspondence
+took place last week between Major Milroy and yourself; in which
+you cast a very serious suspicion on Miss Gwilt's respectability,
+without defining your accusations and without (on being applied
+to) producing your proofs. Upon this, the major appears to have
+felt it his duty (while assuring his governess of his own firm
+belief in her respectability) to inform her of what had happened,
+in order that she might have no future reason to complain of his
+having had any concealments from her in a matter affecting her
+character. Very magnanimous on the major's part; but you will see
+directly that Miss Gwilt was more magnanimous still. After
+expressing her thanks in a most becoming manner, she requested
+permission to withdraw herself from Major Milroy's service.
+
+"Various reports are in circulation as to the governess's reason
+for taking this step.
+
+"The authorized version (as sanctioned by the resident gentry)
+represents Miss Gwilt to have said that she could not
+condescend--in justice to herself, and in justice to her highly
+respectable reference--to defend her reputation against undefined
+imputations cast on it by a comparative stranger. At the same
+time it was impossible for her to pursue such a course of conduct
+as this, unless she possessed a freedom of action which was quite
+incompatible with her continuing to occupy the dependent position
+of a governess. For that reason she felt it incumbent on her to
+leave her situation. But, while doing this, she was equally
+determined not to lead to any misinterpretation of her motives by
+leaving the neighborhood. No matter at what inconvenience to
+herself, she would remain long enough at Thorpe Ambrose to await
+any more definitely expressed imputations that might be made on
+her character, and to repel them publicly the instant they
+assumed a tangible form.
+
+"Such is the position which this high-minded lady has taken up,
+with an excellent effect on the public mind in these parts. It is
+clearly her interest, for some reason, to leave her situation,
+without leaving the neighborhood. On Monday last she established
+herself in a cheap lodging on the outskirts of the town. And on
+the same day she probably wrote to her reference, for yesterday
+there came a letter from that lady to Major Milroy, full of
+virtuous indignation, and courting the fullest inquiry. The
+letter has been shown publicly, and has immensely strengthened
+Miss Gwilt's position. She is now considered to be quite a
+heroine. The _Thorpe Ambrose Mercury_ has got a leading article
+about her, comparing her to Joan of Arc. It is considered
+probable that she will be referred to in the sermon next Sunday.
+We reckon five strong-minded single ladies in this
+neighborhood--and all five have called on her. A testimonial was
+suggested; but it has been given up at Miss Gwilt's own request,
+and a general movement is now on foot to get her employment as a
+teacher of music. Lastly, I have had the honor of a visit from
+the lady herself, in her capacity of martyr, to tell me, in the
+sweetest manner, that she doesn't blame Mr. Armadale, and that
+she considers him to be an innocent instrument in the hands of
+other and more designing people. I was carefully on my guard with
+her; for I don't altogether believe in Miss Gwilt, and I have my
+lawyer's suspicions of the motive that is at the bottom of her
+present proceedings.
+
+"I have written thus far, my dear sir, with little hesitation or
+embarrassment. But there is unfortunately a serious side to this
+business as well as a ridiculous side; and I must unwillingly
+come to it before I close my letter.
+
+"It is, I think, quite impossible that you can permit yourself to
+be spoken of as you are spoken of now, without stirring
+personally in the matter. You have unluckily made many enemies
+here, and foremost among them is my colleague, Mr. Darch. He has
+been showing everywhere a somewhat rashly expressed letter you
+wrote to him on the subject of letting the cottage to Major
+Milroy instead of to himself, and it has helped to exasperate the
+feeling against you. It is roundly stated in so many words that
+you have been prying into Miss Gwilt's family affairs, with the
+most dishonorable motives; that you have tried, for a profligate
+purpose of your own, to damage her reputation, and to deprive her
+of the protection of Major Milroy's roof; and that, after having
+been asked to substantiate by proof the suspicions that you have
+cast on the reputation of a defenseless woman, you have
+maintained a silence which condemns you in the estimation of all
+honorable men.
+
+"I hope it is quite unnecessary for me to say that I don't attach
+the smallest particle of credit to these infamous reports. But
+they are too widely spread and too widely believed to be treated
+with contempt. I strongly urge you to return at once to this
+place, and to take the necessary measures for defending your
+character, in concert with me, as your legal adviser. I have
+formed, since my interview with Miss Gwilt, a very strong opinion
+of my own on the subject of that lady which it is not necessary
+to commit to paper. Suffice it to say here that I shall have a
+means to propose to you for silencing the slanderous tongues of
+your neighbors, on the success of which I stake my professional
+reputation, if you will only back me by your presence and
+authority.
+
+"It may, perhaps, help to show you the necessity there is for
+your return, if I mention one other assertion respecting
+yourself, which is in everybody's mouth. Your absence is, I
+regret to tell you, attributed to the meanest of all motives. It
+is said that you are remaining in London because you are afraid
+to show your face at Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+"Believe me, dear sir, your faithful servant,
+
+"A. PEDGIFT, Sen."
+
+
+Allan was of an age to feel the sting contained in the last
+sentence of his lawyer's letter. He started to his feet in a
+paroxysm of indignation, which revealed his character to Pedgift
+Junior in an entirely new light.
+
+"Where's the time-table?" cried Allan. "I must go back to Thorpe
+Ambrose by the next train! If it doesn't start directly, I'll
+have a special engine. I must and will go back instantly, and I
+don't care two straws for the expense!"
+
+"Suppose we telegraph to my father, sir?" suggested the judicious
+Pedgift. "It's the quickest way of expressing your feelings, and
+the cheapest."
+
+"So it is," said Allan. "Thank you for reminding me of it.
+Telegraph to them! Tell your father to give every man in Thorpe
+Ambrose the lie direct, in my name. Put it in capital letters,
+Pedgift--put it in capital letters!"
+
+Pedgift smiled and shook his head. If he was acquainted with no
+other variety of human nature, he thoroughly knew the variety
+that exists in country towns.
+
+"It won't have the least effect on them, Mr. Armadale," he
+remarked quietly. "They'll only go on lying harder than ever. If
+you want to upset the whole town, one line will do it. With five
+shillings' worth of human labor and electric fluid, sir (I dabble
+a little in science after business hours), we'll explode a
+bombshell in Thorpe Ambrose!" He produced the bombshell on a slip
+of paper as he spoke: "A. Pedgift, Junior, to A. Pedgift,
+Senior.--Spread it all over the place that Mr. Armadale is coming
+down by the next train."
+
+"More words!" suggested Allan, looking over his shoulder. "Make
+it stronger."
+
+"Leave my father to make it stronger, sir," returned the wary
+Pedgift. "My father is on the spot, and his command of language
+is something quite extraordinary." He rang the bell, and
+dispatched the telegram.
+
+Now that something had been done, Allan subsided gradually into a
+state of composure. He l ooked back again at Mr. Pedgift's
+letter, and then handed it to Mr. Pedgift's son.
+
+"Can you guess your father's plan for setting me right in the
+neighborhood?" he asked.
+
+Pedgift the younger shook his wise head. "His plan appears to be
+connected in some way, sir, with his opinion of Miss Gwilt."
+
+"I wonder what he thinks of her?" said Allan.
+
+"I shouldn't be surprised, Mr. Armadale," returned Pedgift
+Junior, "if his opinion staggers you a little, when you come to
+hear it. My father has had a large legal experience of the shady
+side of the sex, and he learned his profession at the Old
+Bailey."
+
+Allan made no further inquiries. He seemed to shrink from
+pursuing the subject, after having started it himself. "Let's be
+doing something to kill the time," he said. "Let's pack up and
+pay the bill."
+
+They packed up and paid the bill. The hour came, and the train
+left for Norfolk at last.
+
+While the travelers were on their way back, a somewhat longer
+telegraphic message than Allan's was flashing its way past them
+along the wires, in the reverse direction--from Thorpe Ambrose to
+London. The message was in cipher, and, the signs being
+interpreted, it ran thus: "From Lydia Gwilt to Maria
+Oldershaw.--Good news! He is coming back. I mean to have an
+interview with him. Everything looks well. Now I have left the
+cottage, I have no women's prying eyes to dread, and I can come
+and go as I please. Mr. Midwinter is luckily out of the way. I
+don't despair of becoming Mrs. Armadale yet. Whatever happens,
+depend on my keeping away from London until I am certain of not
+taking any spies after me to your place. I am in no hurry to
+leave Thorpe Ambrose. I mean to be even with Miss Milroy first."
+
+Shortly after that message was received in London, Allan was back
+again in his own house.
+
+It was evening--Pedgift Junior had just left him--and Pedgift
+Senior was expected to call on business in half an hour's time.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+PEDGIFT'S REMEDY.
+
+AFTER waiting to hold a preliminary consultation with his son,
+Mr. Pedgift the elder set forth alone for his interview with
+Allan at the great house.
+
+Allowing for the difference in their ages, the son was, in this
+instance, so accurately the reflection of the father, that an
+acquaintance with either of the two Pedgifts was almost
+equivalent to an acquaintance with both. Add some little height
+and size to the figure of Pedgift Junior, give more breadth and
+boldness to his humor, and some additional solidity and composure
+to his confidence in himself, and the presence and character of
+Pedgift Senior stood, for all general purposes, revealed before
+you.
+
+The lawyer's conveyance to Thorpe Ambrose was his own smart gig,
+drawn by his famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive
+himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities
+in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of
+the sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift
+the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots, in dry weather and
+wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets
+overlapped his hips, and his favorite summer cravat was of light
+spotted muslin, tied in the neatest and smallest of bows. He used
+tobacco like his son, but in a different form. While the younger
+man smoked, the elder took snuff copiously; and it was noticed
+among his intimates that he always held his "pinch" in a state of
+suspense between his box and his nose when he was going to clinch
+a good bargain or to say a good thing. The art of diplomacy
+enters largely into the practice of all successful men in the
+lower branch of the law. Mr. Pedgift's form of diplomatic
+practice had been the same throughout his life, on every occasion
+when he found his arts of persuasion required at an interview
+with another man. He invariably kept his strongest argument, or
+his boldest proposal, to the last, and invariably remembered it
+at the door (after previously taking his leave), as if it was a
+purely accidental consideration which had that instant occurred
+to him. Jocular friends, acquainted by previous experience with
+this form of proceeding, had given it the name of "Pedgift's
+postscript." There were few people in Thorpe Ambrose who did not
+know what it meant when the lawyer suddenly checked his exit at
+the opened door; came back softly to his chair, with his pinch of
+snuff suspended between his box and his nose; said, "By-the-by,
+there's a point occurs to me;" and settled the question off-hand,
+after having given it up in despair not a minute before.
+
+This was the man whom the march of events at Thorpe Ambrose had
+now thrust capriciously into a foremost place. This was the one
+friend at hand to whom Allan in his social isolation could turn
+for counsel in the hour of need.
+
+
+"Good-evening, Mr. Armadale. Many thanks for your prompt
+attention to my very disagreeable letter," said Pedgift Senior,
+opening the conversation cheerfully the moment he entered his
+client's house. "I hope you understand, sir, that I had really no
+choice under the circumstances but to write as I did?"
+
+"I have very few friends, Mr. Pedgift," returned Allan, simply.
+"And I am sure you are one of the few."
+
+"Much obliged, Mr. Armadale. I have always tried to deserve your
+good opinion, and I mean, if I can, to deserve it now. You found
+yourself comfortable, I hope, sir, at the hotel in London? We
+call it Our hotel. Some rare old wine in the cellar, which I
+should have introduced to your notice if I had had the honor of
+being with you. My son unfortunately knows nothing about wine."
+
+Allan felt his false position in the neighborhood far too acutely
+to be capable of talking of anything but the main business of the
+evening His lawyer's politely roundabout method of approaching
+the painful subject to be discussed between them rather irritated
+than composed him. He came at once to the point, in his own
+bluntly straightforward way.
+
+"The hotel was very comfortable, Mr. Pedgift, and your son was
+very kind to me. But we are not in London now; and I want to talk
+to you about how I am to meet the lies that are being told of me
+in this place. Only point me out any one man," cried Allan, with
+a rising voice and a mounting color--"any one man who says I am
+afraid to show my face in the neighborhood, and I'll horsewhip
+him publicly before another day is over his head!"
+
+Pedgift Senior helped himself to a pinch of snuff, and held it
+calmly in suspense midway between his box and his nose.
+
+"You can horsewhip a man, sir; but you can't horsewhip a
+neighborhood," said the lawyer, in his politely epigrammatic
+manner. "We will fight our battle, if you please, without
+borrowing our weapons of the coachman yet a while, at any rate."
+
+"But how are we to begin?" asked Allan, impatiently. "How am I to
+contradict the infamous things they say of me?"
+
+"There are two ways of stepping out of your present awkward
+position, sir--a short way, and a long way," replied Pedgift
+Senior. "The short way (which is always the best) has occurred to
+me since I have heard of your proceedings in London from my son.
+I understand that you permitted him, after you received my
+letter, to take me into your confidence. I have drawn various
+conclusions from what he has told me, which I may find it
+necessary to trouble you with presently. In the meantime I should
+be glad to know under what circumstances you went to London to
+make these unfortunate inquiries about Miss Gwilt? Was it your
+own notion to pay that visit to Mrs. Mandeville? or were you
+acting under the influence of some other person?"
+
+Allan hesitated. "I can't honestly tell you it was my own
+notion," he replied, and said no more.
+
+"I thought as much!" remarked Pedgift Senior, in high triumph.
+"The short way out of our present difficulty, Mr. Armadale, lies
+straight through that other person, under whose influence you
+acted. That other person must be presented forthwith to public
+notice, and must stand in that other person's proper place. The
+name, if you please, sir, to begin with--we'll come to the
+circumstances directly."
+
+"I am sorry to say, Mr. Pedgift, that we must try the longest
+way, if you have no objection," replied Allan, quietly. "The
+short way happens to b e a way I can't take on this occasion."
+
+The men who rise in the law are the men who decline to take No
+for an answer. Mr. Pedgift the elder had risen in the law; and
+Mr. Pedgift the elder now declined to take No for an answer. But
+all pertinacity--even professional pertinacity included--sooner
+or later finds its limits; and the lawyer, doubly fortified as he
+was by long experience and copious pinches of snuff, found his
+limits at the very outset of the interview. It was impossible
+that Allan could respect the confidence which Mrs. Milroy had
+treacherously affected to place in him. But he had an honest
+man's regard for his own pledged word--the regard which looks
+straightforward at the fact, and which never glances sidelong at
+the circumstances--and the utmost persistency of Pedgift Senior
+failed to move him a hairbreadth from the position which he had
+taken up. "No" is the strongest word in the English language, in
+the mouth of any man who has the courage to repeat it often
+enough, and Allan had the courage to repeat it often enough on
+this occasion.
+
+"Very good, sir," said the lawyer, accepting his defeat without
+the slightest loss of temper. "The choice rests with you, and you
+have chosen. We will go the long way. It starts (allow me to
+inform you) from my office; and it leads (as I strongly suspect)
+through a very miry road to--Miss Gwilt."
+
+Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless astonishment.
+
+"If you won't expose the person who is responsible in the first
+instance, sir, for the inquiries to which you unfortunately lent
+yourself," proceeded Mr. Pedgift the elder, "the only other
+alternative, in your present position, is to justify the
+inquiries themselves."
+
+"And how is that to be done?" inquired Allan.
+
+"By proving to the whole neighborhood, Mr. Armadale, what I
+firmly believe to be the truth--that the pet object of the public
+protection is an adventuress of the worst class; an undeniably
+worthless and dangerous woman. In plainer English still, sir, by
+employing time enough and money enough to discover the truth
+about Miss Gwilt."
+
+
+Before Allan could say a word in answer, there was an
+interruption at the door. After the usual preliminary knock, one
+of the servants came in.
+
+"I told you I was not to be interrupted," said Allan, irritably.
+"Good heavens! am I never to have done with them? Another
+letter!"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the man, holding it out. "And," he added,
+speaking words of evil omen in his master's ears, "the person
+waits for an answer."
+
+Allan looked at the address of the letter with a natural
+expectation of encountering the handwriting of the major's wife.
+The anticipation was not realized. His correspondent was plainly
+a lady, but the lady was not Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"Who can it be?" he said, looking mechanically at Pedgift Senior
+as he opened the envelope.
+
+Pedgift Senior gently tapped his snuff-box, and said, without a
+moment's hesitation, "Miss Gwilt."
+
+Allan opened the letter. The first two words in it were the echo
+of the two words the lawyer had just pronounced. It _was_ Miss
+Gwilt!
+
+Once more, Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless
+astonishment.
+
+"I have known a good many of them in my time, sir," explained
+Pedgift Senior, with a modesty equally rare and becoming in a man
+of his age. "Not as handsome as Miss Gwilt, I admit. But quite as
+bad, I dare say. Read your letter, Mr. Armadale--read your
+letter."
+
+Allan read these lines:
+
+
+"Miss Gwilt presents her compliments to Mr. Armadale and begs to
+know if it will be convenient to him to favor her with an
+interview, either this evening or to-morrow morning. Miss Gwilt
+offers no apology for making her present request. She believes
+Mr. Armadale will grant it as an act of justice toward a
+friendless woman whom he has been innocently the means of
+injuring, and who is earnestly desirous to set herself right in
+his estimation."
+
+
+Allan handed the letter to his lawyer in silent perplexity and
+distress.
+
+The face of Mr. Pedgift the elder expressed but one feeling when
+he had read the letter in his turn and had handed it back--a
+feeling of profound admiration. "What a lawyer she would have
+made," he exclaimed, fervently, "if she had only been a man!"
+
+"I can't treat this as lightly as you do, Mr. Pedgift," said
+Allan. "It's dreadfully distressing to me. I was so fond of her,"
+he added, in a lower tone--"I was so fond of her once."
+
+Mr. Pedgift Senior suddenly became serious on his side.
+
+"Do you mean to say, sir, that you actually contemplate seeing
+Miss Gwilt?" he asked, with an expression of genuine dismay.
+
+"I can't treat her cruelly," returned Allan. "I have been the
+means of injuring her--without intending it, God knows! I can't
+treat her cruelly after that! "
+
+"Mr. Armadale," said the lawyer, "you did me the honor, a little
+while since, to say that you considered me your friend. May I
+presume on that position to ask you a question or two, before you
+go straight to your own ruin?"
+
+"Any questions you like," said Allan, looking back at the
+letter--the only letter he had ever received from Miss Gwilt.
+
+"You have had one trap set for you already, sir, and you have
+fallen into it. Do you want to fall into another?"
+
+"You know the answer to that question, Mr. Pedgift, as well as I
+do."
+
+"I'll try again, Mr. Armadale; we lawyers are not easily
+discouraged. Do you think that any statement Miss Gwilt might
+make to you, if you do see her, would be a statement to be relied
+on, after what you and my son discovered in London?"
+
+"She might explain what we discovered in London," suggested
+Allan, still looking at the writing, and thinking of the hand
+that had traced it.
+
+"_Might_ explain it? My dear sir, she is quite certain to explain
+it! I will do her justice: I believe she would make out a case
+without a single flaw in it from beginning to end."
+
+That last answer forced Allan's attention away from the letter.
+The lawyer's pitiless common sense showed him no mercy.
+
+"If you see that woman again, sir," proceeded Pedgift Senior,
+"you will commit the rashest act of folly I ever heard of in all
+my experience. She can have but one object in coming here--to
+practice on your weakness for her. Nobody can say into what false
+step she may not lead you, if you once give her the opportunity.
+You admit yourself that you have been fond of her; your
+attentions to her have been the subject of general remark; if you
+haven't actually offered her the chance of becoming Mrs.
+Armadale, you have done the next thing to it; and knowing all
+this, you propose to see her, and to let her work on you with her
+devilish beauty and her devilish cleverness, in the character of
+your interesting victim! You, who are one of the best matches in
+England! You, who are the natural prey of all the hungry single
+women in the community! I never heard the like of it; I never, in
+all my professional experience, heard the like of it! If you must
+positively put yourself in a dangerous position, Mr. Armadale,"
+concluded Pedgift the elder, with the everlasting pinch of snuff
+held in suspense between his box and his nose, "there's a
+wild-beast show coming to our town next week. Let in the tigress,
+sir; don't let in Miss Gwilt!"
+
+For the third time Allan looked at his lawyer. And for the third
+time his lawyer looked back at him quite unabashed.
+
+"You seem to have a very bad opinion of Miss Gwilt," said Allan.
+
+"The worst possible opinion, Mr. Armadale," retorted Pedgift
+Senior, coolly. "We will return to that when we have sent the
+lady's messenger about his business. Will you take my advice?
+Will you decline to see her?"
+
+"I would willingly decline--it would be so dreadfully distressing
+to both of us," said Allan. "I would willingly decline, if I only
+knew how."
+
+"Bless my soul, Mr. Armadale, it's easy enough! Don't commit
+_you_ yourself in writing. Send out to the messenger, and say
+there's no answer."
+
+The short course thus suggested was a course which Allan
+positively declined to take. "It's treating her brutally," he
+said; "I can't and won't do it."
+
+Once more the pertinacity of Pedgift the elder found its limits,
+and once more that wise man yielded gracefully to a compromise.
+On receiving his client's promise not to s ee Miss Gwilt, he
+consented to Allan's committing himself in writing under his
+lawyer's dictation. The letter thus produced was modeled in
+Allan's own style; it began and ended in one sentence. "Mr.
+Armadale presents his compliments to Miss Gwilt, and regrets that
+he cannot have the pleasure of seeing her at Thorpe Ambrose."
+Allan had pleaded hard for a second sentence, explaining that he
+only declined Miss Gwilt's request from a conviction that an
+interview would be needlessly distressing on both sides. But his
+legal adviser firmly rejected the proposed addition to the
+letter. "When you say No to a woman, sir," remarked Pedgift
+Senior, "always say it in one word. If you give her your reasons,
+she invariably believes that you mean Yes."
+
+Producing that little gem of wisdom from the rich mine of his
+professional experience, Mr. Pedgift the elder sent out the
+answer to Miss Gwilt's messenger, and recommended the servant to
+"see the fellow, whoever he was, well clear of the house."
+
+"Now, sir," said the lawyer, "we will come back, if you like, to
+my opinion of Miss Gwilt. It doesn't it all agree with yours, I'm
+afraid. You think her an object of pity--quite natural at your
+age. I think her an object for the inside of a prison--quite
+natural at mine. You shall hear the grounds on which I have
+formed my opinion directly. Let me show you that I am in earnest
+by putting the opinion itself, in the first place, to a practical
+test. Do you think Miss Gwilt is likely to persist in paying you
+a visit, Mr. Armadale, after the answer you have just sent to
+her?"
+
+"Quite impossible!" cried Allan, warmly. "Miss Gwilt is a lady;
+after the letter I have sent to her, she will never come near me
+again."
+
+"There we join issue, sir," cried Pedgift Senior. "I say she will
+snap her fingers at your letter (which was one of the reasons why
+I objected to your writing it). I say, she is in all probability
+waiting her messenger's return, in or near your grounds at this
+moment. I say, she will try to force her way in here, before
+four-and-twenty hours more are over your head. Egad, sir!" cried
+Mr. Pedgift, looking at his watch, "it's only seven o'clock now.
+She's bold enough and clever enough to catch you unawares this
+very evening. Permit me to ring for the servant--permit me to
+request that you will give him orders immediately to say you are
+not at home. You needn't hesitate, Mr. Armadale! If you're right
+about Miss Gwilt, it's a mere formality. If I'm right, it's a
+wise precaution. Back your opinion, sir," said Mr. Pedgift,
+ringing the bell; "I back mine!"
+
+Allan was sufficiently nettled when the bell rang to feel ready
+to give the order. But when the servant came in, past
+remembrances got the better of him, and the words stuck in his
+throat. "You give the order," he said to Mr. Pedgift, and walked
+away abruptly to the window. "You're a good fellow!" thought the
+old lawyer, looking after him, and penetrating his motive on the
+instant. "The claws of that she-devil shan't scratch you if I can
+help it."
+
+The servant waited inexorably for his orders.
+
+"If Miss Gwilt calls here, either this evening, or at any other
+time," said Pedgift Senior, "Mr. Armadale is not at home. Wait!
+If she asks when Mr. Armadale will be back, you don't know. Wait!
+If she proposes coming in and sitting down, you have a general
+order that nobody is to come in and sit down unless they have a
+previous appointment with Mr. Armadale. Come!" cried old Pedgift,
+rubbing his hands cheerfully when the servant had left the room,
+"I've stopped her out now, at any rate! The orders are all given,
+Mr. Armadale. We may go on with our conversation."
+
+Allan came back from the window. "The conversation is not a very
+pleasant one," he said. "No offense to you, but I wish it was
+over."
+
+"We will get it over as soon as possible, sir," said Pedgift
+Senior, still persisting, as only lawyers and women _can_
+persist, in forcing his way little by little nearer and nearer to
+his own object. "Let us go back, if you please, to the practical
+suggestion which I offered to you when the servant came in with
+Miss Gwilt's note. There is, I repeat, only one way left for you,
+Mr. Armadale, out of your present awkward position. You must
+pursue your inquiries about this woman to an end--on the chance
+(which I consider next to a certainty) that the end will justify
+you in the estimation of the neighborhood."
+
+"I wish to God I had never made any inquiries at all!" said
+Allan. "Nothing will induce me, Mr. Pedgift, to make any more."
+
+"Why?" asked the lawyer.
+
+"Can you ask me why," retorted Allan, hotly, "after your son has
+told you what we found out in London? Even if I had less cause to
+be--to be sorry for Miss Gwilt than I have; even if it was some
+other woman, do you think I would inquire any further into the
+secret of a poor betrayed creature--much less expose it to the
+neighborhood? I should think myself as great a scoundrel as the
+man who has cast her out helpless on the world, if I did anything
+of the kind. I wonder you can ask me the question--upon my soul,
+I wonder you can ask me the question!"
+
+"Give me your hand, Mr. Armadale!" cried Pedgift Senior, warmly;
+"I honor you for being so angry with me. The neighborhood may say
+what it pleases; you're a gentleman, sir, in the best sense of
+the word. Now," pursued the lawyer, dropping Allan's hand, and
+lapsing back instantly from sentiment to business, "just hear
+what I have got to say in my own defense. Suppose Miss Gwilt's
+real position happens to be nothing like what you are generously
+determined to believe it to be?"
+
+"We have no reason to suppose that," said Allan, resolutely.
+
+"Such is your opinion, sir," persisted Pedgift. "Mine, founded on
+what is publicly known of Miss Gwilt's proceedings here, and on
+what I have seen of Miss Gwilt herself, is that she is as far as
+I am from being the sentimental victim you are inclined to make
+her out. Gently, Mr. Armadale! remember that I have put my
+opinion to a practical test, and wait to condemn it off-hand
+until events have justified you. Let me put my points, sir--make
+allowances for me as a lawyer--and let me put my points. You and
+my son are young men; and I don't deny that the circumstances, on
+the surface, appear to justify the interpretation which, as young
+men, you have placed on them. I am an old man--I know that
+circumstances are not always to be taken as they appear on the
+surface--and I possess the great advantage, in the present case,
+of having had years of professional experience among some of the
+wickedest women who ever walked this earth."
+
+Allan opened his lips to protest, and checked himself, in despair
+of producing the slightest effect. Pedgift Senior bowed in polite
+acknowledgment of his client's self-restraint, and took instant
+advantage of it to go on.
+
+"All Miss Gwilt's proceedings," he resumed, "since your
+unfortunate correspondence with the major show me that she is an
+old hand at deceit. The moment she is threatened with
+exposure--exposure of some kind, there can be no doubt, after
+what you discovered in London--she turns your honorable silence
+to the best possible account, and leaves the major's service in
+the character of a martyr. Once out of the house, what does she
+do next? She boldly stops in the neighborhood, and serves three
+excellent purposes by doing so. In the first place, she shows
+everybody that she is not afraid of facing another attack on her
+reputation. In the second place, she is close at hand to twist
+you round her little finger, and to become Mrs. Armadale in spite
+of circumstances, if you (and I) allow her the opportunity. In
+the third place, if you (and I) are wise enough to distrust her,
+she is equally wise on her side, and doesn't give us the first
+great chance of following her to London, and associating her with
+her accomplices. Is this the conduct of an unhappy woman who has
+lost her character in a moment of weakness, and who has been
+driven unwillingly into a deception to get it back again?"
+
+"You put it cleverly," said Allan, answering with marked
+reluctance; "I can't deny that you put it cleverly."
+
+"Your own common sense, Mr. Armadale, is beginning to tell you
+that I put it just ly," said Pedgift Senior. "I don't presume to
+say yet what this woman's connection may be with those people at
+Pimlico. All I assert is that it is not the connection you
+suppose. Having stated the facts so far, I have only to add my
+own personal impression of Miss Gwilt. I won't shock you, if I
+can help it; I'll try if I can't put it cleverly again. She came
+to my office (as I told you in my letter), no doubt to make
+friends with your lawyer, if she could; she came to tell me, in
+the most forgiving and Christian manner, that she didn't blame
+_you._"
+
+"Do you ever believe in anybody, Mr. Pedgift?" interposed Allan.
+
+"Sometimes, Mr. Armadale," returned Pedgift the elder, as
+unabashed as ever. "I believe as often as a lawyer can. To
+proceed, sir. When I was in the criminal branch of practice, it
+fell to my lot to take instructions for the defense of women
+committed for trial from the women's own lips. Whatever other
+difference there might be among them, I got, in time, to notice,
+among those who were particularly wicked and unquestionably
+guilty, one point in which they all resembled each other. Tall
+and short, old and young, handsome and ugly, they all had a
+secret self-possession that nothing could shake. On the surface
+they were as different as possible. Some of them were in a state
+of indignation; some of them were drowned in tears; some of them
+were full of pious confidence; and some of them were resolved to
+commit suicide before the night was out. But only put your finger
+suddenly on the weak point in the story told by any one of them,
+and there was an end of her rage, or her tears, or her piety, or
+her despair; and out came the genuine woman, in full possession
+of all her resources with a neat little lie that exactly suited
+the circumstances of the case. Miss Gwilt was in tears,
+sir--becoming tears that didn't make her nose red--and I put my
+finger suddenly on the weak point in _her_ story. Down dropped
+her pathetic pocket-handkerchief from her beautiful blue eyes,
+and out came the genuine woman with the neat little lie that
+exactly suited the circumstances! I felt twenty years younger,
+Mr. Armadale, on the spot. I declare I thought I was in Newgate
+again, with my note-book in my hand, taking my instructions for
+the defense!"
+
+"The next thing you'll say, Mr. Pedgift," cried Allan, angrily,
+"is that Miss Gwilt has been in prison!"
+
+Pedgift Senior calmly rapped his snuff-box, and had his answer
+ready at a moment's notice.
+
+"She may have richly deserved to see the inside of a prison, Mr.
+Armadale; but, in the age we live in, that is one excellent
+reason for her never having been near any place of the kind. A
+prison, in the present tender state of public feeling, for a
+charming woman like Miss Gwilt! My dear sir, if she had attempted
+to murder you or me, and if an inhuman judge and jury had decided
+on sending her to a prison, the first object of modern society
+would be to prevent her going into it; and, if that couldn't be
+done, the next object would be to let her out again as soon as
+possible. Read your newspaper, Mr. Armadale, and you'll find we
+live in piping times for the black sheep of the community--if
+they are only black enough. I insist on asserting, sir, that we
+have got one of the blackest of the lot to deal with in this
+case. I insist on asserting that you have had the rare luck, in
+these unfortunate inquiries, to pitch on a woman who happens to
+be a fit object for inquiry, in the interests of the public
+protection. Differ with me as strongly as you please, but don't
+make up your mind finally about Miss Gwilt until events have put
+those two opposite opinions of ours to the test that I have
+proposed. A fairer test there can't be. I agree with you that no
+lady worthy of the name could attempt to force her way in here,
+after receiving your letter. But I deny that Miss Gwilt is worthy
+of the name; and I say she will try to force her way in here in
+spite of you."
+
+"And I say she won't!" retorted Allan, firmly.
+
+Pedgift Senior leaned back in his chair and smiled. There was a
+momentary silence, and in that silence the door-bell rang.
+
+The lawyer and the client both looked expectantly in the
+direction of the hall.
+
+"No," cried Allan, more angrily than ever.
+
+"Yes!" cried Pedgift Senior, contradicting him with the utmost
+politeness.
+
+They waited the event. The opening of the house door was audible,
+but the room was too far from it for the sound of voices to reach
+the ear as well. After a long interval of expectation, the
+closing of the door was heard at last. Allan rose impetuously and
+rang the bell. Mr. Pedgift the elder sat sublimely calm, and
+enjoyed, with a gentle zest, the largest pinch of snuff he had
+taken yet.
+
+"Anybody for me?" asked Allan, when the servant came in.
+
+The man looked at Pedgift Senior, with an expression of
+unutterable reverence, and answered, "Miss Gwilt."
+
+"I don't want to crow over you, sir," said Mr. Pedgift the elder,
+when the servant had withdrawn. "But what do you think of Miss
+Gwilt _ now?_"
+
+Allan shook his head in silent discouragement and distress.
+
+"Time is of some importance, Mr. Armadale. After what has just
+happened, do you still object to taking the course I have had the
+honor of suggesting to you?"
+
+"I can't, Mr. Pedgift," said Allan. "I can't be the means of
+disgracing her in the neighborhood. I would rather be disgraced
+myself--as I am."
+
+"Let me put it in another way, sir. Excuse my persisting. You
+have been very kind to me and my family; and I have a personal
+interest, as well as a professional interest, in you. If you
+can't prevail on yourself to show this woman's character in its
+true light, will you take common precautions to prevent her doing
+any more harm? Will you consent to having her privately watched
+as long as she remains in this neighborhood?"
+
+For the second time Allan shook his head.
+
+"Is that your final resolution, sir?"
+
+"It is, Mr. Pedgift; but I am much obliged to you for your
+advice, all the same."
+
+Pedgift Senior rose in a state of gentle resignation, and took up
+his hat "Good-evening, sir," he said, and made sorrowfully for
+the door. Allan rose on his side, innocently supposing that the
+interview was at an end. Persons better acquainted with the
+diplomatic habits of his legal adviser would have recommended him
+to keep his seat. The time was ripe for "Pedgift's postscript,"
+and the lawyer's indicative snuff-box was at that moment in one
+of his hands, as he opened the door with the other.
+
+"Good-evening," said Allan.
+
+Pedgift Senior opened the door, stopped, considered, closed the
+door again, came back mysteriously with his pinch of snuff in
+suspense between his box and his nose, and repeating his
+invariable formula, "By-the-by, there's a point occurs to me,"
+quietly resumed possession of his empty chair
+
+Allan, wondering, took the seat, in his turn, which he had just
+left. Lawyer and client looked at each other once more, and the
+inexhaustible interview began again.
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PEDGIFT'S POSTSCRIPT.
+
+"I MENTIONED that a point had occurred to me, sir," remarked
+Pedgift Senior.
+
+"You did," said Allan.
+
+"Would you like to hear what it is, Mr. Armadale?"
+
+"If you please," said Allan.
+
+"With all my heart, sir! This is the point. I attach considerable
+importance--if nothing else can be done--to having Miss Gwilt
+privately looked after, as long as she stops at Thorpe Ambrose.
+It struck me just now at the door, Mr. Armadale, that what you
+are not willing to do for your own security, you might be willing
+to do for the security of another person."
+
+"What other person?" inquired Allan.
+
+"A young lady who is a near neighbor of yours, sir. Shall I
+mention the name in confidence? Miss Milroy."
+
+Allan started, and changed color.
+
+"Miss Milroy!" he repeated. "Can _she_ be concerned in this
+miserable business? I hope not, Mr. Pedgift; I sincerely hope
+not."
+
+"I paid a visit, in your interests, sir, at the cottage this
+morning," proceeded Pedgift Senior. "You shall hear what happened
+there, and judge for yourself. Major Milroy has been expressing
+his opinion of you pretty freely; and I thought it highly
+desirable to give him a caution. It's always the way with those
+quiet addle-headed me n: when they do once wake up, there's no
+reasoning with their obstinacy, and no quieting their violence.
+Well, sir, this morning I went to the cottage. The major and Miss
+Neelie were both in the parlor--miss not looking so pretty as
+usual; pale, I thought, pale, and worn, and anxious. Up jumps the
+addle-headed major (I wouldn't give _that,_ Mr. Armadale, for the
+brains of a man who can occupy himself for half his lifetime in
+making a clock!)--up jumps the addle-headed major, in the
+loftiest manner, and actually tries to look me down. Ha! ha! the
+idea of anybody looking _me_ down, at my time of life. I behaved
+like a Christian; I nodded kindly to old What's-o'clock 'Fine
+morning, major,' says I. 'Have you any business with me?' says
+he. 'Just a word,' says I. Miss Neelie, like the sensible girl
+she is, gets up to leave the room; and what does her ridiculous
+father do? He stops her. 'You needn't go, my dear, I have nothing
+to say to Mr. Pedgift,' says this old military idiot, and turns
+my way, and tries to look me down again. 'You are Mr. Armadale's
+lawyer,' says he; 'if you come on any business relating to Mr.
+Armadale, I refer you to my solicitor.' (His solicitor is Darch;
+and Darch has had enough of _me_ in business, I can tell you!)
+'My errand here, major, does certainly relate to Mr. Armadale,'
+says I; 'but it doesn't concern your lawyer--at any rate, just
+yet. I wish to caution you to suspend your opinion of my client,
+or, if you won't do that, to be careful how you express it in
+public. I warn you that our turn is to come, and that you are not
+at the end yet of this scandal about Miss Gwilt.' It struck me as
+likely that he would lose his temper when he found himself
+tackled in that way, and he amply fulfilled my expectations. He
+was quite violent in his language--the poor weak
+creature--actually violent with _me!_ I behaved like a Christian
+again; I nodded kindly, and wished him good-morning. When I
+looked round to wish Miss Neelie good-morning, too, she was gone.
+You seem restless, Mr. Armadale," remarked Pedgift Senior, as
+Allan, feeling the sting of old recollections, suddenly started
+out of his chair, and began pacing up and down the room. "I won't
+try your patience much longer, sir; I am coming to the point."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Pedgift," said Allan, returning to his
+seat, and trying to look composedly at the lawyer through the
+intervening image of Neelie which the lawyer had called up.
+
+"Well, sir, I left the cottage," resumed Pedgift Senior. "Just as
+I turned the corner from the garden into the park, whom should I
+stumble on but Miss Neelie herself, evidently on the lookout for
+me. 'I want to speak to you for one moment, Mr. Pedgift!' says
+she. 'Does Mr. Armadale think _me_ mixed up in this matter?' She
+was violently agitated--tears in her eyes, sir, of the sort which
+my legal experience has _not_ accustomed me to see. I quite
+forgot myself; I actually gave her my arm, and led her away
+gently among the trees. (A nice position to find me in, if any of
+the scandal-mongers of the town had happened to be walking in
+that direction!) 'My dear Miss Milroy,' says I, 'why should Mr.
+Armadale think _you_ mixed up in it?' "
+
+"You ought to have told her at once that I thought nothing of the
+kind!" exclaimed Allan, indignantly. "Why did you leave her a
+moment in doubt about it?"
+
+"Because I am a lawyer, Mr. Armadale," rejoined Pedgift Senior,
+dryly. "Even in moments of sentiment, under convenient trees,
+with a pretty girl on my arm, I can't entirely divest myself of
+my professional caution. Don't look distressed, sir, pray! I set
+things right in due course of time. Before I left Miss Milroy, I
+told her, in the plainest terms, no such idea had ever entered
+your head."
+
+"Did she seem relieved?" asked Allan.
+
+"She was able to dispense with the use of my arm, sir," replied
+old Pedgift, as dryly as ever, "and to pledge me to inviolable
+secrecy on the subject of our interview. She was particularly
+desirous that _you_ should hear nothing about it. If you are at
+all anxious on your side to know why I am now betraying her
+confidence, I beg to inform you that her confidence related to no
+less a person than the lady who favored you with a call just
+now--Miss Gwilt."
+
+Allan, who had been once more restlessly pacing the room,
+stopped, and returned to his chair.
+
+"Is this serious?" he asked.
+
+"Most serious, sir," returned Pedgift Senior. "I am betraying
+Miss Neelie's secret, in Miss Neelie's own interest. Let us go
+back to that cautious question I put to her. She found some
+little difficulty in answering it, for the reply involved her in
+a narrative of the parting interview between her governess and
+herself. This is the substance of it. The two were alone when
+Miss Gwilt took leave of her pupil; and the words she used (as
+reported to me by Miss Neelie) were these. She said, 'Your mother
+has declined to allow me to take leave of her. Do you decline
+too?' Miss Neelie's answer was a remarkably sensible one for a
+girl of her age. 'We have not been good friends,' she said, 'and
+I believe we are equally glad to part with each other. But I have
+no wish to decline taking leave of you.' Saying that, she held
+out her hand. Miss Gwilt stood looking at her steadily, without
+taking it, and addressed her in these words: '_You are not Mrs.
+Armadale yet._' Gently, sir! Keep your temper. It's not at all
+wonderful that a woman, conscious of having her own mercenary
+designs on you, should attribute similar designs to a young lady
+who happens to be your near neighbor. Let me go on. Miss Neelie,
+by her own confession (and quite naturally, I think), was
+excessively indignant. She owns to having answered, 'You
+shameless creature, how dare you say that to me!' Miss Gwilt's
+rejoinder was rather a remarkable one--the anger, on her side,
+appears to have been of the cool, still, venomous kind. 'Nobody
+ever yet injured me, Miss Milroy,' she said, 'without sooner or
+later bitterly repenting it. _You_ will bitterly repent it.' She
+stood looking at her pupil for a moment in dead silence, and then
+left the room. Miss Neelie appears to have felt the imputation
+fastened on her, in connection with you, far more sensitively
+than she felt the threat. She had previously known, as everybody
+had known in the house, that some unacknowledged proceedings of
+yours in London had led to Miss Gwilt's voluntary withdrawal from
+her situation. And she now inferred, from the language addressed
+to her, that she was actually believed by Miss Gwilt to have set
+those proceedings on foot, to advance herself, and to injure her
+governess, in your estimation. Gently, sir, gently! I haven't
+quite done yet. As soon as Miss Neelie had recovered herself, she
+went upstairs to speak to Mrs. Milroy. Miss Gwilt's abominable
+imputation had taken her by surprise; and she went to her mother
+first for enlightenment and advice. She got neither the one nor
+the other. Mrs. Milroy declared she was too ill to enter on the
+subject, and she has remained too ill to enter on it ever since.
+Miss Neelie applied next to her father. The major stopped her the
+moment your name passed her lips: he declared he would never hear
+you mentioned again by any member of his family. She has been
+left in the dark from that time to this, not knowing how she
+might have been misrepresented by Miss Gwilt, or what falsehoods
+you might have been led to believe of her. At my age and in my
+profession, I don't profess to have any extraordinary softness of
+heart. But I do think, Mr. Armadale, that Miss Neelie's position
+deserves our sympathy."
+
+"I'll do anything to help her!" cried Allan, impulsively. "You
+don't know, Mr. Pedgift, what reason I have--" He checked
+himself, and confusedly repeated his first words. "I'll do
+anything," he reiterated earnestly--"anything in the world to
+help her!"
+
+"Do you really mean that, Mr. Armadale? Excuse my asking; but you
+can very materially help Miss Neelie, if you choose! "
+
+"How?" asked Allan. "Only tell me how!"
+
+"By giving me your authority, sir, to protect her from Miss
+Gwilt."
+
+Having fired that shot pointblank at his client, the wise lawyer
+waited a little to let it take its effect before he said any
+more.
+
+Allan's face clouded, and he shifted uneasily from side to side
+of his chair.
+
+"Your son is hard enough to deal with, Mr. Pedgift," he said,
+"and you are harder than your son."
+
+"Thank you, sir," rejoined the ready Pedgift, "in my son's name
+and my own, for a handsome compliment to the firm. If you really
+wish to be of assistance to Miss Neelie," he went on, more
+seriously, "I have shown you the way. You can do nothing to quiet
+her anxiety which I have not done already. As soon as I had
+assured her that no misconception of her conduct existed in your
+mind, she went away satisfied. Her governess's parting threat
+doesn't seem to have dwelt on her memory. I can tell you, Mr.
+Armadale, it dwells on mine! You know my opinion of Miss Gwilt;
+and you know what Miss Gwilt herself has done this very evening
+to justify that opinion even in your eyes. May I ask, after all
+that has passed, whether you think she is the sort of woman who
+can be trusted to confine herself to empty threats?"
+
+The question was a formidable one to answer. Forced steadily back
+from the position which he had occupied at the outset of the
+interview, by the irresistible pressure of plain facts, Allan
+began for the first time to show symptoms of yielding on the
+subject of Miss Gwilt. "Is there no other way of protecting Miss
+Milroy but the way you have mentioned?" he asked, uneasily.
+
+"Do you think the major would listen to you, sir, if you spoke to
+him?" asked Pedgift Senior, sarcastically. "I'm rather afraid he
+wouldn't honor _me_ with his attention. Or perhaps you would
+prefer alarming Miss Neelie by telling her in plain words that we
+both think her in danger? Or, suppose you send me to Miss Gwilt,
+with instructions to inform her that she has done her pupil a
+cruel injustice? Women are so proverbially ready to listen to
+reason; and they are so universally disposed to alter their
+opinions of each other on application--especially when one woman
+thinks that another woman has destroyed her prospect of making a
+good marriage. Don't mind _me,_ Mr. Armadale; I'm only a lawyer,
+and I can sit waterproof under another shower of Miss Gwilt's
+tears!"
+
+"Damn it, Mr. Pedgift, tell me in plain words what you want to
+do!" cried Allan, losing his temper at last.
+
+"In plain words, Mr. Armadale, I want to keep Miss Gwilt's
+proceedings privately under view, as long as she stops in this
+neighborhood. I answer for finding a person who will look after
+her delicately and discreetly. And I agree to discontinue even
+this harmless superintendence of her actions, if there isn't good
+reasons shown for continuing it, to your entire satisfaction, in
+a week's time. I make that moderate proposal, sir, in what I
+sincerely believe to be Miss Milroy's interest, and I wait your
+answer, Yes or No."
+
+"Can't I have time to consider?" asked Allan, driven to the last
+helpless expedient of taking refuge in delay.
+
+"Certainly, Mr. Armadale. But don't forget, while you are
+considering, that Miss Milroy is in the habit of walking out
+alone in your park, innocent of all apprehension of danger, and
+that Miss Gwilt is perfectly free to take any advantage of that
+circumstance that Miss Gwilt pleases."
+
+"Do as you like!" exclaimed Allan, in despair. "And, for God's
+sake, don't torment me any longer!"
+
+Popular prejudice may deny it, but the profession of the law is a
+practically Christian profession in one respect at least. Of all
+the large collection of ready answers lying in wait for mankind
+on a lawyer's lips, none is kept in better working order than
+"the soft answer which turneth away wrath." Pedgift Senior rose
+with the alacrity of youth in his legs, and the wise moderation
+of age on his tongue. "Many thanks, sir," he said, "for the
+attention you have bestowed on me. I congratulate you on your
+decision, and I wish you good-evening." This time his indicative
+snuff-box was not in his hand when he opened the door, and he
+actually disappeared without coming back for a second postscript.
+
+Allan's head sank on his breast when he was left alone. "If it
+was only the end of the week!" he thought, longingly. "If I only
+had Midwinter back again!"
+
+As that aspiration escaped the client's lips, the lawyer got
+gayly into his gig. "Hie away, old girl!" cried Pedgift Senior,
+patting the fast-trotting mare with the end of his whip. "I never
+keep a lady waiting--and I've got business to-night with one of
+your own sex!"
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE MARTYRDOM OF MISS GWILT.
+
+THE outskirts of the little town of Thorpe Ambrose, on the side
+nearest to "the great house," have earned some local celebrity as
+exhibiting the prettiest suburb of the kind to be found in East
+Norfolk. Here the villas and gardens are for the most part built
+and laid out in excellent taste, the trees are in the prime of
+their growth, and the healthy common beyond the houses rises and
+falls in picturesque and delightful variety of broken ground. The
+rank, fashion, and beauty of the town make this place their
+evening promenade; and when a stranger goes out for a drive, if
+he leaves it to the coachman, the coachman starts by way of the
+common as a matter of course.
+
+On the opposite side, that is to say, on the side furthest from
+"the great house," the suburbs (in the year 1851) were
+universally regarded as a sore subject by all persons zealous for
+the reputation of the town.
+
+Here nature was uninviting, man was poor, and social progress, as
+exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The
+streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the
+town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the
+barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders
+hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in
+the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on
+lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they
+were to let for building, raised sickly little crops meanwhile,
+in despair of finding a purchaser to deal with them. All the
+waste paper of the town seemed to float congenially to this
+neglected spot; and all the fretful children came and cried here,
+in charge of all the slatternly nurses who disgraced the place.
+If there was any intention in Thorpe Ambrose of sending a
+worn-out horse to the knacker's, that horse was sure to be found
+waiting his doom in a field on this side of the town. No growth
+flourished in these desert regions but the arid growth of
+rubbish; and no creatures rejoiced but the creatures of the
+night--the vermin here and there in the beds, and the cats
+everywhere on the tiles.
+
+The sun had set, and the summer twilight was darkening. The
+fretful children were crying in their cradles; the horse destined
+for the knacker dozed forlorn in the field of his imprisonment;
+the cats waited stealthily in corners for the coming night. But
+one living figure appeared in the lonely suburb--the figure of
+Mr. Bashwood. But one faint sound disturbed the dreadful
+silence--the sound of Mr. Bashwood's softly stepping feet.
+
+Moving slowly past the heaps of bricks rising at intervals along
+the road, coasting carefully round the old iron and the broken
+tiles scattered here and there in his path, Mr. Bashwood advanced
+from the direction of the country toward one of the unfinished
+streets of the suburb. His personal appearance had been
+apparently made the object of some special attention. His false
+teeth were brilliantly white; his wig was carefully brushed; his
+mourning garments, renewed throughout, gleamed with the hideous
+and slimy gloss of cheap black cloth. He moved with a nervous
+jauntiness, and looked about him with a vacant smile. Having
+reached the first of the skeleton cottages, his watery eyes
+settled steadily for the first time on the view of the street
+before him. The next instant he started; his breath quickened; he
+leaned, trembling and flushing, against the unfinished wall at
+his side. A lady, still at some distance, was advancing toward
+him down the length of the street. "She's coming!" he whispered,
+with a strange mixture of rapture and fear, of alternating color
+and paleness, showing itself in his haggard face. "I wish I was
+the ground she treads on! I wish I was the glove she's got on her
+hand!" He bur st ecstatically into those extravagant words, with
+a concentrated intensity of delight in uttering them that
+actually shook his feeble figure from head to foot.
+
+Smoothly and gracefully the lady glided nearer and nearer, until
+she revealed to Mr. Bashwood's eyes, what Mr. Bashwood's
+instincts had recognized in the first instance--the face of Miss
+Gwilt.
+
+She was dressed with an exquisitely expressive economy of outlay.
+The plainest straw bonnet procurable, trimmed sparingly with the
+cheapest white ribbon, was on her head. Modest and tasteful
+poverty expressed itself in the speckless cleanliness and the
+modestly proportioned skirts of her light "print" gown, and in
+the scanty little mantilla of cheap black silk which she wore
+over it, edged with a simple frilling of the same material. The
+luster of her terrible red hair showed itself unshrinkingly in a
+plaited coronet above her forehead, and escaped in one vagrant
+love-lock, perfectly curled, that dropped over her left shoulder.
+Her gloves, fitting her like a second skin, were of the sober
+brown hue which is slowest to show signs of use. One hand lifted
+her dress daintily above the impurities of the road; the other
+held a little nosegay of the commonest garden flowers.
+Noiselessly and smoothly she came on, with a gentle and regular
+undulation of the print gown; with the love-lock softly lifted
+from moment to moment in the evening breeze; with her head a
+little drooped, and her eyes on the ground--in walk, and look,
+and manner, in every casual movement that escaped her, expressing
+that subtle mixture of the voluptuous and the modest which, of
+the many attractive extremes that meet in women, is in a man's
+eyes the most irresistible of all.
+
+"Mr. Bashwood!" she exclaimed, in loud, clear tones indicative of
+the utmost astonishment, "what a surprise to find you here! I
+thought none but the wretched inhabitants ever ventured near this
+side of the town. Hush!" she added quickly, in a whisper. "You
+heard right when you heard that Mr. Armadale was going to have me
+followed and watched. There's a man behind one of the houses. We
+must talk out loud of indifferent things, and look as if we had
+met by accident. Ask me what I am doing. Out loud! Directly! You
+shall never see me again, if you don't instantly leave off
+trembling and do what I tell you!"
+
+She spoke with a merciless tyranny of eye and voice--with a
+merciless use of her power over the feeble creature whom she
+addressed. Mr. Bashwood obeyed her in tones that quavered with
+agitation, and with eyes that devoured her beauty in a strange
+fascination of terror and delight.
+
+"I am trying to earn a little money by teaching music," she said,
+in the voice intended to reach the spy's ears. "If you are able
+to recommend me any pupils, Mr. Bashwood, your good word will
+oblige me. Have you been in the grounds to-day?" she went on,
+dropping her voice again in a whisper. "Has Mr. Armadale been
+near the cottage? Has Miss Milroy been out of the garden? No? Are
+you sure? Look out for them to-morrow, and next day, and next
+day. They are certain to meet and make it up again, and I must
+and will know of it. Hush! Ask me my terms for teaching music.
+What are you frightened about? It's me the man's after--not you.
+Louder than when you asked me what I was doing, just now; louder,
+or I won't trust you any more; I'll go to somebody else!"
+
+Once more Mr. Bashwood obeyed. "Don't be angry with me," he
+murmured, faintly, when he had spoken the necessary words. "My
+heart beats so you'll kill me!"
+
+"You poor old dear!" she whispered back, with a sudden change in
+her manner, with an easy satirical tenderness. "What business
+have you with a heart at your age? Be here to-morrow at the same
+time, and tell me what you have seen in the grounds. My terms are
+only five shillings a lesson," she went on, in her louder tone.
+"I'm sure that's not much, Mr. Bashwood; I give such long
+lessons, and I get all my pupils' music half-price." She suddenly
+dropped her voice again, and looked him brightly into instant
+subjection. "Don't let Mr. Armadale out of your sight to-morrow!
+If that girl manages to speak to him, and if I don't hear of it,
+I'll frighten you to death. If I _do_ hear of it, I'll kiss you!
+Hush! Wish me good-night, and go on to the town, and leave me to
+go the other way. I don't want you--I'm not afraid of the man
+behind the houses; I can deal with him by myself. Say goodnight,
+and I'll let you shake hands. Say it louder, and I'll give you
+one of my flowers, if you'll promise not to fall in love with
+it." She raised her voice again. "Goodnight, Mr. Bashwood! Don't
+forget my terms. Five shillings a lesson, and the lessons last an
+hour at a time, and I get all my pupils' music half-price, which
+is an immense advantage, isn't it?" She slipped a flower into his
+hand--frowned him into obedience, and smiled to reward him for
+obeying, at the same moment--lifted her dress again above the
+impurities of the road--and went on her way with a dainty and
+indolent deliberation, as a cat goes on her way when she has
+exhausted the enjoyment of frightening a mouse.
+
+Left alone, Mr. Bashwood turned to the low cottage wall near
+which he had been standing, and, resting himself on it wearily,
+looked at the flower in his hand.
+
+His past existence had disciplined him to bear disaster and
+insult, as few happier men could have borne them; but it had not
+prepared him to feel the master-passion of humanity, for the
+first time, at the dreary end of his life, in the hopeless decay
+of a manhood that had withered under the double blight of
+conjugal disappointment and parental sorrow. "Oh, if I was only
+young again!" murmured the poor wretch, resting his arms on the
+wall and touching the flower with his dry, fevered lips in a
+stealthy rapture of tenderness. "She might have liked me when I
+was twenty!" He suddenly started back into an erect position, and
+stared about him in vacant bewilderment and terror. "She told me
+to go home," he said, with a startled look. "Why am I stopping
+here?" He turned, and hurried on to the town--in such dread of
+her anger, if she looked round and saw him, that he never so much
+as ventured on a backward glance at the road by which she had
+retired, and never detected the spy dogging her footsteps, under
+cover of the empty houses and the brick-heaps by the roadside.
+
+Smoothly and gracefully, carefully preserving the speckless
+integrity of her dress, never hastening her pace, and never
+looking aside to the right hand or the left, Miss Gwilt pursued
+her way toward the open country. The suburban road branched off
+at its end in two directions. On the left, the path wound through
+a ragged little coppice to the grazing grounds of a neighboring
+farm; on the right, it led across a hillock of waste land to the
+high-road. Stopping a moment to consider, but not showing the spy
+that she suspected him by glancing behind her while there was a
+hiding-place within his reach, Miss Gwilt took the path across
+the hillock. "I'll catch him there," she said to herself, looking
+up quietly at the long straight line of the empty high-road.
+
+Once on the ground that she had chosen for her purpose, she met
+the difficulties of the position with perfect tact and
+self-possession. After walking some thirty yards along the road,
+she let her nosegay drop, half turned round in stooping to pick
+it up, saw the man stopping at the same moment behind her, and
+instantly went on again, quickening her pace little by little,
+until she was walking at the top of her speed. The spy fell into
+the snare laid for him. Seeing the night coming, and fearing that
+he might lose sight of her in the darkness, he rapidly lessened
+the distance between them. Miss Gwilt went on faster and faster
+till she plainly heard his footstep behind her, then stopped,
+turned, and met the man face to face the next moment.
+
+"My compliments to Mr. Armadale," she said, "and tell him I've
+caught you watching me."
+
+"I'm not watching you, miss," retorted the spy, thrown off his
+guard by the daring plainness of the language in which she had
+spoken to him.
+
+Miss Gwilt's eyes measured him contemptuously from head to foot.
+He was a weakly, undersized man. She wa s the taller, and (quite
+possibly) the stronger of the two.
+
+"Take your hat off, you blackguard, when you speak to a lady,"
+she said, and tossed his hat in an instant, across a ditch by
+which they were standing, into a pool on the other side.
+
+This time the spy was on his guard. He knew as well as Miss Gwilt
+knew the use which might be made of the precious minutes, if he
+turned his back on her and crossed the ditch to recover his hat.
+"It's well for you you're a woman," he said, standing scowling at
+her bareheaded in the fast-darkening light.
+
+Miss Gwilt glanced sidelong down the onward vista of the road,
+and saw, through the gathering obscurity, the solitary figure of
+a man rapidly advancing toward her. Some women would have noticed
+the approach of a stranger at that hour and in that lonely place
+with a certain anxiety. Miss Gwilt was too confident in her own
+powers of persuasion not to count on the man's assistance
+beforehand, whoever he might be, _because_ he was a man. She
+looked back at the spy with redoubled confidence in herself, and
+measured him contemptuously from head to foot for the second
+time.
+
+"I wonder whether I'm strong enough to throw you after your hat?"
+she said. "I'll take a turn and consider it."
+
+She sauntered on a few steps toward the figure advancing along
+the road. The spy followed her close. "Try it," he said,
+brutally. "You're a fine woman; you're welcome to put your arms
+round me if you like." As the words escaped him, he too saw the
+stranger for the first time. He drew back a step and waited. Miss
+Gwilt, on her side, advanced a step and waited, too.
+
+The stranger came on, with the lithe, light step of a practiced
+walker, swinging a stick in his hand and carrying a knapsack on
+his shoulders. A few paces nearer, and his face became visible.
+He was a dark man, his black hair was powdered with dust, and his
+black eyes were looking steadfastly forward along the road before
+him.
+
+Miss Gwilt advanced with the first signs of agitation she had
+shown yet. "Is it possible?" she said, softly. "Can it really be
+you?"
+
+It was Midwinter, on his way back to Thorpe Ambrose, after his
+fortnight among the Yorkshire moors.
+
+He stopped and looked at her, in breathless surprise. The image
+of the woman had been in his thoughts, at the moment when the
+woman herself spoke to him. "Miss Gwilt!" he exclaimed, and
+mechanically held out his hand.
+
+She took it, and pressed it gently. "I should have been glad to
+see you at any time," she said. "You don't know how glad I am to
+see you now. May I trouble you to speak to that man? He has been
+following me, and annoying me all the way from the town."
+
+Midwinter stepped past her without uttering a word. Faint as the
+light was, the spy saw what was coming in his face, and, turning
+instantly, leaped the ditch by the road-side. Before Midwinter
+could follow, Miss Gwilt's hand was on his shoulder.
+
+"No," she said, "you don't know who his employer is."
+
+Midwinter stopped and looked at her.
+
+"Strange things have happened since you left us," she went on. "I
+have been forced to give up my situation, and I am followed and
+watched by a paid spy. Don't ask who forced me out of my
+situation, and who pays the spy--at least not just yet. I can't
+make up my mind to tell you till I am a little more composed. Let
+the wretch go. Do you mind seeing me safe back to my lodging?
+It's in your way home. May I--may I ask for the support of your
+arm? My little stock of courage is quite exhausted." She took his
+arm and clung close to it. The woman who had tyrannized over Mr.
+Bashwood was gone, and the woman who had tossed the spy's hat
+into the pool was gone. A timid, shrinking, interesting creature
+filled the fair skin and trembled on the symmetrical limbs of
+Miss Gwilt. She put her handkerchief to her eyes. "They say
+necessity has no law," she murmured, faintly. "I am treating you
+like an old friend. God knows I want one!"
+
+They went on toward the town. She recovered herself with a
+touching fortitude; she put her handkerchief back in her pocket,
+and persisted in turning the conversation on Midwinter's walking
+tour. "It is bad enough to be a burden on you," she said, gently
+pressing on his arm as she spoke; "I mustn't distress you as
+well. Tell me where you have been, and what you have seen.
+Interest me in your journey; help me to escape from myself."
+
+They reached the modest little lodging in the miserable little
+suburb. Miss Gwilt sighed, and removed her glove before she took
+Midwinter's hand. "I have taken refuge here," she said, simply.
+"It is clean and quiet; I am too poor to want or expect more. We
+must say good-by, I suppose, unless"--she hesitated modestly, and
+satisfied herself by a quick look round that they were
+unobserved--"unless you would like to come in and rest a little?
+I feel so gratefully toward you, Mr. Midwinter! Is there any
+harm, do you think, in my offering you a cup of tea?"
+
+The magnetic influence of her touch was thrilling through him
+while she spoke. Change and absence, to which he had trusted to
+weaken her hold on him, had treacherously strengthened it
+instead. A man exceptionally sensitive, a man exceptionally pure
+in his past life, he stood hand in hand, in the tempting secrecy
+of the night, with the first woman who had exercised over him the
+all-absorbing influence of her sex. At his age, and in his
+position, who could have left her? The man (with a man's
+temperament) doesn't live who could have left her. Midwinter went
+in.
+
+A stupid, sleepy lad opened the house door. Even he, being a male
+creature, brightened under the influence of Miss Gwilt. "The urn,
+John," she said, kindly, "and another cup and saucer. I'll borrow
+your candle to light my candles upstairs, and then I won't
+trouble you any more to-night." John was wakeful and active in an
+instant. "No trouble, miss," he said, with awkward civility. Miss
+Gwilt took his candle with a smile. "How good people are to me!"
+she whispered, innocently, to Midwinter, as she led the way
+upstairs to the little drawing-room on the first floor.
+
+She lit the candles, and, turning quickly on her guest, stopped
+him at the first attempt he made to remove the knapsack from his
+shoulders. "No," she said, gently; "in the good old times there
+were occasions when the ladies unarmed their knights. I claim the
+privilege of unarming _my_ knight." Her dexterous fingers
+intercepted his at the straps and buckles, and she had the dusty
+knapsack off, before he could protest against her touching it.
+
+They sat down at the one little table in the room. It was very
+poorly furnished; but there was something of the dainty neatness
+of the woman who inhabited it in the arrangement of the few poor
+ornaments on the chimney-piece, in the one or two prettily bound
+volumes on the chiffonier, in the flowers on the table, and the
+modest little work-basket in the window. "Women are not all
+coquettes," she said, as she took off her bonnet and mantilla,
+and laid them carefully on a chair. "I won't go into my room, and
+look in my glass, and make myself smart; you shall take me just
+as I am." Her hands moved about among the tea-things with a
+smooth, noiseless activity.
+
+Her magnificent hair flashed crimson in the candle-light, as she
+turned her head hither and thither, searching with an easy grace
+for the things she wanted in the tray. Exercise had heightened
+the brilliancy of her complexion, and had quickened the rapid
+alternations of expression in her eyes--the delicious languor
+that stole over them when she was listening or thinking, the
+bright intelligence that flashed from them softly when she spoke.
+In the lightest word she said, in the least thing she did, there
+was something that gently solicited the heart of the man who sat
+with her. Perfectly modest in her manner, possessed to perfection
+of the graceful restraints and refinements of a lady, she had all
+the allurements that feast the eye, all the siren invitations
+that seduce the sense--a subtle suggestiveness in her silence,
+and a sexual sorcery in her smile.
+
+"Should I be wrong," she asked, suddenly suspending the
+conversation which she had thus far persistently restricted to
+the subject of Midwinter's walking tour, "if I g uessed that you
+have something on your mind--something which neither my tea nor
+my talk can charm away? Are men as curious as women? Is the
+something--Me?"
+
+Midwinter struggled against the fascination of looking at her and
+listening to her. "I am very anxious to hear what has happened
+since I have been away," he said. "But I am still more anxious,
+Miss Gwilt, not to distress you by speaking of a painful
+subject."
+
+She looked at him gratefully. "It is for your sake that I have
+avoided the painful subject," she said, toying with her spoon
+among the dregs in her empty cup. "But you will hear about it
+from others, if you don't hear about it from me; and you ought to
+know why you found me in that strange situation, and why you see
+me here. Pray remember one thing, to begin with. I don't blame
+your friend, Mr. Armadale. I blame the people whose instrument he
+is."
+
+Midwinter started. "Is it possible," he began, "that Allan can be
+in any way answerable--?" He stopped, and looked at Miss Gwilt in
+silent astonishment.
+
+She gently laid her hand on his. "Don't be angry with me for only
+telling the truth," she said. "Your friend is answerable for
+everything that has happened to me--innocently answerable, Mr.
+Midwinter, I firmly believe. We are both victims. _He_ is the
+victim of his position as the richest single man in the
+neighborhood; and I am the victim of Miss Milroy's determination
+to marry him."
+
+"Miss Milroy?" repeated Midwinter, more and more astonished.
+"Why, Allan himself told me--" He stopped again.
+
+"He told you that I was the object of his admiration? Poor
+fellow, he admires everybody; his head is almost as empty as
+this," said Miss Gwilt, smiling indicatively into the hollow of
+her cup. She dropped the spoon, sighed, and became serious again.
+"I am guilty of the vanity of having let him admire me," she went
+on, penitently, "without the excuse of being able, on my side, to
+reciprocate even the passing interest that he felt in me. I don't
+undervalue his many admirable qualities, or the excellent
+position he can offer to his wife. But a woman's heart is not to
+be commanded--no, Mr. Midwinter, not even by the fortunate master
+of Thorpe Ambrose, who commands everything else."
+
+She looked him full in the face as she uttered that magnanimous
+sentiment. His eyes dropped before hers, and his dark color
+deepened. He had felt his heart leap in him at the declaration of
+her indifference to Allan. For the first time since they had
+known each other, his interests now stood self-revealed before
+him as openly adverse to the interests of his friend.
+
+"I have been guilty of the vanity of letting Mr. Armadale admire
+me, and I have suffered for it," resumed Miss Gwilt. "If there
+had been any confidence between my pupil and me, I might have
+easily satisfied her that she might become Mrs. Armadale--if she
+could--without having any rivalry to fear on my part. But Miss
+Milroy disliked and distrusted me from the first. She took her
+own jealous view, no doubt, of Mr. Armadale's thoughtless
+attentions to me. It was her interest to destroy the position,
+such as it was, that I held in his estimation; and it is quite
+likely her mother assisted her. Mrs. Milroy had her motive also
+(which I am really ashamed to mention) for wishing to drive me
+out of the house. Anyhow, the conspiracy has succeeded. I have
+been forced (with Mr. Armadale's help) to leave the major's
+service. Don't be angry, Mr. Midwinter! Don't form a hasty
+opinion! I dare say Miss Milroy has some good qualities, though I
+have not found them out; and I assure you again and again that I
+don't blame Mr. Armadale. I only blame the people whose
+instrument he is."
+
+"How is he their instrument? How can he be the instrument of any
+enemy of yours?" asked Midwinter. "Pray excuse my anxiety, Miss
+Gwilt: Allan's good name is as dear to me as my own!"
+
+Miss Gwilt's eyes turned full on him again, and Miss Gwilt's
+heart abandoned itself innocently to an outburst of enthusiasm.
+"How I admire your earnestness!" she said. "How I like your
+anxiety for your friend! Oh, if women could only form such
+friendships! Oh you happy, happy men!" Her voice faltered, and
+her convenient tea-cup absorbed her for the third time. " I would
+give all the little beauty I possess," she said, "if I could only
+find such a friend as Mr. Armadale has found in _you._ I never
+shall, Mr. Midwinter--I never shall. Let us go back to what we
+were talking about. I can only tell you how your friend is
+concerned in my misfortune by telling you something first about
+myself. I am like many other governesses; I am the victim of sad
+domestic circumstances. It may be weak of me, but I have a horror
+of alluding to them among strangers. My silence about my family
+and my friends exposes me to misinterpretation in my dependent
+position. Does it do me any harm, Mr. Midwinter, in your
+estimation?"
+
+"God forbid!" said Midwinter, fervently. "There is no man
+living," he went on, thinking of his own family story, "who has
+better reason to understand and respect your silence than I
+have."
+
+Miss Gwilt seized his hand impulsively. "Oh," she said, "I knew
+it, the first moment I saw you! I knew that you, too, had
+suffered; that you, too, had sorrows which you kept sacred!
+Strange, strange sympathy! I believe in mesmerism--do you?" She
+suddenly recollected herself, and shuddered. "Oh, what have I
+done? What must you think of me?" she exclaimed, as he yielded to
+the magnetic fascination of her touch, and, forgetting everything
+but the hand that lay warm in his own, bent over it and kissed
+it. "Spare me!" she said, faintly, as she felt the burning touch
+of his lips. "I am so friendless--I am so completely at your
+mercy!"
+
+He turned away from her, and hid his face in his hands; he was
+trembling, and she saw it. She looked at him while his face was
+hidden from her; she looked at him with a furtive interest and
+surprise. "How that man loves me!" she thought. "I wonder whether
+there was a time when I might have loved _him?_"
+
+The silence between them remained unbroken for some minutes. He
+had felt her appeal to his consideration as she had never
+expected or intended him to feel it--he shrank from looking at
+her or from speaking to her again.
+
+"Shall I go on with my story?" she asked. "Shall we forget and
+forgive on both sides?" A woman's inveterate indulgence for every
+expression of a man's admiration which keeps within the limits of
+personal respect curved her lips gently into a charming smile.
+She looked down meditatively at her dress, and brushed a crumb
+off her lap with a little flattering sigh. "I was telling you,"
+she went on, "of my reluctance to speak to strangers of my sad
+family story. It was in that way, as I afterward found out, that
+I laid myself open to Miss Milroy's malice and Miss Milroy's
+suspicion. Private inquiries about me were addressed to the lady
+who was my reference--at Miss Milroy's suggestion, in the first
+instance, I have no doubt. I am sorry to say, this is not the
+worst of it. By some underhand means, of which I am quite
+ignorant, Mr. Armadale's simplicity was imposed on; and, when
+application was made secretly to my reference in London, it was
+made, Mr. Midwinter, through your friend."
+
+Midwinter suddenly rose from his chair and looked at her. The
+fascination that she exercised over him, powerful as it was,
+became a suspended influence, now that the plain disclosure came
+plainly at last from her lips. He looked at her, and sat down
+again, like a man bewildered, without uttering a word.
+
+"Remember how weak he is," pleaded Miss Gwilt, gently, "and make
+allowances for him as I do. The trifling accident of his failing
+to find my reference at the address given him seems, I can't
+imagine why, to have excited Mr. Armadale's suspicion. At any
+rate, he remained in London. What he did there, it is impossible
+for me to say. I was quite in the dark; I knew nothing: I
+distrusted nobody; I was as happy in my little round of duties as
+I could be with a pupil whose affections I had failed to win,
+when, one morning, to my indescribable astonishment, Major Milroy
+showed me a correspondence between Mr. Armadale and himself. He
+spoke to me in his wife's presence. Poor
+ creature, I make no complaint of her; such affliction as she
+suffers excuses everything. I wish I could give you some idea of
+the letters between Major Milroy and Mr. Armadale; but my head is
+only a woman's head, and I was so confused and distressed at the
+time! All I can tell you is that Mr. Armadale chose to preserve
+silence about his proceedings in London, under circumstances
+which made that silence a reflection on my character. The major
+was most kind; his confidence in me remained unshaken; but could
+his confidence protect me against his wife's prejudice and his
+daughter's ill-will? Oh, the hardness of women to each other! Oh,
+the humiliation if men only knew some of us as we really are!
+What could I do? I couldn't defend myself against mere
+imputations; and I couldn't remain in my situation after a slur
+had been cast on me. My pride (Heaven help me, I was brought up
+like a gentlewoman, and I have sensibilities that are not blunted
+even yet!)--my pride got the better of me, and I left my place.
+Don't let it distress you, Mr. Midwinter! There's a bright side
+to the picture. The ladies in the neighborhood have overwhelmed
+me with kindness; I have the prospect of getting pupils to teach;
+I am spared the mortification of going back to be a burden on my
+friends. The only complaint I have to make is, I think, a just
+one. Mr. Armadale has been back at Thorpe Ambrose for some days.
+I have entreated him, by letter, to grant me an interview; to
+tell me what dreadful suspicions he has of me, and to let me set
+myself right in his estimation. Would you believe it? He has
+declined to see me--under the influence of others, not of his own
+free will, I am sure! Cruel, isn't it? But he has even used me
+more cruelly still; he persists in suspecting me; it is he who is
+having me watched. Oh, Mr. Midwinter, don't hate me for telling
+you what you _must_ know! The man you found persecuting me and
+frightening me tonight was only earning his money, after all, as
+Mr. Armadale's spy."
+
+Once more Midwinter started to his feet; and this time the
+thoughts that were in him found their way into words.
+
+"I can't believe it; I won't believe it!" he exclaimed,
+indignantly. "If the man told you that, the man lied. I beg your
+pardon, Miss Gwilt; I beg your pardon from the bottom of my
+heart. Don't, pray don't think I doubt _you;_ I only say there is
+some dreadful mistake. I am not sure that I understand as I ought
+all that you have told me. But this last infamous meanness of
+which you think Allan guilty, I _do_ understand. I swear to you,
+he is incapable of it! Some scoundrel has been taking advantage
+of him; some scoundrel has been using his name. I'll prove it to
+you, if you will only give me time. Let me go and clear it up at
+once. I can't rest; I can't bear to think of it; I can't even
+enjoy the pleasure of being here. Oh," he burst out desperately,
+"I'm sure you feel for me, after what you have said--I feel so
+for _you!_"
+
+He stopped in confusion. Miss Gwilt's eyes were looking at him
+again, and Miss Gwilt's hand had found its way once more into his
+own.
+
+"You are the most generous of living men," she said, softly. "I
+will believe what you tell me to believe. Go," she added, in a
+whisper, suddenly releasing his hand, and turning away from him.
+"For both our sakes, go!"
+
+His heart beat fast; he looked at her as she dropped into a chair
+and put her handkerchief to her eyes. For one moment he
+hesitated; the next, he snatched up his knapsack from the floor,
+and left her precipitately, without a backward look or a parting
+word.
+
+She rose when the door closed on him. A change came over her the
+instant she was alone. The color faded out of her cheeks; the
+beauty died out of her eyes; her face hardened horribly with a
+silent despair. "It's even baser work than I bargained for," she
+said, "to deceive _him._" After pacing to and fro in the room for
+some minutes, she stopped wearily before the glass over the
+fire-place. "You strange creature!" she murmured, leaning her
+elbows on the mantelpiece, and languidly addressing the
+reflection of herself in the glass. "Have you got any conscience
+left? And has that man roused it?"
+
+The reflection of her face changed slowly. The color returned to
+her cheeks, the delicious languor began to suffuse her eyes
+again. Her lips parted gently, and her quickening breath began to
+dim the surface of the glass. She drew back from it, after a
+moment's absorption in her own thoughts, with a start of terror.
+"What am I doing?" she asked herself, in a sudden panic of
+astonishment. "Am I mad enough to be thinking of him in _that_
+way?"
+
+She burst into a mocking laugh, and opened her desk on the table
+recklessly with a bang. "It's high time I had some talk with
+Mother Jezebel," she said, and sat down to write to Mrs.
+Oldershaw.
+
+"I have met with Mr. Midwinter," she began, "under very lucky
+circumstances; and I have made the most of my opportunity. He has
+just left me for his friend Armadale; and one of two good things
+will happen to-morrow. If they don't quarrel, the doors of Thorpe
+Ambrose will be opened to me again at Mr. Midwinter's
+intercession. If they do quarrel, I shall be the unhappy cause of
+it, and I shall find my way in for myself, on the purely
+Christian errand of reconciling them."
+
+She hesitated at the next sentence, wrote the first few words of
+it, scratched them out again, and petulantly tore the letter into
+fragments, and threw the pen to the other end of the room.
+Turning quickly on her chair, she looked at the seat which
+Midwinter had occupied, her foot restlessly tapping the floor,
+and her handkerchief thrust like a gag between her clinched
+teeth. "Young as you are," she thought, with her mind reviving
+the image of him in the empty chair, "there has been something
+out of the common in _your_ life; and I must and will know it!"
+
+The house clock struck the hour, and roused her. She sighed, and,
+walking back to the glass, wearily loosened the fastenings of her
+dress; wearily removed the studs from the chemisette beneath it,
+and put them on the chimney-piece. She looked indolently at the
+reflected beauties of her neck and bosom, as she unplaited her
+hair and threw it back in one great mass over her shoulders.
+"Fancy," she thought, "if he saw me now!" She turned back to the
+table, and sighed again as she extinguished one of the candles
+and took the other in her hand. "Midwinter?" she said, as she
+passed through the folding-doors of the room to her bed-chamber.
+"I don't believe in his name, to begin with!"
+
+
+The night had advanced by more than an hour before Midwinter was
+back again at the great house.
+
+Twice, well as the homeward way was known to him, he had strayed
+out of the right road. The events of the evening--the interview
+with Miss Gwilt herself, after his fortnight's solitary thinking
+of her; the extraordinary change that had taken place in her
+position since he had seen her last; and the startling assertion
+of Allan's connection with it--had all conspired to throw his
+mind into a state of ungovernable confusion. The darkness of the
+cloudy night added to his bewilderment. Even the familiar gates
+of Thorpe Ambrose seemed strange to him. When he tried to think
+of it, it was a mystery to him how he had reached the place.
+
+The front of the house was dark, and closed for the night.
+Midwinter went round to the back. The sound of men's voices, as
+he advanced, caught his ear. They were soon distinguishable as
+the voices of the first and second footman, and the subject of
+conversation between them was their master.
+
+"I'll bet you an even half-crown he's driven out of the
+neighborhood before another week is over his head," said the
+first footman.
+
+"Done!" said the second. "He isn't as easy driven as you think."
+
+"Isn't he!" retorted the other. "He'll be mobbed if he stops
+here! I tell you again, he's not satisfied with the mess he's got
+into already. I know it for certain, he's having the governess
+watched."
+
+At those words, Midwinter mechanically checked himself before he
+turned the corner of the house. His first doubt of the result of
+his meditated appeal to Allan ran through him like a sudden
+chill. The influence exercised by the voic e of public scandal is
+a force which acts. in opposition to the ordinary law of
+mechanics. It is strongest, not by concentration, but by
+distribution. To the primary sound we may shut our ears; but the
+reverberation of it in echoes is irresistible. On his way back,
+Midwinter's one desire had been to find Allan up, and to speak to
+him immediately. His one hope now was to gain time to contend
+with the new doubts and to silence the new misgivings; his one
+present anxiety was to hear that Allan had gone to bed. He turned
+the corner of the house, and presented himself before the men
+smoking their pipes in the back garden. As soon as their
+astonishment allowed them to speak, they offered to rouse their
+master. Allan had given his friend up for that night, and had
+gone to bed about half an hour since.
+
+"It was my master's' particular order, sir," said the
+head-footman, "that he was to be told of it if you came back."
+
+"It is _my_ particular request," returned Midwinter, "that you
+won't disturb him."
+
+The men looked at each other wonderingly, as he took his candle
+and left them.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SHE COMES BETWEEN THEM.
+
+APPOINTED hours for the various domestic events of the day were
+things unknown at Thorpe Ambrose. Irregular in all his habits,
+Allan accommodated himself to no stated times (with the solitary
+exception of dinner-time) at any hour of the day or night. He
+retired to rest early or late, and he rose early or late, exactly
+as he felt inclined. The servants were forbidden to call him; and
+Mrs. Gripper was accustomed to improvise the breakfast as she
+best might, from the time when the kitchen fire was first lighted
+to the time when the clock stood on the stroke of noon.
+
+Toward nine o'clock on the morning after his return Midwinter
+knocked at Allan's door, and on entering the room found it empty.
+After inquiry among the servants, it appeared that Allan had
+risen that morning before the man who usually attended on him was
+up, and that his hot water had been brought to the door by one of
+the house-maids, who was then still in ignorance of Midwinter's
+return. Nobody had chanced to see the master, either on the
+stairs or in the hall; nobody had heard him ring the bell for
+breakfast, as usual. In brief, nobody knew anything about him,
+except what was obviously clear to all--that he was not in the
+house.
+
+Midwinter went out under the great portico. He stood at the head
+of the flight of steps considering in which direction he should
+set forth to look for his friend. Allan's unexpected absence
+added one more to the disquieting influences which still
+perplexed his mind. He was in the mood in which trifles irritate
+a man, and fancies are all-powerful to exalt or depress his
+spirits.
+
+The sky was cloudy; and the wind blew in puffs from the south;
+there was every prospect, to weather-wise eyes, of coming rain.
+While Midwinter was still hesitating, one of the grooms passed
+him on the drive below. The man proved, on being questioned, to
+be better informed about his master's movements than the servants
+indoors. He had seen Allan pass the stables more than an hour
+since, going out by the back way into the park with a nosegay in
+his hand.
+
+A nosegay in his hand? The nosegay hung incomprehensibly on
+Midwinter's mind as he walked round, on the chance of meeting
+Allan, to the back of the house. "What does the nosegay mean?" he
+asked himself, with an unintelligible sense of irritation, and a
+petulant kick at a stone that stood in his way.
+
+It meant that Allan had been following his impulses as usual. The
+one pleasant impression left on his mind after his interview with
+Pedgift Senior was the impression made by the lawyer's account of
+his conversation with Neelie in the park. The anxiety that he
+should not misjudge her, which the major's daughter had so
+earnestly expressed, placed her before Allan's eyes in an
+irresistibly attractive character--the character of the one
+person among all his neighbors who had some respect still left
+for his good opinion. Acutely sensible of his social isolation,
+now that there was no Midwinter to keep him company in the empty
+house, hungering and thirsting in his solitude for a kind word
+and a friendly look, he began to think more and more regretfully
+and more and more longingly of the bright young face so
+pleasantly associated with his first happiest days at Thorpe
+Ambrose. To be conscious of such a feeling as this was, with a
+character like Allan's, to act on it headlong, lead him where it
+might. He had gone out on the previous morning to look for Neelie
+with a peace-offering of flowers, but with no very distinct idea
+of what he should say to her if they met; and failing to find her
+on the scene of her customary walks, he had characteristically
+persisted the next morning in making a second attempt with
+another peace-offering on a larger scale. Still ignorant of his
+friend's return, he was now at some distance from the house,
+searching the park in a direction which he had not tried yet.
+
+After walking out a few hundred yards beyond the stables, and
+failing to discover any signs of Allan, Midwinter retraced his
+steps, and waited for his friend's return, pacing slowly to and
+fro on the little strip of garden ground at the back of the
+house.
+
+From time to time, as he passed it, he looked in absently at the
+room which had formerly been Mrs. Armadale's, which was now
+(through his interposition) habitually occupied by her son--the
+room with the Statuette on the bracket, and the French windows
+opening to the ground, which had once recalled to him the Second
+Vision of the Dream. The Shadow of the Man, which Allan had seen
+standing opposite to him at the long window; the view over a lawn
+and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass;
+the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the
+statue in fragments on the floor--these objects and events of the
+visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all
+superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as
+they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room
+again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think of the
+boat drifting away in the moonlight, and the night's imprisonment
+on the Wrecked Ship!
+
+Toward ten o'clock the well-remembered sound of Allan's voice
+became suddenly audible in the direction of the stables. In a
+moment more he was visible from the garden. His second morning's
+search for Neelie had ended to all appearance in a second defeat
+of his object. The nosegay was still in his hand; and he was
+resignedly making a present of it to one of the coachman's
+children.
+
+Midwinter impulsively took a step forward toward the stables, and
+abruptly checked his further progress.
+
+Conscious that his position toward his friend was altered already
+in relation to Miss Gwilt, the first sight of Allan filled his
+mind with a sudden distrust of the governess's influence over
+him, which was almost a distrust of himself. He knew that he had
+set forth from the moors on his return to Thorpe Ambrose with the
+resolution of acknowledging the passion that had mastered him,
+and of insisting, if necessary, on a second and a longer absence
+in the interests of the sacrifice which he was bent on making to
+the happiness of his friend. What had become of that resolution
+now? The discovery of Miss Gwilt's altered position, and the
+declaration that she had voluntarily made of her indifference to
+Allan, had scattered it to the winds. The first words with which
+he would have met his friend, if nothing had happened to him on
+the homeward way, were words already dismissed from his lips. He
+drew back as he felt it, and struggled, with an instinctive
+loyalty toward Allan, to free himself at the last moment from the
+influence of Miss Gwilt.
+
+Having disposed of his useless nosegay, Allan passed on into the
+garden, and the instant he entered it recognized Midwinter with a
+loud cry of surprise and delight.
+
+"Am I awake or dreaming?" he exclaimed, seizing his friend
+excitably by both hands." You dear old Midwinter, have you sprung
+up out of the ground, or have you  dropped from the clouds?"
+
+It was not till Midwinter had explained the mystery of his
+unexpec ted appearance in every particular that Allan could be
+prevailed on to say a word about himself. When he did speak, he
+shook his head ruefully, and subdued the hearty loudness of his
+voice, with a preliminary look round to see if the servants were
+within hearing.
+
+"I've learned to be cautious since you went away and left me,"
+said Allan. "My dear fellow, you haven't the least notion what
+things have happened, and what an awful scrape I'm in at this
+very moment!"
+
+"You are mistaken, Allan. I have heard more of what has happened
+than you suppose."
+
+"What! the dreadful mess I'm in with Miss Gwilt? the row with the
+major? the infernal scandal-mongering in the neighborhood? You
+don't mean to say--?"
+
+"Yes," interposed Midwinter, quietly; "I have heard of it all."
+
+"Good heavens! how? Did you stop at Thorpe Ambrose on your way
+back? Have you been in the coffee-room at the hotel? Have you met
+Pedgift? Have you dropped into the Reading Rooms, and seen what
+they call the freedom of the press in the town newspaper?"
+
+Midwinter paused before he answered, and looked up at the sky.
+The clouds had been gathering unnoticed over their heads, and the
+first rain-drops were beginning to fall.
+
+"Come in here," said Allan. "We'll go up to breakfast this way. "
+He led Midwinter through the open French window into his own
+sitting-room. The wind blew toward that side of the house, and
+the rain followed them in. Midwinter, who was last, turned and
+closed the window.
+
+Allan was too eager for the answer which the weather had
+interrupted to wait for it till they reached the breakfast-room.
+He stopped close at the window, and added two more to his string
+of questions.
+
+"How can you possibly have heard about me and Miss Gwilt?" he
+asked. "Who told you?"
+
+"Miss Gwilt herself," replied Midwinter, gravely.
+
+Allan's manner changed the moment the governess's name passed his
+friend's lips.
+
+"I wish you had heard my story first," he said. "Where did you
+meet with Miss Gwilt?"
+
+There was a momentary pause. They both stood still at the window,
+absorbed in the interest of the moment. They both forgot that
+their contemplated place of shelter from the rain had been the
+breakfast-room upstairs.
+
+"Before I answer your question," said Midwinter, a little
+constrainedly, "I want to ask you something, Allan, on my side.
+Is it really true that you are in some way concerned in Miss
+Gwilt's leaving Major Milroy's service?"
+
+There was another pause. The disturbance which had begun to
+appear in Allan's manner palpably increased.
+
+"It's rather a long story," he began. "I have been taken in,
+Midwinter. I've been imposed on by a person, who--I can't help
+saying it--who cheated me into promising what I oughtn't to have
+promised, and doing what I had better not have done. It isn't
+breaking my promise to tell you. I can trust in your discretion,
+can't I? You will never say a word, will you?"
+
+"Stop!" said Midwinter. "Don't trust me with any secrets which
+are not your own. If you have given a promise, don't trifle with
+it, even in speaking to such an intimate friend as I am." He laid
+his hand gently and kindly on Allan's shoulder. "I can't help
+seeing that I have made you a little uncomfortable," he went on.
+"I can't help seeing that my question is not so easy a one to
+answer as I had hoped and supposed. Shall we wait a little? Shall
+we go upstairs and breakfast first?"
+
+Allan was far too earnestly bent on presenting his conduct to his
+friend in the right aspect to heed Midwinter's suggestion. He
+spoke eagerly on the instant, without moving from the window.
+
+"My dear fellow, it's a perfectly easy question to answer.
+Only"--he hesitated--"only it requires what I'm a bad hand at: it
+requires an explanation."
+
+"Do you mean," asked Midwinter, more seriously, but not less
+gently than before, "that you must first justify yourself, and
+then answer my question?"
+
+"That's it!" said Allan, with an air of relief. "You're hit the
+right nail on the head, just as usual."
+
+Midwinter's face darkened for the first time. "I am sorry to hear
+it," he said, his voice sinking low, and his eyes dropping to the
+ground as he spoke.
+
+The rain was beginning to fall thickly. It swept across the
+garden, straight on the closed windows, and pattered heavily
+against the glass.
+
+"Sorry!" repeated Allan. "My dear fellow, you haven't heard the
+particulars yet. Wait till I explain the thing first."
+
+"You are a bad hand at explanations," said Midwinter, repeating
+Allan's own words. "Don't place yourself at a disadvantage. Don't
+explain it."
+
+Allan looked at him, in silent perplexity and surprise.
+
+"You are my friend--my best and dearest friend," Midwinter went
+on. "I can't bear to let you justify yourself to me as if I was
+your judge, or as if I doubted you." He looked up again at Allan
+frankly and kindly as he said those words. "Besides," he resumed,
+"I think, if I look into my memory, I can anticipate your
+explanation. We had a moment's talk, before I went away, about
+some very delicate questions which you proposed putting to Major
+Milroy. I remember I warned you; I remember I had my misgivings.
+Should I be guessing right if I guessed that those questions have
+been in some way the means of leading you into a false position?
+If it is true that you have been concerned in Miss Gwilt's
+leaving her situation, is it also true--is it only doing you
+justice to believe--that any mischief for which you are
+responsible has been mischief innocently done?"
+
+"Yes," said Allan, speaking, for the first time, a little
+constrainedly on his side. "It is only doing me justice to say
+that." He stopped and began drawing lines absently with his
+finger on the blurred surface of the window-pane. "You're not
+like other people, Midwinter," he resumed, suddenly, with an
+effort; "and I should have liked you to have heard the
+particulars all the same."
+
+"I will hear them if you desire it," returned Midwinter. "But I
+am satisfied, without another word, that you have not willingly
+been the means of depriving Miss Gwilt of her situation. If that
+is understood between you and me, I think we need say no more.
+Besides, I have another question to ask, of much greater
+importance--a question that has been forced on me by what I saw
+with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, last night."
+
+He stopped, recoiling in spite of himself. "Shall we go upstairs
+first?" he asked, abruptly, leading the way to the door, and
+trying to gain time.
+
+It was useless. Once again, the room which they were both free to
+leave, the room which one of them had twice tried to leave
+already, held them as if they were prisoners.
+
+Without answering, without even appearing to have heard
+Midwinter's proposal to go upstairs, Allan followed him
+mechanically as far as the opposite side of the window. There he
+stopped. "Midwinter!" he burst out, in a sudden panic of
+astonishment and alarm, "there seems to be something strange
+between us! You're not like yourself. What is it?"
+
+With his hand on the lock of the door, Midwinter turned, and
+looked back into the room. The moment had come. His haunting fear
+of doing his friend an injustice had shown itself in a restraint
+of word, look, and action which had been marked enough to force
+its way to Allan's notice. The one course left now, in the
+dearest interests of the friendship that united them, was to
+speak at once, and to speak boldly.
+
+"There's something strange between us," reiterated Allan. "For
+God's sake, what is it?"
+
+Midwinter took his hand from the door, and came down again to the
+window, fronting Allan. He occupied the place, of necessity,
+which Allan had just left. It was the side of the window on which
+the Statuette stood. The little figure, placed on its projecting
+bracket, was, close behind him on his right hand. No signs of
+change appeared in the stormy sky. The rain still swept slanting
+across the garden, and pattered heavily against the glass.
+
+"Give me your hand, Allan."
+
+Allan gave it, and Midwinter held it firmly while he spoke.
+
+"There is something strange between us," he said. "There is
+something to be set right which touches you nearly; and  it has
+not been set right yet. You asked me just now where I met with
+Miss Gwilt. I met with h er on my way back here, upon the
+high-road on the further side of the town. She entreated me to
+protect her from a man who was following and frightening her. I
+saw the scoundrel with my own eyes, and I should have laid hands
+on him, if Miss Gwilt herself had not stopped me. She gave a very
+strange reason for stopping me. She said I didn't know who his
+employer was."
+
+Allan's ruddy color suddenly deepened; he looked aside quickly
+through the window at the pouring rain. At the same moment their
+hands fell apart, and there was a pause of silence on either
+side. Midwinter was the first to speak again.
+
+"Later in the evening," he went on, "Miss Gwilt explained
+herself. She told me two things. She declared that the man whom I
+had seen following her was a hired spy. I was surprised, but I
+could not dispute it. She told me next, Allan--what I believe
+with my whole heart and soul to be a falsehood which has been
+imposed on her as the truth--she told me that the spy was in your
+employment!"
+
+Allan turned instantly from the window, and looked Midwinter full
+in the face again. "I must explain myself this time," he said,
+resolutely.
+
+The ashy paleness peculiar to him in moments of strong emotion
+began to show itself on Midwinter's cheeks.
+
+"More explanations!" he said, and drew back a step, with his eyes
+fixed in a sudden terror of inquiry on Allan's face.
+
+"You don't know what I know, Midwinter. You don't know that what
+I have done has been done with a good reason. And what is more, I
+have not trusted to myself--I have had good advice."
+
+"Did you hear what I said just now?" asked Midwinter,
+incredulously. "You can't--surely, you can't have been attending
+to me?"
+
+"I haven't missed a word," rejoined Allan. "I tell you again, you
+don't know what I know of Miss Gwilt. She has threatened Miss
+Milroy. Miss Milroy is in danger while her governess stops in
+this neighborhood."
+
+Midwinter dismissed the major's daughter from the conversation
+with a contemptuous gesture of his hand.
+
+"I don't want to hear about Miss, Milroy," he said. "Don't mix up
+Miss Milroy-- Good God, Allan, am I to understand that the spy
+set to watch Miss Gwilt was doing his vile work with your
+approval?"
+
+"Once for all, my dear fellow, will you, or will you not, let me
+explain?"
+
+"Explain!" cried Midwinter, his eyes aflame, and his hot Creole
+blood rushing crimson into his face. "Explain the employment of a
+spy? What! after having driven Miss Gwilt out of her situation by
+meddling with her private affairs, you meddle again by the vilest
+of all means--the means of a paid spy? You set a watch on the
+woman whom you yourself told me you loved, only a fortnight
+since--the woman you were thinking of as your wife! I don't
+believe it; I won't believe it. Is my head failing me? Is it
+Allan Armadale I am speaking to? Is it Allan Armadale's face
+looking at me? Stop! you are acting under some mistaken scruple.
+Some low fellow has crept into your confidence, and has done this
+in your name without telling you first."
+
+Allan controlled himself with admirable patience and admirable
+consideration for the temper of his friend. "If you persist in
+refusing to hear me," he said, "I must wait as well as I can till
+my turn comes."
+
+"Tell me you are a stranger to the employment of that man, and I
+will hear you willingly."
+
+"Suppose there should be a necessity, that you know nothing
+about, for employing him?"
+
+"I acknowledge no necessity for the cowardly persecution of a
+helpless woman."
+
+A momentary flush of irritation--momentary, and no more--passed
+over Allan's face. "You mightn't think her quite so helpless," he
+said, "if you knew the truth."
+
+"Are _you_ the man to tell me the truth?" retorted the other.
+"You who have refused to hear her in her own defense! You who
+have closed the doors of this house against her!"
+
+Allan still controlled himself, but the effort began at last to
+be visible.
+
+"I know your temper is a hot one," he said. "But for all that,
+your violence quite takes me by surprise. I can't account for it,
+unless"--he hesitated a moment, and then finished the sentence in
+his usual frank, outspoken way--"unless you are sweet yourself on
+Miss Gwilt."
+
+Those last words heaped fuel on the fire. They stripped the truth
+instantly of all concealments and disguises, and laid it bare to
+view. Allan's instinct had guessed, and the guiding influence
+stood revealed of Midwinter's interest in Miss Gwilt.
+
+"What right have you to say that?" he asked, with raised voice
+and threatening eyes.
+
+"I told _you,_" said Allan, simply, "when I thought I was sweet
+on her myself. Come! come! it's a little hard, I think, even if
+you are in love with her, to believe everything she tells you,
+and not to let me say a word. Is _that_ the way you decide
+between us?"
+
+"Yes, it is!" cried the other, infuriated by Allan's second
+allusion to Miss Gwilt. "When I am asked to choose between the
+employer of a spy and the victim of a spy, I side with the
+victim!"
+
+"Don't try me too hard, Midwinter, I have a temper to lose as
+well as you."
+
+He stopped, struggling with himself. The torture of passion in
+Midwinter's face, from which a less simple and less generous
+nature might have recoiled in horror, touched Allan suddenly with
+an artless distress, which, at that moment, was little less than
+sublime. He advanced, with his eyes moistening, and his hand held
+out. "You asked me for my hand just now," he said, "and I gave it
+you. Will you remember old times, and give me yours, before it's
+too late?"
+
+"No!" retorted Midwinter, furiously. "I may meet Miss Gwilt
+again, and I may want my hand free to deal with your spy!"
+
+He had drawn back along the wall as Allan advanced, until the
+bracket which supported the Statuette was before instead of
+behind him. In the madness of his passion he saw nothing but
+Allan's face confronting him. In the madness of his passion, he
+stretched out his right hand as he answered, and shook it
+threateningly in the air. It struck the forgotten projection of
+the bracket--and the next instant the Statuette lay in fragments
+on the floor.
+
+The rain drove slanting over flower-bed and lawn, and pattered
+heavily against the glass; and the two Armadales stood by the
+window, as the two Shadows had stood in the Second Vision of the
+Dream, with the wreck of the image between them.
+
+Allan stooped over the fragments of the little figure, and lifted
+them one by one from the floor.
+
+"Leave me," he said, without looking up, "or we shall both repent
+it."
+
+Without a word, Midwinter moved back slowly. He stood for the
+second time with his hand on the door, and looked his last at the
+room. The horror of the night on the Wreck had got him once more,
+and the flame of his passion was quenched in an instant.
+
+"The Dream!" he whispered, under his breath. "The Dream again!"
+
+The door was tried from the outside, and a servant appeared with
+a trivial message about the breakfast.
+
+Midwinter looked at the man with a blank, dreadful helplessness
+in his face. "Show me the way out," he said. "The place is dark,
+and the room turns round with me."
+
+The servant took him by the arm, and silently led him out.
+
+As the door closed on them, Allan picked up the last fragment of
+the broken figure. He sat down alone at the table, and hid his
+face in his hands. The self-control which he had bravely
+preserved under exasperation renewed again and again now failed
+him at last in the friendless solitude of his room, and, in the
+first bitterness of feeling that Midwinter had turned against him
+like the rest, he burst into tears.
+
+The moments followed each other, the slow time wore on. Little by
+little the signs of a new elemental disturbance began to show
+themselves in the summer storm. The shadow of a swiftly deepening
+darkness swept over the sky. The pattering of the rain lessened
+with the lessening wind. There was a momentary hush of stillness.
+Then on a sudden the rain poured down again like a cataract, and
+the low roll of thunder came up solemnly on the dying air.
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+SHE KNOWS THE TRUTH.
+
+1. _From Mr. Bashwood to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Thorpe Ambrose, July 20th, 1851.
+
+"DEAR MADAM--I received yesterday, by private messenger, your
+obliging note, in which you di rect me to communicate with you
+through the post only, as long as there is reason to believe that
+any visitors who may come to you are likely to be observed. May I
+be permitted to say that I look forward with respectful anxiety
+to the time when I shall again enjoy the only real happiness I
+have ever experienced--the happiness of personally addressing
+you?
+
+"In compliance with your desire that I should not allow this day
+(the Sunday) to pass without privately noticing what went on at
+the great house, I took the keys, and went this morning to the
+steward's office. I accounted for my appearance to the servants
+by informing them that I had work to do which it was important to
+complete in the shortest possible time. The same excuse would
+have done for Mr. Armadale if we had met, but no such meeting
+happened.
+
+"Although I was at Thorpe Ambrose in what I thought good time, I
+was too late to see or hear anything myself of a serious quarrel
+which appeared to have taken place, just before I arrived,
+between Mr. Armadale and Mr. Midwinter.
+
+"All the little information I can give you in this matter is
+derived from one of the servants. The man told me that he heard
+the voices of the two gentlemen loud in Mr. Armadale's
+sitting-room. He went in to announce breakfast shortly afterward,
+and found Mr. Midwinter in such a dreadful state of agitation
+that he had to be helped out of the room. The servant tried to
+take him upstairs to lie down and compose himself. He declined,
+saying he would wait a little first in one of the lower rooms,
+and begging that he might be left alone. The man had hardly got
+downstairs again when he heard the front door opened and closed.
+He ran back, and found that Mr. Midwinter was gone. The rain was
+pouring at the time, and thunder and lightning came soon
+afterward. Dreadful weather certainly to go out in. The servant
+thinks Mr. Midwinter's mind was unsettled. I sincerely hope not.
+Mr. Midwinter is one of the few people I have met with in the
+course of my life who have treated me kindly.
+
+"Hearing that Mr. Armadale still remained in the sitting-room, I
+went into the steward's office (which, as you may remember, is on
+the same side of the house), and left the door ajar, and set the
+window open, waiting and listening for anything that might
+happen. Dear madam, there was a time when I might have thought
+such a position in the house of my employer not a very becoming
+one. Let me hasten to assure you that this is far from being my
+feeling now. I glory in any position which makes me serviceable
+to you.
+
+"The state of the weather seemed hopelessly adverse to that
+renewal of intercourse between Mr. Armadale and Miss Milroy which
+you so confidently anticipate, and of which you are so anxious to
+be made aware. Strangely enough, however, it is actually in
+consequence of the state of the weather that I am now in a
+position to give you the very information you require. Mr.
+Armadale and Miss Milroy met about an hour since. The
+circumstances were as follows:
+
+"Just at the beginning of the thunder-storm, I saw one of the
+grooms run across from the stables, and heard him tap at his
+master's window. Mr. Armadale opened the window and asked what
+was the matter. The groom said he came with a message from the
+coachman's wife. She had seen from her room over the stables
+(which looks on to the park) Miss Milroy quite alone, standing
+for shelter under one of the trees. As that part of the park was
+at some distance from the major's cottage, she had thought that
+her master might wish to send and ask the young lady into the
+house--especially as she had placed herself, with a thunder-storm
+coming on, in what might turn out to be a very dangerous
+position.
+
+"The moment Mr. Armadale understood the man's message, he called
+for the water-proof things and the umbrellas, and ran out
+himself, instead of leaving it to the servants. In a little time
+he and the groom came back with Miss Milroy between them, as well
+protected as could be from the rain.
+
+"I ascertained from one of the women-servants, who had taken the
+young lady into a bedroom, and had supplied her with such dry
+things as she wanted, that Miss Milroy had been afterward shown
+into the drawing-room, and that Mr. Armadale was there with her.
+The only way of following your instructions, and finding out what
+passed between them, was to go round the house in the pelting
+rain, and get into the conservatory (which opens into the
+drawing-room) by the outer door. I hesitate at nothing, dear
+madam, in your service; I would cheerfully get wet every day, to
+please you. Besides, though I may at first sight be thought
+rather an elderly man, a wetting is of no very serious
+consequence to me. I assure you I am not so old as I look, and I
+am of a stronger constitution than appears.
+
+"It was impossible for me to get near enough in the conservatory
+to see what went on in the drawing-room, without the risk of
+being discovered. But most of the conversation reached me, except
+when they dropped their voices. This is the substance of what I
+heard:
+
+"I gathered that Miss Milroy had been prevailed on, against her
+will, to take refuge from the thunder-storm in Mr. Armadale's
+house. She said so, at least, and she gave two reasons. The first
+was that her father had forbidden all intercourse between the
+cottage and the great house. Mr. Armadale met this objection by
+declaring that her father had issued his orders under a total
+misconception of the truth, and by entreating her not to treat
+him as cruelly as the major had treated him. He entered, I
+suspect, into some explanations at this point, but as he dropped
+his voice I am unable to say what they were. His language, when I
+did hear it, was confused and ungrammatical. It seemed, however,
+to be quite intelligible enough to persuade Miss Milroy that her
+father had been acting under a mistaken impression of the
+circumstances. At least, I infer this; for, when I next heard the
+conversation, the young lady was driven back to her second
+objection to being in the house--which was, that Mr. Armadale had
+behaved very badly to her, and that he richly deserved that she
+should never speak to him again.
+
+"In this latter case, Mr. Armadale attempted no defense of any
+kind. He agreed with her that he had behaved badly; he agreed
+with her that he richly deserved she should never speak to him
+again. At the same time he implored her to remember that he had
+suffered his punishment already. He was disgraced in the
+neighborhood; and his dearest friend, his one intimate friend in
+the world, had that very morning turned against him like the
+rest. Far or near, there was not a living creature whom he was
+fond of to comfort him, or to say a friendly word to him. He was
+lonely and miserable, and his heart ached for a little
+kindness--and that was his only excuse for asking Miss Milroy to
+forget and forgive the past.
+
+"I must leave you, I fear, to judge for yourself of the effect of
+this on the young lady; for, though I tried hard, I failed to
+catch what she said. I am almost certain I heard her crying, and
+Mr. Armadale entreating her not to break his heart. They
+whispered a great deal, which aggravated me. I was afterward
+alarmed by Mr. Armadale coming out into the conservatory to pick
+some flowers. He did not come as far, fortunately, as the place
+where I was hidden; and he went in again into the drawing-room,
+and there was more talking (I suspect at close quarters), which
+to my great regret I again failed to catch. Pray forgive me for
+having so little to tell you. I can only add that, when the storm
+cleared off, Miss Milroy went away with the flowers in her hand,
+and with Mr. Armadale escorting her from the house. My own humble
+opinion is that he had a powerful friend at court, all through
+the interview, in the young lady's own liking for him.
+
+"This is all I can say at present, with the exception of one
+other thing I heard, which I blush to mention. But your word is
+law, and you have ordered me to have no concealments from you.
+
+"Their talk turned once, dear madam, on yourself. I think I heard
+the word 'creature' from Miss Milroy; and I am certain that Mr.
+Armadale, while acknowledging that he had once admired you, added
+that circumstances had since satisfied him of 'his folly.' I
+quote his own expression; it made me quite tremble with
+indignation. If I may be permitted to say so, the man who admires
+Miss Gwilt lives in Paradise. Respect, if nothing else, ought to
+have closed Mr. Armadale's lips. He is my employer, I know; but
+after his calling it an act of folly to admire you (though I _am_
+his deputy-steward), I utterly despise him.
+
+"Trusting that I may have been so happy as to give you
+satisfaction thus far, and earnestly desirous to deserve the
+honor of your continued confidence in me, I remain, dear madam,
+
+"Your grateful and devoted servant,
+
+"FELIX BASHWOOD."
+
+2. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Diana Street, Monday, July 21st.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--I trouble you with a few lines. They are written
+under a sense of the duty which I owe to myself, in our present
+position toward each other.
+
+"I am not at all satisfied with the tone of your last two
+letters; and I am still less pleased at your leaving me this
+morning without any letter at all--and this when we had arranged,
+in the doubtful state of our prospects, that I was to hear from
+you every day. I can only interpret your conduct in one way. I
+can only infer that matters at Thorpe Ambrose, having been all
+mismanaged, are all going wrong.
+
+"It is not my present object to reproach you, for why should I
+waste time, language, and paper? I merely wish to recall to your
+memory certain considerations which you appear to be disposed to
+overlook. Shall I put them in the plainest English? Yes; for,
+with all my faults, I am frankness personified.
+
+"In the first place, then, I have an interest in your becoming
+Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose as well as you. Secondly, I have
+provided you (to say nothing of good advice) with all the money
+needed to accomplish our object. Thirdly, I hold your notes of
+hand, at short dates, for every farthing so advanced. Fourthly
+and lastly, though I am indulgent to a fault in the capacity of a
+friend--in the capacity of a woman of business, my dear, I am not
+to be trifled with. That is all, Lydia, at least for the present.
+
+"Pray don't suppose I write in anger; I am only sorry and
+disheartened. My state of mind resembles David's. If I had the
+wings of a dove, I would flee away and be at rest.
+
+"Affectionately yours, MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+3. _From Mr. Bashwood to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Thorpe Ambrose, July 21st.
+
+"DEAR MADAM--You will probably receive these lines a few hours
+after my yesterday's communication reaches you. I posted my first
+letter last night, and I shall post this before noon to-day.
+
+"My present object in writing is to give you some more news from
+this house. I have the inexpressible happiness of announcing that
+Mr. Armadale's disgraceful intrusion on your privacy is at an
+end. The watch set on your actions is to be withdrawn this day. I
+write, dear madam, with the tears in my eyes--tears of joy,
+caused by feelings which I ventured to express in my previous
+letter (see first paragraph toward the end). Pardon me this
+personal reference. I can speak to you (I don't know why) so much
+more readily with my pen than with my tongue.
+
+"Let me try to compose myself, and proceed with my narrative.
+
+"I had just arrived at the steward's office this morning, when
+Mr. Pedgift the elder followed me to the great house to see Mr.
+Armadale by special appointment. It is needless to say that I at
+once suspended any little business there was to do, feeling that
+your interests might possibly be concerned. It is also most
+gratifying to add that this time circumstances favored me. I was
+able to stand under the open window and to hear the whole
+interview.
+
+"Mr. Armadale explained himself at once in the plainest terms. He
+gave orders that the person who had been hired to watch you
+should be instantly dismissed. On being asked to explain this
+sudden change of purpose, he did not conceal that it was owing to
+the effect produced on his mind by what had passed between Mr.
+Midwinter and himself on the previous day. Mr. Midwinter's
+language, cruelly unjust as it was, had nevertheless convinced
+him that no necessity whatever could excuse any proceeding so
+essentially base in itself as the employment of a spy, and on
+that conviction he was now determined to act.
+
+"But for your own positive directions to me to conceal nothing
+that passes here in which your name is concerned, I should really
+be ashamed to report what Mr. Pedgift said on his side. He has
+behaved kindly to me, I know. But if he was my own brother, I
+could never forgive him the tone in which he spoke of you, and
+the obstinacy with which he tried to make Mr. Armadale change his
+mind.
+
+"He began by attacking Mr. Midwinter. He declared that Mr.
+Midwinter's opinion was the very worst opinion that could be
+taken; for it was quite plain that you, dear madam, had twisted
+him round your finger. Producing no effect by this coarse
+suggestion (which nobody who knows you could for a moment
+believe), Mr. Pedgift next referred to Miss Milroy, and asked Mr.
+Armadale if he had given up all idea of protecting her. What this
+meant I cannot imagine. I can only report it for your private
+consideration. Mr. Armadale briefly answered that he had his own
+plan for protecting Miss Milroy, and that the circumstances were
+altered in that quarter, or words to a similar effect. Still Mr.
+Pedgift persisted. He went on (I blush to mention) from bad to
+worse. He tried to persuade Mr. Armadale next to bring an action
+at law against one or other of the persons who had been most
+strongly condemning his conduct in the neighborhood, for the
+purpose--I really hardly know how to write it--of getting you
+into the witness-box. And worse yet: when Mr. Armadale still said
+No, Mr. Pedgift, after having, as I suspected by the sound of his
+voice, been on the point of leaving the room, artfully came back,
+and proposed sending for a detective officer from London, simply
+to look at you. 'The whole of this mystery about Miss Gwilt's
+true character,' he said, 'may turn on a question of identity. It
+won't cost much to have a man down from London; and it's worth
+trying whether her face is or is not known at headquarters to the
+police.' I again and again assure you, dearest lady, that I only
+repeat those abominable words from a sense of duty toward
+yourself. I shook--I declare I shook from head to foot when I
+heard them.
+
+"To resume, for there is more to tell you.
+
+"Mr. Armadale (to his credit--I don't deny it, though I don't
+like him) still said No. He appeared to be getting irritated
+under Mr. Pedgift's persistence, and he spoke in a somewhat hasty
+way. 'You persuaded me on the last occasion when we talked about
+this,' he said, 'to do something that I have been since heartily
+ashamed of. You won't succeed in persuading me, Mr. Pedgift, a
+second time.' Those were his words. Mr. Pedgift took him up
+short; Mr. Pedgift seemed to be nettled on his side.
+
+" 'If that is the light in which you see my advice, sir,' he
+said, 'the less you have of it for the future, the better. Your
+character and position are publicly involved in this matter
+between yourself and Miss Gwilt; and you persist, at a most
+critical moment, in taking a course of your own, which I believe
+will end badly. After what I have already said and done in this
+very serious case, I can't consent to go on with it with both my
+hands tied, and I can't drop it with credit to myself while I
+remain publicly known as your solicitor. You leave me no
+alternative, sir, but to resign the honor of acting as your legal
+adviser.' 'I am sorry to hear it,' says Mr. Armadale, 'but I have
+suffered enough already through interfering with Miss Gwilt. I
+can't and won't stir any further in the matter.' '_You_ may not
+stir any further in it, sir,' says Mr. Pedgift, 'and _I_ shall
+not stir any further in it, for it has ceased to be a question of
+professional interest to me. But mark my words, Mr. Armadale, you
+are not at the end of this business yet. Some other person's
+curiosity may go on from the point where you (and I) have
+stopped; and some other person's hand may let the broad daylight
+in yet on Miss Gwilt.'
+
+"I report their language, d ear madam, almost word for word, I
+believe, as I heard it. It produced an indescribable impression
+on me; it filled me, I hardly know why, with quite a panic of
+alarm. I don't at all understand it, and I understand still less
+what happened immediately afterward.
+
+"Mr. Pedgift's voice, when he said those last words, sounded
+dreadfully close to me. He must have been speaking at the open
+window, and he must, I fear, have seen me under it. I had time,
+before he left the house, to get out quietly from among the
+laurels, but not to get back to the office. Accordingly I walked
+away along the drive toward the lodge, as if I was going on some
+errand connected with the steward's business.
+
+"Before long, Mr. Pedgift overtook me in his gig, and stopped.
+'So _you_ feel some curiosity about Miss Gwilt, do you?' he said.
+'Gratify your curiosity by all means; _I_ don't object to it.' I
+felt naturally nervous, but I managed to ask him what he meant.
+He didn't answer; he only looked down at me from the gig in a
+very odd manner, and laughed. 'I have known stranger things
+happen even than _that!_' he said to himself suddenly, and drove
+off.
+
+"I have ventured to trouble you with this last incident, though
+it may seem of no importance in your eyes, in the hope that your
+superior ability may be able to explain it. My own poor
+faculties, I confess, are quite unable to penetrate Mr. Pedgift's
+meaning. All I know is that he has no right to accuse me of any
+such impertinent feeling as curiosity in relation to a lady whom
+I ardently esteem and admire. I dare not put it in warmer words.
+
+"I have only to add that I am in a position to be of continued
+service to you here if you wish it. Mr. Armadale has just been
+into the office, and has told me briefly that, in Mr. Midwinter's
+continued absence, I am still to act as steward's deputy till
+further notice.
+
+"Believe me, dear madam, anxiously and devotedly yours, FELIX
+BASHWOOD."
+
+4. _From Allan Armadale to the Reverend Decimus Brock._
+
+Thorpe Ambrose, Tuesday.
+
+"MY DEAR MR. BROCK--I am in sad trouble. Midwinter has quarreled
+with me and left me; and my lawyer has quarreled with me and left
+me; and (except dear little Miss Milroy, who has forgiven me) all
+the neighbors have turned their backs on me. There is a good deal
+about 'me' in this, but I can't help it. I am very miserable
+alone in my own house. Do pray come and see me! You are the only
+old friend I have left, and I do long so to tell you about it.
+
+"N. B.--On my word of honor as a gentleman, I am not to blame.
+Yours affectionately,
+
+"ALLAN ARMADALE.
+
+"P. S.--I would come to you (for this place is grown quite
+hateful to me), but I have a reason for not going too far away
+from Miss Milroy just at present."
+
+5. _From Robert Stapleton to Allan Armadale, Esq._
+
+"Bascombe Rectory, Thursday Morning.
+
+"RESPECTED SIR--I see a letter in your writing, on the table
+along with the others, which I am sorry to say my master is not
+well enough to open. He is down with a sort of low fever. The
+doctor says it has been brought on with worry and anxiety which
+master was not strong enough to bear. This seems likely; for I
+was with him when he went to London last month, and what with his
+own business, and the business of looking after that person who
+afterward gave us the slip, he was worried and anxious all the
+time; and for the matter of that, so was I.
+
+"My master was talking of you a day or two since. He seemed
+unwilling that you should know of his illness, unless he got
+worse. But I think you ought to know of it. At the same time he
+is not worse; perhaps a trifle better. The doctor says he must be
+kept very quiet, and not agitated on any account. So be pleased
+to take no notice of this--I mean in the way of coming to the
+rectory. I have the doctor's orders to say it is not needful, and
+it would only upset my master in the state he is in now.
+
+"I will write again if you wish it. Please accept of my duty, and
+believe me to remain, sir, your humble servant,
+
+"ROBERT STAPLETON.
+
+"P. S.--The yacht has been rigged and repainted, waiting your
+orders. She looks beautiful."
+
+6. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Diana Street, July 24th.
+
+"MISS GWILT--The post hour has passed for three mornings
+following, and has brought me no answer to my letter. Are you
+purposely bent on insulting me? or have you left Thorpe Ambrose?
+In either case, I won't put up with your conduct any longer. The
+law shall bring you to book, if I can't.
+
+"Your first note of hand (for thirty pounds) falls due on Tuesday
+next, the 29th. If you had behaved with common consideration
+toward me, I would have let you renew it with pleasure. As things
+are, I shall have the note presented; and, if it is not paid, I
+shall instruct my man of business to take the usual course.
+
+"Yours, MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+7. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw._
+
+"5 Paradise Place, Thorpe Ambrose, July 25th.
+
+MRS. OLDERSHAW--The time of your man of business being, no doubt,
+of some value, I write a line to assist him when he takes the
+usual course. He will find me waiting to be arrested in the
+first-floor apartments, at the above address. In my present
+situation, and with my present thoughts, the best service you can
+possibly render me is to lock me up.
+
+"L. G."
+
+8. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt._
+
+"Diana Street, July 26th.
+
+"MY DARLING LYDIA--The longer I live in this wicked world the
+more plainly I see that women's own tempers are the worst enemies
+women have to contend with. What a truly regretful style of
+correspondence we have fallen into! What a sad want of
+self-restraint, my dear, on your side and on mine!
+
+"Let me, as the oldest in years, be the first to make the needful
+excuses, the first to blush for my own want of self-control. Your
+cruel neglect, Lydia, stung me into writing as I did. I am so
+sensitive to ill treatment, when it is inflicted on me by a
+person whom I love and admire; and, though turned sixty, I am
+still (unfortunately for myself) so young at heart. Accept my
+apologies for having made use of my pen, when I ought to have
+been content to take refuge in my pocket-handkerchief. Forgive
+your attached Maria for being still young at heart!
+
+"But oh, my dear--though I own I threatened you--how hard of you
+to take me at my word! How cruel of you, if your debt had been
+ten times what it is, to suppose me capable (whatever I might
+say) of the odious inhumanity of arresting my bosom friend!
+Heavens! have I deserved to be taken at my word in this
+unmercifully exact way, after the years of tender intimacy that
+have united us? But I don't complain; I only mourn over the
+frailty of our common human nature. Let us expect as little of
+each other as possible, my dear; we are both women, and we can't
+help it. I declare, when I reflect on the origin of our
+unfortunate sex--when I remember that we were all originally made
+of no better material than the rib of a man (and that rib of so
+little importance to its possessor that he never appears to have
+missed it afterward), I am quite astonished at our virtues, and
+not in the least surprised at our faults.
+
+"I am wandering a little; I am losing myself in serious thought,
+like that sweet character in Shakespeare who was 'fancy free.'
+One last word, dearest, to say that my longing for an answer to
+this proceeds entirely from my wish to hear from you again in
+your old friendly tone, and is quite unconnected with any
+curiosity to know what you are doing at Thorpe Ambrose--except
+such curiosity as you yourself might approve. Need I add that I
+beg you as a favor to _me_ to renew, on the customary terms? I
+refer to the little bill due on Tuesday next, and I venture to
+suggest that day six weeks.
+
+"Yours, with a truly motherly feeling,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+9. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw._
+
+"Paradise Place, July 27th.
+
+"I HAVE just got your last letter. The brazen impudence of it has
+roused me. I am to be treated like a child, am I?--to be
+threatened first, and then, if threatening fails, to be coaxed
+afterward? You _ shall_ coax me; you shall know, my motherly
+friend, the sort of child you have to deal with.
+
+"I had a reason, Mrs. Oldershaw, for the silence which has so
+seriously offended yo u. I was afraid--actually afraid--to let
+you into the secret of my thoughts. No such fear troubles me now.
+My only anxiety this morning is to make you my best
+acknowledgments for the manner in which you have written to me.
+After carefully considering it, I think the worst turn I can
+possibly do you is to tell you what you are burning to know. So
+here I am at my desk, bent on telling it. If you don't bitterly
+repent, when you are at the end of this letter, not having held
+to your first resolution, and locked me up out of harm's way
+while you had the chance, my name is not Lydia Gwilt.
+
+"Where did my last letter end? I don't remember, and don't care.
+Make it out as you can--I am not going back any further than this
+day week. That is to say, Sunday last.
+
+"There was a thunder-storm in the morning. It began to clear off
+toward noon. I didn't go out: I waited to see Midwinter or to
+hear from him. (Are you surprised at my not writing 'Mr.' before
+his name? We have got so familiar, my dear, that 'Mr.' would be
+quite out of place.) He had left me the evening before, under
+very interesting circumstances. I had told him that his friend
+Armadale was persecuting me by means of a hired spy. He had
+declined to believe it, and had gone straight to Thorpe Ambrose
+to clear the thing up. I let him kiss my hand before he went. He
+promised to come back the next day (the Sunday). I felt I had
+secured my influence over him; and I believed he would keep his
+word.
+
+"Well, the thunder passed away as I told you. The weather cleared
+up; the people walked out in their best clothes; the dinners came
+in from the bakers; I sat dreaming at my wretched little hired
+piano, nicely dressed and looking my best--and still no Midwinter
+appeared. It was late in the afternoon, and I was beginning to
+feel offended, when a letter was brought to me. It had been left
+by a strange messenger who went away again immediately. I looked
+at the letter. Midwinter at last--in writing, instead of in
+person. I began to feel more offended than ever; for, as I told
+you, I thought I had used my influence over him to better
+purpose.
+
+"The letter, when I read it, set my mind off in a new direction.
+It surprised, it puzzled, it interested me. I thought, and
+thought, and thought of him, all the rest of the day.
+
+"He began by asking my pardon for having doubted what I told him.
+Mr. Armadale's own lips had confirmed me. They had quarreled (as
+I had anticipated they would); and he, and the man who had once
+been his dearest friend on earth, had parted forever. So far, I
+was not surprised. I was amused by his telling me in his
+extravagant way that he and his friend were parted forever; and I
+rather wondered what he would think when I carried out my plan,
+and found my way into the great house on pretense of reconciling
+them.
+
+"But the second part of the letter set me thinking. Here it is,
+in his own words.
+
+
+" 'It is only by struggling against myself (and no language can
+say how hard the struggle has been) that I have decided on
+writing, instead of speaking to you. A merciless necessity claims
+my future life. I must leave Thorpe Ambrose, I must leave
+England, without hesitating, without stopping to look back. There
+are reasons--terrible reasons, which I have madly trifled
+with--for my never letting Mr. Armadale set eyes on me, or hear
+of me again, after what has happened between us. I must go, never
+more to live under the same roof, never more to breathe the same
+air with that man. I must hide myself from him under an assumed
+name; I must put the mountains and the seas between us. I have
+been warned as no human creature was ever warned before. I
+believe--I dare not tell you why--I believe that, if the
+fascination you have for me draws me back to you, fatal
+consequences will come of it to the man whose life has been so
+strangely mingled with your life and mine--the man who was once
+_your_ admirer and _my_ friend. And yet, feeling this, seeing it
+in my mind as plainly as I see the sky above my head, there is a
+weakness in me that still shrinks from the one imperative
+sacrifice of never seeing you again. I am fighting with it as a
+man fights with the strength of his despair. I have been near
+enough, not an hour since, to see the house where you live, and
+have forced myself away again out of sight of it. Can I force
+myself away further still, now that my letter is written--now,
+when the useless confession escapes me, and I own to loving you
+with the first love I have ever known, with the last love I shall
+ever feel? Let the coming time answer the question; I dare not
+write of it or think of it more.'
+
+
+"Those were the last words. In that strange way the letter ended.
+
+"I felt a perfect fever of curiosity to know what he meant. His
+loving me, of course, was easy enough to understand. But what did
+he mean by saying he had been warned? Why was he never to live
+under the same roof, never to breathe the same air again, with
+young Armadale? What sort of quarrel could it be which obliged
+one man to hide himself from another under an assumed name, and
+to put the mountains and the seas between them? Above all, if he
+came back, and let me fascinate him, why should it be fatal to
+the hateful lout who possesses the noble fortune and lives in the
+great house?
+
+"I never longed in my life as I longed to see him again and put
+these questions to him. I got quite superstitious about it as the
+day drew on. They gave me a sweet-bread and a cherry pudding for
+dinner. I actually tried if he would come back by the stones in
+the plate! He will, he won't, he will, he won't--and so on. It
+ended in 'He won't.' I rang the bell, and had the things taken
+away. I contradicted Destiny quite fiercely. I said, 'He will!'
+and I waited at home for him.
+
+"You don't know what a pleasure it is to me to give you all these
+little particulars. Count up--my bosom friend, my second
+mother--count up the money you have advanced on the chance of my
+becoming Mrs. Armadale, and then think of my feeling this
+breathless interest in another man. Oh, Mrs. Oldershaw, how
+intensely I enjoy the luxury of irritating you!
+
+"The day got on toward evening. I rang again, and sent down to
+borrow a railway time-table. What trains were there to take him
+away on Sunday? The national respect for the Sabbath stood my
+friend. There was only one train, which had started hours before
+he wrote to me. I went and consulted my glass. It paid me the
+compliment of contradicting the divination by cherry-stones. My
+glass said: 'Get behind the window-curtain; he won't pass the
+long lonely evening without coming back again to look at the
+house.' I got behind the window-curtain, and waited with his
+letter in my hand.
+
+"The dismal Sunday light faded, and the dismal Sunday quietness
+in the street grew quieter still. The dusk came, and I heard a
+step coming with it in the silence. My heart gave a little
+jump--only think of my having any heart left! I said to myself:
+'Midwinter!' And Midwinter it was.
+
+"When he came in sight he was walking slowly, stopping and
+hesitating at every two or three steps. My ugly little
+drawing-room window seemed to be beckoning him on in spite of
+himself. After waiting till I saw him come to a standstill, a
+little aside from the house, but still within view of my
+irresistible window, I put on my things and slipped out by the
+back way into the garden. The landlord and his family were at
+supper, and nobody saw me. I opened the door in the wall, and got
+round by the lane into the street. At that awkward moment I
+suddenly remembered, what I had forgotten before, the spy set to
+watch me, who was, no doubt, waiting somewhere in sight of the
+house.
+
+"It was necessary to get time to think, and it was (in my state
+of mind) impossible to let Midwinter go without speaking to him.
+In great difficulties you generally decide at once, if you decide
+at all. I decided to make an appointment with him for the next
+evening, and to consider in the interval how to manage the
+interview so that it might escape observation. This, as I felt at
+the time, was leaving my own curiosity free to torment me for
+four-and-twenty mortal hours; but what other choice had I? It was
+as good as giving u p being mistress of Thorpe Ambrose
+altogether, to come to a private understanding with Midwinter in
+the sight and possibly in the hearing of Armadale's spy.
+
+"Finding an old letter of yours in my pocket, I drew back into
+the lane, and wrote on the blank leaf, with the little pencil
+that hangs at my watch-chain: 'I must and will speak to you. It
+is impossible tonight, but be in the street tomorrow at this
+time, and leave me afterward forever, if you like. When you have
+read this, overtake me, and say as you pass, without stopping or
+looking round, "Yes, I promise." '
+
+"I folded up the paper, and came on him suddenly from behind. As
+he started and turned round, I put the note into his hand,
+pressed his hand, and passed on. Before I had taken ten steps I
+heard him behind me. I can't say he didn't look round--I saw his
+big black eyes, bright and glittering in the dusk, devour me from
+head to foot in a moment; but otherwise he did what I told him.
+'I can deny you nothing,' he whispered; 'I promise.' He went on
+and left me. I couldn't help thinking at the time how that brute
+and booby Armadale would have spoiled everything in the same
+situation.
+
+"I tried hard all night to think of a way of making our interview
+of the next evening safe from discovery, and tried in vain. Even
+as early as this, I began to feel as if Midwinter's letter had,
+in some unaccountable manner, stupefied me.
+
+"Monday morning made matters worse. News came from my faithful
+ally, Mr. Bashwood, that Miss Milroy and Armadale had met and
+become friends again. You may fancy the state I was in! An hour
+or two later there came more news from Mr. Bashwood--good news
+this time. The mischievous idiot at Thorpe Ambrose had shown
+sense enough at last to be ashamed of himself. He had decided on
+withdrawing the spy that very day, and he and his lawyer had
+quarreled in consequence.
+
+"So here was the obstacle which I was too stupid to remove for
+myself obligingly removed for me! No more need to fret about the
+coming interview with Midwinter; and plenty of time to consider
+my next proceedings, now that Miss Milroy and her precious swain
+had come together again. Would you believe it, the letter, or the
+man himself (I don't know which), had taken such a hold on me
+that, though I tried and tried, I could think of nothing else;
+and this when I had every reason to fear that Miss Milroy was in
+a fair way of changing her name to Armadale, and when I knew that
+my heavy debt of obligation to her was not paid yet? Was there
+ever such perversity? I can't account for it; can you?
+
+"The dusk of the evening came at last. I looked out of the
+window--and there he was!
+
+"I joined him at once; the people of the house, as before, being
+too much absorbed in their eating and drinking to notice anything
+else. 'We mustn't be seen together here,' I whispered. 'I must go
+on first, and you must follow me.'
+
+"He said nothing in the way of reply. What was going on in his
+mind I can't pretend to guess; but, after coming to his
+appointment, he actually hung back as if he was half inclined to
+go away again.
+
+" 'You look as if you were afraid of me,' I said.
+
+" 'I _am_ afraid of you,' he answered--'of you, and of myself.'
+
+"It was not encouraging; it was not complimentary. But I was in
+such a frenzy of curiosity by this time that, if he had been
+ruder still, I should have taken no notice of it. I led the way a
+few steps toward the new buildings, and stopped and looked round
+after him.
+
+" 'Must I ask it of you as a favor,' I said, 'after your giving
+me your promise, and after such a letter as you have written to
+me?'
+
+"Something suddenly changed him; he was at my side in an instant.
+'I beg your pardon, Miss Gwilt; lead the way where you please.'
+He dropped back a little after that answer, and I heard him say
+to himself, 'What _is_ to be _will_ be. What have I to do with
+it, and what has she?'
+
+"It could hardly have been the words, for I didn't understand
+them--it must have been the tone he spoke in, I suppose, that
+made me feel a momentary tremor. I was half inclined, without the
+ghost of a reason for it, to wish him good-night, and go in
+again. Not much like me, you will say. Not much, indeed! It
+didn't last a moment. Your darling Lydia soon came to her senses
+again.
+
+"I led the way toward the unfinished cottages, and the country
+beyond. It would have been much more to my taste to have had him
+into the house, and have talked to him in the light of the
+candles. But I had risked it once already; and in this
+scandal-mongering place, and in my critical position, I was
+afraid to risk it again. The garden was not to be thought of
+either, for the landlord smokes his pipe there after his supper.
+There was no alternative but to take him away from the town.
+
+"From time to time, I looked back as I went on. There he was,
+always at the same distance, dim and ghost-like in the dusk,
+silently following me.
+
+"I must leave off for a little while. The church bells have
+broken out, and the jangling of them drives me mad. In these
+days, when we have all got watches and clocks, why are bells
+wanted to remind us when the service begins? We don't require to
+be rung into the theater. How excessively discreditable to the
+clergy to be obliged to ring us into the church!
+
+                              ----------
+
+"They have rung the congregation in at last; and 1 can take up my
+pen, and go on again.
+
+"I was a little in doubt where to lead him to. The high-road was
+on one side of me; but, empty as it looked, somebody might be
+passing when we least expected It. The other way was through the
+coppice. I led him through the coppice.
+
+"At the outskirts of the trees, on the other side, there was a
+dip in the ground with some felled timber lying on it, and a
+little pool beyond, still and white and shining in the twilight.
+The long grazing-grounds rose over its further shore, with the
+mist thickening on them, and a dim black line far away of cattle
+in slow procession going home. There wasn't a living creature
+near; there wasn't a sound to be heard. I sat down on one of the
+felled trees and looked back for him. 'Come,' I said,
+softly--'come and sit by me here.'
+
+"Why am I so particular about all this? I hardly know. The place
+made an unaccountably vivid impression on me, and I can't help
+writing about it. If I end badly--suppose we say on the
+scaffold?--I believe the last thing I shall see, before the
+hangman pulls the drop, will be the little shining pool, and the
+long, misty grazing-grounds, and the cattle winding dimly home in
+the thickening night. Don't be alarmed, you worthy creature! My
+fancies play me strange tricks sometimes; and there is a little
+of last night's laudanum, I dare say, in this part of my letter.
+
+"He came--in the strangest silent way, like a man walking in his
+sleep--he came and sat down by me. Either the night was very
+close, or I was by this time literally in a fever: I couldn't
+bear my bonnet on; I couldn't bear my gloves. The want to look at
+him, and see what his singular silence meant, and the
+impossibility of doing it in the darkening light, irritated my
+nerves, till I thought I should have screamed. I took his hand,
+to try if that would help me. It was burning hot; and it closed
+instantly on mine--you know how. Silence, after _that,_ was not
+to be thought of. The one safe way was to begin talking to him at
+once.
+
+" 'Don't despise me,' I said. 'I am obliged to bring you to this
+lonely place; I should lose my character if we were seen
+together.'
+
+"I waited a little. His hand warned me once more not to let the
+silence continue. I determined to _make_ him speak to me this
+time.
+
+" 'You have interested me, and frightened me,' I went on. 'You
+have written me a very strange letter. I must know what it
+means.'
+
+" 'It is too late to ask. _You_ have taken the way, and _I_ have
+taken the way, from which there is no turning back.' He made that
+strange answer in a tone that was quite new to me--a tone that
+made me even more uneasy than his silence had made me the moment
+before. 'Too late,' he repeated--'too late! There is only one
+question to ask me now.'
+
+" 'What is it?'
+
+"As I said the words, a sudden trembling passed from his hand to
+m ine, and told me instantly that I had better have held my
+tongue. Before I could move, before I could think, he had me in
+his arms. 'Ask me if I love you,' he whispered. At the same
+moment his head sank on my bosom; and some unutterable torture
+that was in him burst its way out, as it does with _us,_ in a
+passion of sobs and tears.
+
+"My first impulse was the impulse of a fool. I was on the point
+of making our usual protest and defending myself in our usual
+way. Luckily or unluckily, I don't know which, I have lost the
+fine edge of the sensitiveness of youth; and I checked the first
+movement of my hands, and the first word on my lips. Oh, dear,
+how old I felt, while he was sobbing his heart out on my breast!
+How I thought of the time when he might have possessed himself of
+my love! All he had possessed himself of now was--my waist.
+
+"I wonder whether I pitied him? It doesn't matter if I did. At
+any rate, my hand lifted itself somehow, and my fingers twined
+themselves softly in his hair. Horrible recollections came back
+to me of other times, and made me shudder as I touched him. And
+yet I did it. What fools women are!
+
+" 'I won't reproach you,' I said, gently. 'I won't say this is a
+cruel advantage to take of me, in such a position as mine. You
+are dreadfully agitated; I will let you wait a little and compose
+yourself.'
+
+"Having got as far as that, I stopped to consider how I should
+put the questions to him that I was burning to ask. But I was too
+confused, I suppose, or perhaps too impatient to consider. I let
+out what was uppermost in my mind, in the words that came first.
+
+" 'I don't believe you love me,' I said. 'You write strange
+things to me; you frighten me with mysteries. What did you mean
+by saying in your letter that it would be fatal to Mr. Armadale
+if you came back to me? What danger can there be to Mr.
+Armadale--?'
+
+"Before I could finish the question, he suddenly lifted his head
+and unclasped his arms. I had apparently touched some painful
+subject which recalled him to himself. Instead of my shrinking
+from _him,_ it was he who shrank from _me._ I felt offended with
+him; why, I don't know--but offended I was; and I thanked him
+with my bitterest emphasis for remembering what was due to me,
+_at last!_
+
+" 'Do you believe in Dreams?' he burst out, in the most strangely
+abrupt manner, without taking the slightest notice of what I had
+said to him. 'Tell me,' he went on, without allowing me time to
+answer, 'were you, or was any relation of yours, ever connected
+with Allan Armadale's father or mother? Were you, or was anybody
+belonging to you, ever in the island of Madeira? '
+
+"Conceive my astonishment, if you can. I turned cold. In an
+instant I turned cold all over. He was plainly in the secret of
+what had happened when I was in Mrs. Armadale's service in
+Madeira--in all probability before he was born! That was
+startling enough of itself. And he had evidently some reason of
+his own for trying to connect _me_ with those events--which was
+more startling still.
+
+" 'No,' I said, as soon as I could trust myself to speak. 'I know
+nothing of his father or mother.'
+
+" 'And nothing of the island of Madeira?'
+
+" 'Nothing of the island of Madeira.'
+
+"He turned his head away, and began talking to himself.
+
+" 'Strange!' he said. 'As certainly as I was in the Shadow's
+place at the window, _she_ was in the Shadow's place at the
+pool!'
+
+"Under other circumstances, his extraordinary behavior might have
+alarmed me. But after his question about Madeira, there was some
+greater fear in me which kept all common alarm at a distance. I
+don't think I ever determined on anything in my life as I
+determined on finding out how he had got his information, and who
+he really was. It was quite plain to me that I had roused some
+hidden feeling in him by my question about Armadale, which was as
+strong in its way as his feeling for _me._ What had become of my
+influence over him?
+
+"I couldn't imagine what had become of it; but I could and did
+set to work to make him feel it again.
+
+" 'Don't treat me cruelly,' I said; 'I didn't treat _you_ cruelly
+just now. Oh, Mr. Midwinter, it's so lonely, it's so dark--don't
+frighten me!'
+
+" 'Frighten you!' He was close to me again in a moment. 'Frighten
+you!' He repeated the word with as much astonishment as if I had
+woke him from a dream, and charged him with something that he had
+said in his sleep.
+
+"It was on the tip of my tongue, finding how I had surprised him,
+to take him while he was off his guard, and to ask why my
+question about Armadale had produced such a change in his
+behavior to me. But after what had happened already, I was afraid
+to risk returning to the subject too soon. Something or
+other--what they call an instinct, I dare say--warned me to let
+Armadale alone for the present, and to talk to him first about
+himself. As I told you in one of my early letters, I had noticed
+signs and tokens in his manner and appearance which convinced me,
+young as he was, that he had done something or suffered something
+out of the common in his past life. I had asked myself more and
+more suspiciously every time I saw him whether he was what he
+appeared to be; and first and foremost among my other doubts was
+a doubt whether he was passing among us by his real name. Having
+secrets to keep about my own past life, and having gone myself in
+other days by more than one assumed name, I suppose I am all the
+readier to suspect other people when I find something mysterious
+about them. Any way, having the suspicion in my mind, I
+determined to startle him, as he had startled me, by an
+unexpected question on my side--a question about his name.
+
+"While I was thinking, he was thinking; and, as it soon appeared,
+of what I had just said to him. 'I am so grieved to have
+frightened you,' he whispered, with that gentleness and humility
+which we all so heartily despise in a man when he speaks to other
+women, and which we all so dearly like when he speaks to
+ourselves. 'I hardly know what I have been saying,' he went on;
+'my mind is miserably disturbed. Pray forgive me, if you can; I
+am not myself to-night.'
+
+" 'I am not angry,' I said; 'I have nothing to forgive. We are
+both imprudent; we are both unhappy.' I laid my head on his
+shoulder. 'Do you really love me?' I asked him, softly, in a
+whisper.
+
+"His arm stole round me again; and I felt the quick beat of his
+heart get quicker and quicker. 'If you only knew!' he whispered
+back; 'if you only knew--' He could say no more. I felt his face
+bending toward mine, and dropped my head lower, and stopped him
+in the very act of kissing me.
+
+" 'No,' I said; 'I am only a woman who has taken your fancy. You
+are treating me as if I was your promised wife.'
+
+" '_Be_ my promised wife!' he whispered, eagerly, and tried to
+raise my head. I kept it down. The horror of these old
+remembrances that you know of came back and made me tremble a
+little when he asked me to be his wife. I don't think I was
+actually faint; but something like faintness made me close my
+eyes. The moment I shut them, the darkness seemed to open as if
+lightning had split it; and the ghosts of _those other men_ rose
+in the horrid gap, and looked at me.
+
+" 'Speak to me!' he whispered, tenderly. 'My darling, my angel,
+speak to me!'
+
+"His voice helped me to recover myself. I had just sense enough
+left to remember that the time was passing, and that I had not
+put my question to him yet about his name.
+
+" 'Suppose I felt for you as you feel for me?' I said. 'Suppose I
+loved you dearly enough to trust you with the happiness of all my
+life to come?'
+
+"I paused a moment to get my breath. It was unbearably still and
+close; the air seemed to have died when the night came.
+
+" 'Would you be marrying me honorably,' I went on, 'if you
+married me in your present name?'
+
+"His arm dropped from my waist, and I felt him give one great
+start. After that he sat by me, still, and cold, and silent, as
+if my question had struck him dumb. I put my arm round his neck,
+and lifted my head again on his shoulder. Whatever the spell was
+I had laid on him, my coming closer in that way seemed to break
+it.
+
+" 'Who told you?' He stopped. 'No,' he went on, 'nobody can have
+told you. What ma de you suspect--?' He stopped again.
+
+" 'Nobody told me,' I said; 'and I don't know what made me
+suspect. Women have strange fancies sometimes. Is Midwinter
+really your name?'
+
+" 'I can't deceive you,' he answered, after another interval of
+silence; 'Midwinter is _not_ really my name.'
+
+"I nestled a little closer to him.
+
+" 'What _is_ your name?' I asked.
+
+"He hesitated.
+
+"I lifted my face till my cheek just touched his. I persisted,
+with my lips close at his ear:
+
+" 'What, no confidence in me even yet! No confidence in the woman
+who has almost confessed she loves you--who has almost consented
+to be your wife!'
+
+"He turned his face to mine. For the second time he tried to kiss
+me, and for the second time I stopped him.
+
+"'If I tell you my name,' he said, 'I must tell you more.'
+
+"I let my cheek touch his again.
+
+" 'Why not?' I said. 'How can I love a man--much less marry
+him--if he keeps himself a stranger to me?'
+
+"There was no answering that, as I thought. But he did answer it.
+
+" 'It is a dreadful story,' he said. 'It may darken all your
+life, if you know it, as it has darkened mine.'
+
+"I put my other arm round him, and persisted. 'Tell it me; I'm
+not afraid; tell it me.'
+
+"He began to yield to my other arm.
+
+" 'Will you keep it a sacred secret?' he said. 'Never to be
+breathed--never to be known but to you and me?'
+
+"I promised him it should be a secret. I waited in a perfect
+frenzy of expectation. Twice he tried to begin, and twice his
+courage failed him.
+
+" 'I can't!' he broke out in a wild, helpless way. I can't tell
+it!'
+
+"My curiosity, or more likely my temper, got beyond all control.
+He had irritated me till I was reckless what I said or what I
+did. I suddenly clasped him close, and pressed my lips to his. 'I
+love you!' I whispered in a kiss. '_Now_ will you tell me?'
+
+"For the moment he was speechless. I don't know whether I did it
+purposely to drive him wild. I don't know whether I did it
+involuntarily in a burst of rage. Nothing is certain but that I
+interpreted his silence the wrong way. I pushed him back from me
+in a fury the instant after I had kissed him. 'I hate you!' I
+said. 'You have maddened me into forgetting myself. Leave me. I
+don't care for the darkness. Leave me instantly, and never see me
+again!'
+
+"He caught me by the hand and stopped me. He spoke in a new
+voice; he suddenly _commanded,_ as only men can.
+
+" 'Sit down,' he said. 'You have given me back my courage--you
+shall know who I am.'
+
+"In the silence and the darkness all round us, I obeyed him, and
+sat down.
+
+"In the silence and the darkness all round us, he took me in his
+arms again, and told me who he was.
+
+                              ----------
+
+"Shall I trust you with his story? Shall I tell you his real
+name? Shall I show you, as I threatened, the thoughts that have
+grown out of my interview with him and out of all that has
+happened to me since that time?
+
+"Or shall I keep his secret as I promised? and keep my own secret
+too, by bringing this weary, long letter to an end at the very
+moment when you are burning to hear more!
+
+"Those are serious questions, Mrs. Oldershaw--more serious than
+you suppose. I have had time to calm down, and I begin to see,
+what I failed to see when I first took up my pen to write to you,
+the wisdom of looking at consequences. Have I frightened myself
+in trying to frighten _you?_ It is possible--strange as it may
+seem, it is really possible.
+
+"I have been at the window for the last minute or two, thinking.
+There is plenty of time for thinking before the post leaves. The
+people are only now coming out of church.
+
+"I have settled to put my letter on one side, and to take a look
+at my diary. In plainer words I must see what I risk if I decide
+on trusting you; and my diary will show me what my head is too
+weary to calculate without help. I have written the story of my
+days (and sometimes the story of my nights) much more regularly
+than usual for the last week, having reasons of my own for being
+particularly careful in this respect under present circumstances.
+If I end in doing what it is now in my mind to do, it would be
+madness to trust to my memory. The smallest forgetfulness of the
+slightest event that has happened from the night of my interview
+with Midwinter to the present time might be utter ruin to me.
+
+" 'Utter ruin to her!' you will say. 'What kind of ruin does she
+mean?'
+
+"Wait a little, till I have asked my diary whether I can safely
+tell you."
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
+
+"July 21st, Monday night, eleven o'clock.--Midwinter has just
+left me. We parted by my desire at the path out of the coppice;
+he going his way to the hotel, and I going mine to my lodgings.
+
+"I have managed to avoid making another appointment with him by
+arranging to write to him to-morrow morning. This gives me the
+night's interval to compose myself, and to coax my mind back (if
+I can) to my own affairs. Will the night pass, and the morning
+find me still thinking of the Letter that came to him from his
+father's deathbed? of the night he watched through on the Wrecked
+Ship; and, more than all, of the first breathless moment when he
+told me his real Name?
+
+"Would it help me to shake off these impressions, I wonder, if I
+made the effort of writing them down? There would be no danger,
+in that case, of my forgetting anything important. And perhaps,
+after all, it may be the fear of forgetting something which I
+ought to remember that keeps this story of Midwinter's weighing
+as it does on my mind. At any rate, the experiment is worth
+trying. In my present situation I _must_ be free to think of
+other things, or I shall never find my way through all the
+difficulties at Thorpe Ambrose that are still to come.
+
+"Let me think. What _haunts_ me, to begin with?
+
+"The Names haunt me. I keep saying and saying to myself: Both
+alike!--Christian name and surname both alike! A light-haired
+Allan Armadale, whom I have long since known of, and who is the
+son of my old mistress. A dark-haired Allan Armadale, whom I only
+know of now, and who is only known to others under the name of
+Ozias Midwinter. Stranger still; it is not relationship, it is
+not chance, that has made them namesakes. The father of the light
+Armadale was the man who was _born_ to the family name, and who
+lost the family inheritance. The father of the dark Armadale was
+the man who _took_ the name, on condition of getting the
+inheritance--and who got it.
+
+"So there are two of them--I can't help thinking of it--both
+unmarried. The light-haired Armadale, who offers to the woman who
+can secure him, eight thousand a year while he lives; who leaves
+her twelve hundred a year when he dies; who must and shall marry
+me for those two golden reasons; and whom I hate and loathe as I
+never hated and loathed a man yet. And the dark-haired Armadale,
+who has a poor little income, which might perhaps pay his wife's
+milliner, if his wife was careful; who has just left me,
+persuaded that I mean to marry him; and whom--well, whom I
+_might_ have loved once, before I was the woman I am now.
+
+"And Allan the Fair doesn't know he has a namesake. And Allan the
+Dark has kept the secret from everybody but the Somersetshire
+clergyman (whose discretion he can depend on) and myself.
+
+"And there are two Allan Armadales--two Allan Armadales--two
+Allan Armadales. There! three is a lucky number. Haunt me again,
+after that, if you can!
+
+"What next? The murder in the timber ship? No; the murder is a
+good reason why the dark Armadale, whose father committed it,
+should keep his secret from the fair Armadale, whose father was
+killed; but it doesn't concern _me._ I remember there was a
+suspicion in Madeira at the time of something wrong. _Was_ it
+wrong? Was the man who had been tricked out of his wife to blame
+for shutting the cabin door, and leaving the man who had tricked
+him to drown in the wreck? Yes; the woman wasn't worth it.
+
+"What am I sure of that really concerns myself?
+
+"I am sure of one very important thing. I am sure that
+Midwinter--I must call him by his ugly false name, or I may
+confuse the two Armadales before I have done--I am sure that
+Midwinter is perfectly ignorant that I and the little imp of
+twelve years old who waited o n Mrs. Armadale in Madeira, and
+copied the letters that were supposed to arrive from the West
+Indies, are one and the same. There are not many girls of twelve
+who could have imitated a man's handwriting, and held their
+tongues about it afterward, as I did; but that doesn't matter
+now. What does matter is that Midwinter's belief in the Dream is
+Midwinter's only reason for trying to connect me with Allan
+Armadale, by associating me with Allan Armadale's father and
+mother. I asked him if he actually thought me old enough to have
+known either of them. And he said No, poor fellow, in the most
+innocent, bewildered way. Would he say No if he saw me now? Shall
+I turn to the glass and see if I look my five-and-thirty years?
+or shall I go on writing? I will go on writing.
+
+"There is one thing more that haunts me almost as obstinately as
+the Names.
+
+"I wonder whether I am right in relying on Midwinter'
+superstition (as I do) to help me in keeping him at arms-length.
+After having let the excitement of the moment hurry me into
+saying more than I need have said, he is certain to press me; he
+is certain to come back, with a man's hateful selfishness and
+impatience in such things, to the question of marrying me. Will
+the Dream help me to check him? After alternately believing and
+disbelieving in it, he has got, by his own confession, to
+believing in it again. Can I say I believe in it, too? I have
+better reasons for doing so than he knows of. I am not only the
+person who helped Mrs. Armadale's marriage by helping her to
+impose on her own father: I am the woman who tried to drown
+herself; the woman who started the series of accidents which put
+young Armadale in possession of his fortune; the woman who has
+come Thorpe Ambrose to marry him for his fortune, now he has got
+it; and more extraordinary still, the woman who stood in the
+Shadow's place at the pool! These may be coincidences, but they
+are strange coincidences. I declare I begin to fancy that _I_
+believe in the Dream too!
+
+"Suppose I say to him, 'I think as you think. I say what you said
+in your letter to me, Let us part before the harm is done. Leave
+me before the Third Vision of the Dream comes true. Leave me, and
+put the mountains and the seas between you and the man who bears
+your name!'
+
+"Suppose, on the other side, that his love for me makes him
+reckless of everything else? Suppose he says those desperate
+words again, which I understand now: What _is_ to be, _will_ be.
+What have I to do with it, and what has she?' Suppose--suppose--
+
+"I won't write any more. I hate writing. It doesn't relieve
+me--it makes me worse. I'm further from being able to think of
+all that I _must_ think of than I was when I sat down. It is past
+midnight. To-morrow has come already; and here I am as helpless
+as the stupidest woman living! Bed is the only fit place for me.
+
+"Bed? If it was ten years since, instead of to-day; and if I had
+married Midwinter for love, I might be going to bed now with
+nothing heavier on my mind than a visit on tiptoe to the nursery,
+and a last look at night to see if my children were sleeping
+quietly in their cribs. I wonder whether I should have loved my
+children if I had ever had any? Perhaps, yes--perhaps, no. It
+doesn't matter.
+
+
+"Tuesday morning, ten o'clock.--Who was the man who invented
+laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart whoever he was.
+If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose
+comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises,
+what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of
+oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed; I have written a
+perfect little letter to Midwinter; I have drunk my nice cup of
+tea, with a real relish of it; I have dawdled over my morning
+toilet with an exquisite sense of relief--and all through the
+modest little bottle of Drops, which I see on my bedroom
+chimney-piece at this moment. 'Drops,' you are a darling! If I
+love nothing else, I love _you._
+
+"My letter to Midwinter has been sent through the post; and I
+have told him to reply to me in the same manner.
+
+"I feel no anxiety about his answer--he can only answer in one
+way. I have asked for a little time to consider, because my
+family circumstances require some consideration, in his interests
+as well as in mine. I have engaged to tell him what those
+circumstances are (what shall I say, I wonder?) when we next
+meet; and I have requested him in the meantime to keep all that
+has passed between us a secret for the present. As to what he is
+to do himself in the interval while I am supposed to be
+considering, I have left it to his own discretion--merely
+reminding him that his attempting to see me again (while our
+positions toward each other cannot be openly avowed) might injure
+my reputation. I have offered to write to him if he wishes it;
+and I have ended by promising to make the interval of our
+necessary separation as short as I can.
+
+"This sort of plain, unaffected letter--which I might have
+written to him last night, if his story had not been running in
+my head as it did--has one defect, I know. It certainly keeps him
+out of the way, while I am casting my net, and catching my gold
+fish at the great house for the second time; but it also leaves
+an awkward day of reckoning to come with Midwinter if I succeed.
+How am I to manage him? What am I to do? I ought to face those
+two questions as boldly as usual; but somehow my courage seems to
+fail me, and I don't quite fancy meeting _that_ difficulty, till
+the time comes when it _must_ be met. Shall I confess to my diary
+that I am sorry for Midwinter, and that I shrink a little from
+thinking of the day when he hears that I am going to be mistress
+at the great house?
+
+"But I am not mistress yet; and I can't take a step in the
+direction of the great house till I have got the answer to my
+letter, and till I know that Midwinter is out of the way.
+Patience! patience! I must go and forget myself at my piano.
+There is the 'Moonlight Sonata' open, and tempting me, on the
+music-stand. Have I nerve enough to play it, I wonder? Or will it
+set me shuddering with the mystery and terror of it, as it did
+the other day?
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--I have got his answer. The slightest request I
+can make is a command to him. He has gone; and he sends me his
+address in London. 'There are two considerations' (he says)
+'which help to reconcile me to leaving you. The first is that
+_you_ wish it, and that it is only to be for a little while. The
+second is that I think I can make some arrangements in London for
+adding to my income by my own labor. I have never cared for money
+for myself; but you don't know how I am beginning already to
+prize the luxuries and refinements that money can provide, for my
+wife's sake.' Poor fellow! I almost wish I had not written to him
+as I did; I almost wish I had not sent him away from me.
+
+"Fancy if Mother Oldershaw saw this page in my diary! I have had
+a letter from her this morning--a letter to remind me of my
+obligations, and to tell me she suspects things are all going
+wrong. Let her suspect! I shan't trouble myself to answer; I
+can't be worried with that old wretch in the state I am in now.
+
+"It is a lovely afternoon--I want a walk--I mustn't think of
+Midwinter. Suppose I put on my bonnet, and try my experiment at
+once at the great house? Everything is in my favor. There is no
+spy to follow me, and no lawyer to keep me out, this time. Am I
+handsome enough, today? Well, yes; handsome enough to be a match
+for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be
+perched on a form at school, and strapped to a backboard to
+straighten her crooked shoulders.
+
+     " 'The nursery lisps out in all they utter;
+        Besides, they always smell of bread-and-butter.'
+
+"How admirably Byron has described girls in their teens!
+
+
+"Eight o'clock.--I have just got back from Armadale's house. I
+have seen him, and spoken to him; and the end of it may be set
+down in three plain words. I have failed. There is no more chance
+of my being Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose than there is of my
+being Queen of England.
+
+"Shall I write and tell Oldershaw? Shall I go back to London? Not
+till I have had time to think a little. N ot just yet.
+
+"Let me think; I have failed completely--failed, with all the
+circumstances in favor of success. I caught him alone on the
+drive in front of the house. He was excessively disconcerted, but
+at the same time quite willing to hear me. I tried him, first
+quietly--then with tears, and the rest of it. I introduced myself
+in the character of the poor innocent woman whom he had been the
+means of injuring. I confused, I interested, I convinced him. I
+went on to the purely Christian part of my errand, and spoke with
+such feeling of his separation from his friend, for which I was
+innocently responsible, that I turned his odious rosy face quite
+pale, and made him beg me at last not to distress him. But,
+whatever other feelings I roused in him, I never once roused his
+old feeling for _me._ I saw it in his eyes when he looked at me;
+I felt it in his fingers when we shook hands. We parted friends,
+and nothing more.
+
+"It is for this, is it, Miss Milroy, that I resisted temptation,
+morning after morning, when I knew you were out alone in the
+park? I have just left you time to slip in, and take my place in
+Armadale's good graces, have I? I never resisted temptation yet
+without suffering for it in some such way as this! If I had only
+followed my first thoughts, on the day when I took leave of you,
+my young lady--well, well, never mind that now. I have got the
+future before me; you are not Mrs. Armadale yet! And I can tell
+you one other thing--whoever else he marries, he will never marry
+_you._ If I am even with you in no other way, trust me, whatever
+comes of it, to be even with you there!
+
+"I am not, to my own surprise, in one of my furious passions. The
+last time I was in this perfectly cool state, under serious
+provocation, something came of it, which I daren't write down,
+even in my own private diary. I shouldn't be surprised if
+something comes of it now.
+
+"On my way back, I called at Mr. Bashwood's lodgings in the town.
+He was not at home, and I left a message telling him to come here
+tonight and speak to me. I mean to relieve him at once of the
+duty of looking after Armadale and Miss Milroy. I may not see my
+way yet to ruining her prospects at Thorpe Ambrose as completely
+as she has ruined mine. But when the time comes, and I do see it,
+I don't know to what lengths my sense of injury may take me; and
+there may be inconvenience, and possibly danger, in having such a
+chicken-hearted creature as Mr. Bashwood in my confidence.
+
+"I suspect I am more upset by all this than I supposed.
+Midwinter's story is beginning to haunt me again, without rhyme
+or reason.
+
+"A soft, quick, trembling knock at the street door! I know who it
+is. No hand but old Bashwood's could knock in that way.
+
+
+"Nine o'clock.--I have just got rid of him. He has surprised me
+by coming out in a new character.
+
+"It seems (though I didn't detect him) that he was at the great
+house while I was in company with Armadale. He saw us talking on
+the drive, and he afterward heard what the servants said, who saw
+us too. The wise opinion below stairs is that we have 'made it
+up,' and that the master is likely to marry me after all. 'He's
+sweet on her red hair,' was the elegant expression they used in
+the kitchen. 'Little missie can't match her there; and little
+missie will get the worst of it.' How I hate the coarse ways of
+the lower orders!
+
+"While old Bashwood was telling me this, I thought he looked even
+more confused and nervous than usual. But I failed to see what
+was really the matter until after I had told him that he was to
+leave all further observation of Mr. Armadale and Miss Milroy to
+me. Every drop of the little blood there is in the feeble old
+creature's body seemed to fly up into his face. He made quite an
+overpowering effort; he really looked as if he would drop down
+dead of fright at his own boldness; but be forced out the
+question for all that, stammering, and stuttering, and kneading
+desperately with both hands at the brim of his hideous great hat.
+'I beg your pardon, Miss Gwi-Gwi-Gwilt! You are not really
+go-go-going to marry Mr. Armadale, are you? Jealous--if ever I
+saw it in a man's face yet, I saw it in his--actually jealous of
+Armadale at his age! If I had been in the humor for it, I should
+have burst out laughing in his face. As it was, I was angry, and
+lost all patience with him. I told him he was an old fool, and
+ordered him to go on quietly with his usual business until I sent
+him word that he was wanted again. He submitted as usual; but
+there was an indescribable something in his watery old eyes, when
+he took leave of me, which I have never noticed in them before.
+Love has the credit of working all sorts of strange
+transformations. Can it be really possible that Love has made Mr.
+Bashwood man enough to be angry with me?
+
+"Wednesday.--My experience of Miss Milroy's habits suggested a
+suspicion to me last night which I thought it desirable to clear
+up this morning.
+
+"It was always her way, when I was at the cottage, to take a walk
+early in the morning before breakfast. Considering that I used
+often to choose that very time for _my_ private meetings with
+Armadale, it struck me as likely that my former pupil might be
+taking a leaf out of my book, and that I might make some
+desirable discoveries if I turned my steps in the direction of
+the major's garden at the right hour. I deprived myself of my
+Drops, to make sure of waking; passed a miserable night in
+consequence; and was ready enough to get up at six o'clock, and
+walk the distance from my lodgings to the cottage in the fresh
+morning air.
+
+"I had not been five minutes on the park side of the garden
+inclosure before I sat her come out.
+
+"She seemed to have had a bad night too; her eyes were heavy and
+red, and her lips and cheeks looked swollen as if she had been
+crying. There was something on her mind, evidently; something, as
+it soon appeared, to take her out of the garden into the park.
+She walked (if one can call it walking; with such legs as hers!)
+straight to the summer house, and opened the door, and crossed
+the bridge, and went on quicker and quicker toward the low ground
+in the park, where the trees are thickest. I followed her over
+the open space with perfect impunity in the preoccupied state she
+was in; and, when she began to slacken her pace among the trees,
+I was among the trees too, and was not afraid of her seeing me.
+
+"Before long, there was a crackling and trampling of heavy feet
+coming up toward us through the under-wood in a deep dip of the
+ground. I knew that step as well as she knew it. 'Here I am,' she
+said, in a faint little voice. I kept behind the trees a few
+yards off, in some doubt on which side Armadale would come out of
+the under-wood to join her. He came out up the side of the dell,
+opposite to the tree behind which I was standing. They sat down
+together on the bank. I sat down behind the tree, and looked at
+them through the under-wood, and heard without the slightest
+difficulty every word that they said.
+
+"The talk began by his noticing that she looked out of spirits,
+and asking if anything had gone wrong at the cottage. The artful
+little minx lost no time in making the necessary impression on
+him; she began to cry. He took her hand, of course, and tried, in
+his brutishly straightforward way, to comfort her. No; she was
+not to be comforted. A miserable prospect was before her; she had
+not slept the whole night for thinking of it. Her father had
+called her into his room the previous evening, had spoken about
+the state of her education, and had told her in so many words
+that she was to go to school. The place had been found, and the
+terms had been settled; and as soon as her clothes could he got
+ready, miss was to go.
+
+" 'While that hateful Miss Gwilt was in the house,' says this
+model young person, 'I would have gone to school willingly--I
+wanted to go. But it's all different now; I don't think of it in
+the same way; I feel too old for school. I'm quite heart-broken,
+Mr. Armadale.' There she stopped as if she had meant to say more,
+and gave him a look which finished the sentence plainly: 'I'm
+quite heart-broken, Mr. Armadale, now we are friendly again, at
+going away from you!' For d ownright brazen impudence, which a
+grown woman would be ashamed of, give me the young girls whose
+'modesty' is so pertinaciously insisted on by the nauseous
+domestic sentimentalists of the present day!
+
+"Even Armadale, booby as he is, understood her. After bewildering
+himself in a labyrinth of words that led nowhere, he took
+her--one can hardly say round the waist, for she hasn't got
+one--he took her round the last hook-and-eye of her dress, and,
+by way of offering her a refuge from the indignity of being sent
+to school at her age, made her a proposal of marriage in so many
+words.
+
+"If I could have killed them both at that moment by lifting up my
+little finger, I have not the least doubt I should have lifted
+it. As things were, I only waited to see what Miss Milroy would
+do.
+
+"She appeared to think it necessary--feeling, I suppose, that she
+had met him without her father's knowledge, and not forgetting
+that I had had the start of her as the favored object of Mr.
+Armadale's good opinion--to assert herself by an explosion of
+virtuous indignation. She wondered how he could think of such a
+thing after his conduct with Miss Gwilt, and after her father had
+forbidden him the house! Did he want to make her feel how
+inexcusably she had forgotten what was due to herself? Was it
+worthy of a gentleman to propose what he knew as well as she did
+was impossible? and so on, and so on. Any man with brains in his
+head would have known what all this rodomontade really meant.
+Armadale took it so seriously that he actually attempted to
+justify himself.
+
+"He declared, in his headlong, blundering way, that he was quite
+in earnest; he and her father might make it up and be friends
+again; and, if the major persisted in treating him as a stranger,
+young ladies and gentlemen in their situation had made runaway
+marriages before now, and fathers and mothers who wouldn't
+forgive them before had forgiven them afterward. Such
+outrageously straightforward love-making as this left Miss
+Milroy, of course, but two alternatives--to confess that she had
+been saying No when she meant Yes, or to take refuge in another
+explosion. She was hypocrite enough to prefer another explosion.
+'How dare you, Mr. Armadale? Go away directly! It's
+inconsiderate, it's heartless, it's perfectly disgraceful to say
+such things to me!' and so on, and so on. It seems incredible,
+but it is not the less true, that he was positively fool enough
+to take her at her word. He begged her pardon, and went away like
+a child that is put in the corner--the most contemptible object
+in the form of man that eyes ever looked on!
+
+"She waited, after he had gone, to compose herself, and I waited
+behind the trees to see how she would succeed. Her eyes wandered
+round slyly to the path by which he had left her. She smiled
+(grinned would be the truer way of putting it, with such a mouth
+as hers); took a few steps on tiptoe to look after him; turned
+back again, and suddenly burst into a violent fit of crying. I am
+not quite so easily taken in as Armadale, and I saw what it all
+meant plainly enough.
+
+" 'To-morrow,' I thought to myself, 'you will be in the park
+again, miss, by pure accident. The next day, you will lead him on
+into proposing to you for the second time. The day after, he will
+venture back to the subject of runaway marriages, and you will
+only be becomingly confused. And the day after that, if he has
+got a plan to propose, and if your clothes are ready to be packed
+for school, you will listen to him.' Yes, yes; Time is always on
+the man's side, where a woman is concerned, if the man is only
+patient enough to let Time help him.
+
+"I let her leave the place and go back to the cottage, quite
+unconscious that I had been looking at her. I waited among the
+trees, thinking. The truth is, I was impressed by what I had
+heard and seen, in a manner that it is not very easy to describe.
+It put the whole thing before me in a new light. It showed
+me--what I had never even suspected till this morning--that she
+is really fond of him.
+
+"Heavy as my debt of obligation is to her, there is no fear _now_
+of my failing to pay it to the last farthing. It would have been
+no small triumph for me to stand between Miss Milroy and her
+ambition to be one of the leading ladies of the county. But it is
+infinitely more, where her first love is concerned, to stand
+between Miss Milroy and her heart's desire. Shall I remember my
+own youth and spare her? No! She has deprived me of the one
+chance I had of breaking the chain that binds me to a past life
+too horrible to be thought of. I am thrown back into a position,
+compared to which the position of an outcast who walks the
+streets is endurable and enviable. No, Miss Milroy--no, Mr.
+Armadale; I will spare neither of you.
+
+"I have been back some hours. I have been thinking, and nothing
+has come of it. Ever since I got that strange letter of
+Midwinter's last Sunday, my usual readiness in emergencies has
+deserted me. When I am not thinking of him or of his story, my
+mind feels quite stupefied. I, who have always known what to do
+on other occasions, don't know what to do now. It would be easy
+enough, of course, to warn Major Milroy of his daughter's
+proceedings. But the major is fond of his daughter; Armadale is
+anxious to be reconciled with him; Armadale is rich and
+prosperous, and ready to submit to the elder man; and sooner or
+later they will be friends again, and the marriage will follow.
+Warning Major Milroy is only the way to embarrass them for the
+present; it is not the way to part them for good and all.
+
+"What _is_ the way? I can't see it. I could tear my own hair off
+my head! I could burn the house down! If there was a train of
+gunpowder under the whole world, I could light it, and blow the
+whole world to destruction--I am in such a rage, such a frenzy
+with myself for not seeing it!
+
+"Poor dear Midwinter! Yes, '_dear._' I don't care. I'm lonely and
+helpless. I want somebody who is gentle and loving to make much
+of me; I wish I had his head on my bosom again; I have a good
+mind to go to London and marry him. Am I mad? Yes; all people who
+are as miserable as I am are mad. I must go to the window and get
+some air. Shall I jump out? No; it disfigures one so, and the
+coroner's inquest lets so many people see it.
+
+"The air has revived me. I begin to remember that I have Time on
+my side, at any rate. Nobody knows but me of their secret
+meetings in the park the first thing in the morning. If jealous
+old Bashwood, who is slinking and sly enough for anything, tries
+to look privately after Armadale, in his own interests, he will
+try at the usual time when he goes to the steward's office. He
+knows nothing of Miss Milroy's early habits; and he won't be on
+the spot till Armadale has got back to the house. For another
+week to come, I may wait and watch them, and choose my own time
+and way of interfering the moment I see a chance of his getting
+the better of her hesitation, and making her say Yes.
+
+"So here I wait, without knowing how things will end with
+Midwinter in London; with my purse getting emptier and emptier,
+and no appearance so far of any new pupils to fill it; with
+Mother Oldershaw certain to insist on having her money back the
+moment she knows I have failed; without prospects, friends, or
+hopes of any kind--a lost woman, if ever there was a lost woman
+yet. Well! I say it again and again and again--I don't care! Here
+I stop, if I sell the clothes off my back, if I hire myself at
+the public-house to play to the brutes in the tap-room; here I
+stop till the time comes, and I see the way to parting Armadale
+and Miss Milroy forever!
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--Any signs that the time is coming yet? I hardly
+know; there are signs of a change, at any rate, in my position in
+the neighborhood.
+
+"Two of the oldest and ugliest of the many old and ugly ladies
+who took up my case when I left Major Milroy's service have just
+called, announcing themselves, with the insufferable impudence of
+charitable Englishwomen, as a deputation from my patronesses. It
+seems that the news of my reconciliation with Armadale has spread
+from the servants' offices at the great house, and has reached
+the town, with this result.
+
+"It is the unanimous opinion of my 'patronesses' (and the opinion
+of Major Milroy also, who has been consulted) that I have acted
+with the most inexcusable imprudence in going to Armadale's
+house, and in there speaking on friendly terms with a man whose
+conduct toward myself has made his name a by-word in the
+neighborhood. My total want of self-respect in this matter has
+given rise to a report that I am trading as cleverly as ever on
+my good looks, and that I am as likely as not to end in making
+Armadale marry me, after all. My 'patronesses' are, of course,
+too charitable to believe this. They merely feel it necessary to
+remonstrate with me in a Christian spirit, and to warn me that
+any second and similar imprudence on my part would force all my
+best friends in the plate to withdraw the countenance and
+protection which I now enjoy.
+
+"Having addressed me, turn and turn about, in these terms
+(evidently all rehearsed beforehand), my two Gorgon visitors
+straightened themselves in their chairs, and looked at me as much
+as to say, 'You may often have heard of Virtue, Miss Gwilt, but
+we don't believe you ever really saw it in full bloom till we
+came and called on you.'
+
+"Seeing they were bent on provoking me, I kept my temper, and
+answered them in my smoothest, sweetest, and most lady-like
+manner. I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class
+of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at
+eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up
+again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes
+and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their
+Christianity on a week-day. On this hint, as the man says in the
+play, I spoke.
+
+" 'What have I done that is wrong?' I asked, innocently. 'Mr.
+Armadale has injured me; and I have been to his house and
+forgiven him the injury. Surely there must be some mistake,
+ladies? You can't have really come here to remonstrate with me in
+a Christian spirit for performing an act of Christianity?'
+
+"The two Gorgons got up. I firmly believe some women have cats'
+tails as well as cats' faces. I firmly believe the tails of those
+two particular cats wagged slowly under their petticoats, and
+swelled to four times their proper size.
+
+" 'Temper we were prepared for, Miss Gwilt,' they said, 'but not
+Profanity. We wish you good-evening.'
+
+"So they left me, and so 'Miss Gwilt' sinks out of the
+patronizing notice of the neighborhood
+
+"I wonder what will come of this trumpery little quarrel? One
+thing will come of it which I can see already. The report will
+reach Miss Milroy's ears; she will insist on Armadale's
+justifying himself; and Armadale will end in satisfying her of
+his innocence by making another proposal. This will be quite
+likely to hasten matters between them; at least it would with me.
+If I was in her place, I should say to myself, 'I will make sure
+of him while I can.' Supposing it doesn't rain to-morrow morning,
+I think I will take another early walk in the direction of the
+park.
+
+
+"Midnight.--As I can't take my drops, with a morning walk before
+me, I may as well give up all hope of sleeping, and go on with my
+diary. Even with my drops, I doubt if my head would be very quiet
+on my pillow to-night. Since the little excitement of the scene
+with my 'lady-patronesses' has worn off, I have been troubled
+with misgivings which would leave me but a poor chance, under any
+circumstances, of getting much rest.
+
+"I can't imagine why, but the parting words spoken to Armadale by
+that old brute of a lawyer have come back to my mind! Here they
+are, as reported in Mr. Bashwood's letter: 'Some other person's
+curiosity may go on from the point where you (and I) have
+stopped, and some other person's hand may let the broad daylight
+in yet on Miss Gwilt.'
+
+"What does he mean by that? And what did he mean afterward when
+he overtook old Bashwood in the drive, by telling him to gratify
+his curiosity? Does this hateful Pedgift actually suppose there
+is any chance-- ? Ridiculous! Why, I have only to _look_ at the
+feeble old creature, and he daren't lift his little finger unless
+I tell him. _He_ try to pry into my past life, indeed! Why,
+people with ten times his brains, and a hundred times his
+courage, hare tried--and have left off as wise as they began.
+
+"I don't know, though; it might have been better if I had kept my
+temper when Bashwood was here the other night. And it might be
+better still if I saw him to-morrow, and took him back into my
+good graces by giving him something to do for me. Suppose I tell
+him to look after the two Pedgifts, and to discover whether there
+is any chance of their attempting to renew their connection with
+Armadale? No such thing is at all likely; but if I gave old
+Bashwood this commission, it would flatter his sense of his own
+importance to me, and would at the same time serve the excellent
+purpose of keeping him out of my way.
+
+
+"Thursday morning, nine o'clock.--I have just got back from the
+park.
+
+"For once I have proved a true prophet. There they were together,
+at the same early hour, in the same secluded situation among the
+trees; and there was miss in full possession of the report of my
+visit to the great house, and taking her tone accordingly.
+
+"After saying one or two things about me, which I promise him not
+to forget, Armadale took the way to convince her of his constancy
+which I felt beforehand he would be driven to take. He repeated
+his proposal of marriage, with excellent effect this time. Tears
+and kisses and protestations followed; and my late pupil opened
+her heart at last, in the most innocent manner. Home, she
+confessed, was getting so miserable to her now that it was only
+less miserable than going to school. Her mother's temper was
+becoming more violent and unmanageable every day. The nurse, who
+was the only person with any influence over her, had gone away in
+disgust. Her father was becoming more and more immersed in his
+clock, and was made more and more resolute to send her away from
+home by the distressing scenes which now took place with her
+mother almost day by day. I waited through these domestic
+disclosures on the chance of hearing any plans they might have
+for the future discussed between them; and my patience, after no
+small exercise of it, was rewarded at last.
+
+"The first suggestion (as was only natural where such a fool as
+Armadale was concerned) came from the girl.
+
+"She started an idea which I own I had not anticipated. She
+proposed that Armadale should write to her father; and, cleverer
+still, she prevented all fear of his blundering by telling him
+what he was to say. He was to express himself as deeply
+distressed at his estrangement from the major, and to request
+permission to call at the cottage, and say a few words in his own
+justification. That was all. The letter was not to be sent that
+day, for the applicants for the vacant place of Mrs. Milroy's
+nurse were coming, and seeing them and questioning them would put
+her father, with his dislike of such things, in no humor to
+receive Armadale's application indulgently. The Friday would be
+the day to send the letter, and on the Saturday morning if the
+answer was unfortunately not favorable, they might meet again, 'I
+don't like deceiving my father; he has always been so kind to me.
+And there will be no need to deceive him, Allan, if we can only
+make you friends again.' Those were the last words the little
+hypocrite said, when I left them.
+
+"What will the major do? Saturday morning will show. I won't
+think of it till Saturday morning has come and gone. They are not
+man and wife yet; and again and again I say it, though my brains
+are still as helpless as ever, man and wife they shall never be.
+
+"On my way home again, I caught Bashwood at his breakfast, with
+his poor old black tea-pot, and his little penny loaf, and his
+one cheap morsel of oily butter, and his darned dirty tablecloth.
+It sickens me to think of it.
+
+"I coaxed and comforted the miserable old creature till the tears
+stood in his eyes, and he quite blushed with pleasure. He
+undertakes to look after the Pedgifts with the utmost alacrity.
+Pedgift the elder he described, when once roused, as the most
+obstinate man livin g; nothing will induce him to give way,
+unless Armadale gives way also on his side. Pedgift the younger
+is much the more likely of the two to make attempts at a
+reconciliation. Such, at least, is Bashwood's opinion. It is of
+very little consequence now what happens either way. The only
+important thing is to tie my elderly admirer safely again to my
+apron-string. And this is done.
+
+"The post is late this morning. It has only just come in, and has
+brought me a letter from Midwinter.
+
+
+"It is a charming letter; it flatters me and flutters me as if I
+was a young girl again. No reproaches for my never having written
+to him; no hateful hurrying of me, in plain words, to marry him.
+He only writes to tell me a piece of news. He has obtained,
+through his lawyers, a prospect of being employed as occasional
+correspondent to a newspaper which is about to be started in
+London. The employment will require him to leave England for the
+Continent, which would exactly meet his own wishes for the
+future, but he cannot consider the proposal seriously until he
+has first ascertained whether it would meet my wishes too. He
+knows no will but mine, and he leaves me to decide, after first
+mentioning the time allowed him before his answer must be sent
+in. It is the time, of course (if I agree to his going abroad),
+in which I must marry him. But there is not a word about this in
+his letter. He asks for nothing but a sight of my handwriting to
+help him through the interval while we are separated from each
+other.
+
+"That is the letter; not very long, but so prettily expressed.
+
+"I think I can penetrate the secret of his fancy for going
+abroad. That wild idea of putting the mountains and the seas
+between Armadale and himself is still in his mind. As if either
+he or I could escape doing what we are fated to do--supposing we
+really are fated--by putting a few hundred or a few thousand
+miles between Armadale and ourselves! What strange absurdity and
+inconsistency! And yet how I like him for being absurd and
+inconsistent; for don't I see plainly that I am at the bottom of
+it all? Who leads this clever man astray in spite of himself? Who
+makes him too blind to see the contradiction in his own conduct,
+which he would see plainly in the conduct of another person? How
+interested I do feel in him! How dangerously near I am to
+shutting my eyes on the past, and letting myself love him! Was
+Eve fonder of Adam than ever, I wonder, after she had coaxed him
+into eating the apple? I should have quite doted on him if I had
+been in her place. (Memorandum: To write Midwinter a charming
+little letter on my side, with a kiss in it; and as time is
+allowed him before he sends in his answer, to ask for time, too,
+before I tell him whether I will or will not go abroad.)
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--A tiresome visit from my landlady; eager for a
+little gossip, and full of news which she thinks will interest
+me.
+
+"She is acquainted, I find, with Mrs. Milroy's late nurse; and
+she has been seeing her friend off at the station this afternoon.
+They talked, of course, of affairs at the cottage, and my name
+found its way into the conversation. I am quite wrong, it seems,
+if the nurse's authority is to be trusted, in believing Miss
+Milroy to be responsible for sending Mr. Armadale to my reference
+in London. Miss Milroy really knew nothing about it, and it all
+originated in her mother's mad jealousy of me. The present
+wretched state of things at the cottage is due entirely to the
+same cause. Mrs. Milroy is firmly persuaded that my remaining at
+Thorpe Ambrose is referable to my having some private means of
+communicating with the major which it is impossible for her to
+discover. With this conviction in her mind, she has become so
+unmanageable that no person, with any chance of bettering
+herself, could possibly remain in attendance an her; and sooner
+or later, the major, object to it as he may, will be obliged to
+place her under proper medical care.
+
+"That is the sum and substance of what the wearisome landlady,
+had to tell me. Unnecessary to say that I was not in the least
+interested by it. Even if the nurse's s assertion is to be
+depended on--which I persist in doubting--it is of no importance
+now. I know that Miss Milroy, and nobody but Miss Milroy has
+utterly ruined my prospect of becoming Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose, and I care to know nothing more. If her mother was
+really alone in the attempt to expose my false reference, her
+mother seems to be suffering for it, at any rate. And so good-by
+to Mrs. Milroy; and Heaven defend me from any more last glimpses
+at the cottages seen through the medium of my landlady's
+spectacles!
+
+
+"Nine o'clock.--Bashwood has just left me, having come with news
+from the great house. Pedgift the younger has made his attempt at
+bringing about a reconciliation this very day, and has failed. I
+am the sole cause of the failure. Armadale is quite willing to be
+reconciled if Pedgift the elder will avoid all future occasion of
+disagreement between them by never recurring to the subject of
+Miss Gwilt. This, however, happens to be exactly the condition
+which Pedgift's father--with his opinion of me and my
+doings--should consider it his duty to Armadale _not_ to accept.
+So lawyer and client remain as far apart as ever, and the
+obstacle of the Pedgifts is cleared out of my way.
+
+"It might have been a very awkward obstacle, so far as Pedgift
+the elder is concerned, if one of his suggestions had been
+carried out; I mean, if an officer of the London police had been
+brought down here to look at me. It is a question, even now,
+whether I had better not take to the thick veil again, which I
+always wear in London and other large places. The only difficulty
+is that it would excite remark in this inquisitive little town to
+see me wearing a thick veil, for the first time, in the summer
+weather.
+
+"It is close on ten o'clock; I have been dawdling over my diary
+longer than I supposed.
+
+"No words can describe how weary and languid I feel. Why don't I
+take my sleeping drops and go to bed? There is no meeting between
+Armadale and Miss Milroy to force me into early rising to-morrow
+morning. Am I trying, for the hundredth time, to see my way
+clearly into the future--trying, in my present state of fatigue,
+to be the quick-witted woman I once was, before all these
+anxieties came together and overpowered me? or am I perversely
+afraid of my bed when I want it most? I don't know; I am tired
+and miserable; I am looking wretchedly haggard and old. With a
+little encouragement, I might be fool enough to burst out crying.
+Luckily, there is no one to encourage me. What sort of a night is
+it, I wonder?
+
+"A cloudy night, with the moon showing at intervals, and the wind
+rising. I can just hear it moaning among the ins and outs of the
+unfinished cottages at the end of the street. My nerves must be a
+little shaken, I think. I was startled just now by a shadow on
+the wall. It was only after a moment or two that I mustered sense
+enough to notice where the candle was, and to see that the shadow
+was my own.
+
+"Shadows remind me of Midwinter; or, if the shadows don't,
+something else does. I must have another look at his letter, and
+then I will positively go to bed.
+
+
+"I shall end in getting fond of him. If I remain much longer in
+this lonely uncertain state--so irresolute, so unlike my usual
+self--I shall end in getting fond of him. What madness! As if _I_
+could ever be really fond of a man again!
+
+"Suppose I took one of my sudden resolutions, and married him.
+Poor as he is, he would give me a name and a position if I became
+his wife. Let me see how the name--his own name--would look, if I
+really did consent to it for mine.
+
+" 'Mrs. Armadale!' Pretty.
+
+" 'Mrs. Allan Armadale!' Prettier still.
+
+"My nerves _must_ be shaken. Here is my own handwriting startling
+me now! It is so strange; it is enough to startle anybody. The
+similarity in the two names never struck me in this light before.
+Marry which of the two I might, my name would, of course, be the
+same. I should have been Mrs. Armadale, if I had married the
+light-haired Allan at the great house. And I can be Mrs. Armadale
+still, if I marry the dark-haired Allan in London. It's alm ost
+maddening to write it down--to feel that something ought to come
+of it--and to find nothing come.
+
+"How _can_ anything come of it? If I did go to London, and marry
+him (as of course I must marry him) under his real name, would he
+let me be known by it afterward? With all his reasons for
+concealing his real name, he would insist--no, he is too fond of
+me to do that--he would entreat me to take the name which he has
+assumed. Mrs. Midwinter. Hideous! Ozias, too, when I wanted to
+address him familiarly, as his wife should. Worse than hideous!
+
+"And yet there would be some reason for humoring him in this if
+he asked me.
+
+"Suppose the brute at the great house happened to leave this
+neighborhood as a single man; and suppose, in his absence, any of
+the people who know him heard of a Mrs. Allan Armadale, they
+would set her down at once as his wife. Even if they actually saw
+me--if I actually came among them with that name, and if he was
+not present to contradict it--his own servants would be the first
+to say, 'We knew she would marry him, after all!' And my
+lady-patronesses, who will be ready to believe anything of me now
+we have quarreled, would join the chorus _sotto voce:_ 'Only
+think, my dear, the report that so shocked us actually turns out
+to be true!' No. If I marry Midwinter, I must either be
+perpetually putting my husband and myself in a false position--or
+I must leave his real name, his pretty, romantic name, behind me
+at the church door.
+
+"My husband! As if I was really going to marry him! I am _not_
+going to marry him, and there's an end of it.
+
+
+"Half-past ten.--Oh, dear! oh, dear! how my temples throb, and
+how hot my weary eyes feel! There is the moon looking at me
+through the window. How fast the little scattered clouds are
+flying before the wind! Now they let the moon in; and now they
+shut the moon out. What strange shapes the patches of yellow
+light take, and lose again, all in a moment! No peace and quiet
+for me, look where I may. The candle keeps flickering, and the
+very sky itself is restless to-night.
+
+" 'To bed! to bed!' as Lady Macbeth says. I wonder, by-the-by,
+what Lady Macbeth would have done in my position? She would have
+killed somebody when her difficulties first began. Probably
+Armadale.
+
+
+"Friday morning.--A night's rest, thanks again to my Drops. I
+went to breakfast in better spirits, and received a morning
+welcome in the shape of a letter from Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+"My silence has produced its effect on Mother Jezebel. She
+attributes it to the right cause, and she shows her claws at
+last. If I am not in a position to pay my note of hand for thirty
+pounds, which is due on Tuesday next, her lawyer is instructed to
+'take the usual course.' _If_ I am not in a position to pay it!
+Why, when I have settled to-day with my landlord, I shall have
+barely five pounds left! There is not the shadow of a prospect
+between now and Tuesday of my earning any money; and I don't
+possess a friend in this place who would trust me with sixpence.
+The difficulties that are swarming round me wanted but one more
+to complete them, and that one has come.
+
+"Midwinter would assist me, of course, if I could bring myself to
+ask him for assistance. But _that_ means marrying him. Am I
+really desperate enough and helpless enough to end it in that
+way? No; not yet.
+
+"My head feels heavy; I must get out into the fresh air, and
+think about it.
+
+
+"Two o'clock.--I believe I have caught the infection of
+Midwinter's superstition. I begin to think that events are
+forcing me nearer and nearer to some end which I don't see yet,
+but which I am firmly persuaded is now not far off.
+
+"I have been insulted--deliberately insulted before witnesses--by
+Miss Milroy.
+
+"After walking, as usual, in the most unfrequented place I could
+pick out, and after trying, not very successfully, to think to
+some good purpose of what I am to do next, I remembered that I
+needed some note-paper and pens, and went back to the town to the
+stationer's shop. It might have been wiser to have sent for what
+I wanted. But I was weary of myself, and weary of my lonely
+rooms; and I did my own errand, for no better reason than that it
+was something to do.
+
+"I had just got into the shop, and was asking for what I wanted,
+when another customer came in. We both looked up, and recognized
+each other at the same moment: Miss Milroy.
+
+"A woman and a lad were behind the counter, besides the man who
+was serving me. The woman civilly addressed the new customer.
+'What can we have the pleasure of doing for you, miss?' After
+pointing it first by looking me straight in the face, she
+answered, 'Nothing, thank you, at present. I'll come back when
+the shop is empty.'
+
+"She went out. The three people in the shop looked at me in
+silence. In silence, on my side, I paid for my purchases, and
+left the place. I don't know how I might have felt if I had been
+in my usual spirits. In the anxious, unsettled state I am in now,
+I can't deny it, the girl stung me.
+
+"In the weakness of the moment (for it was nothing else), I was
+on the point of matching her petty spitefulness by spitefulness
+quite as petty on my side. I had actually got as far as the whole
+length of the street on my way to the major's cottage, bent on
+telling him the secret of his daughter's morning walks, before my
+better sense came back to me. When I did cool down, I turned
+round at once, and took the way home. No, no, Miss Milroy; mere
+temporary mischief-making at the cottage, which would only end in
+your father forgiving you, and in Armadale profiting by his
+indulgence, will nothing like pay the debt I owe you. I don't
+forget that your heart is set on Armadale; and that the major,
+however he may talk, has always ended hitherto in giving you your
+own way. My head may be getting duller and duller, but it has not
+quite failed me yet.
+
+"In the meantime, there is Mother Oldershaw's letter waiting
+obstinately to be answered; and here am I, not knowing what to do
+about it yet. Shall I answer it or not? It doesn't matter for the
+present; there are some hours still to spare before the post goes
+out.
+
+"Suppose I asked Armadale to lend me the money? I should enjoy
+getting _something_ out of him; and I believe, in his present
+situation with Miss Milroy, he would do anything to be rid of me.
+Mean enough this, on my part. Pooh! When you hate and despise a
+man, as I hate and despise Armadale, who cares for looking mean
+in _his_ eyes?
+
+"And yet my pride--or my something else, I don't know
+what--shrinks from it.
+
+"Half-past two--only half-past two. Oh, the dreadful weariness of
+these long summer days! I can't keep thinking and thinking any
+longer; I must do something to relieve my mind. Can I go to my
+piano? No; I'm not fit for it. Work? No; I shall get thinking
+again if I take to my needle. A man, in my place, would find
+refuge in drink. I'm not a man, and I can't drink. I'll dawdle
+over my dresses, and put my things tidy.
+
+                              * * * * * *
+
+"Has an hour passed? More than an hour. It seems like a minute.
+
+"I can't look back through these leaves, but I know I wrote
+somewhere that I felt myself getting nearer and nearer to some
+end that was still hidden from me. The end is hidden no longer.
+The cloud is off my mind, the blindness has gone from my eyes. I
+see it! I see it!
+
+"It came to me--I never sought it. If I was lying on my
+death-bed, I could swear, with a safe conscience, I never sought
+it.
+
+"I was only looking over my things; I was as idly and as
+frivolously employed as the most idle and most frivolous woman
+living. I went through my dresses, and my linen. What could be
+more innocent? Children go through their dresses and their linen.
+
+"It was, such a long summer day, and I was so tired of myself. I
+went to my boxes next. I looked over the large box first, which I
+usually leave open; and then I tried the small box, which I
+always keep locked.
+
+"From one thing to the other, I came at last to the bundle of
+letters at the bottom--the letters of the man for whom I once
+sacrificed and suffered everything; the man who has made me what
+I am.
+
+"A hundred times I had determined to burn his letters; but I have
+never burned them. This, time, all I said wa s, 'I won't read his
+letters!' And I did read them.
+
+"The villain--the false, cowardly, heartless villain--what have I
+to do with his letters now? Oh, the misery of being a woman! Oh,
+the meanness that our memory of a man can tempt us to, when our
+love for him is dead and gone! I read the letters--I was so
+lonely and so miserable, I read the letters.
+
+"I came to the last--the letter he wrote to encourage me, when I
+hesitated as the terrible time came nearer and nearer; the letter
+that revived me when my resolution failed at the eleventh hour. I
+read on, line after line, till I came to these words:
+
+
+" '. . . I really have no patience with such absurdities as you
+have written to me. You say I am driving you on to do what is
+beyond a woman's courage. Am I? I might refer you to any
+collection of Trials, English or foreign. to show that you were
+utterly wrong. But such collections may be beyond your reach; and
+I will only refer you to a case in yesterday's newspaper. The
+circumstances are totally different from our circumstances; but
+the example of resolution in a woman is an example worth your
+notice.
+
+" 'You will find, among the law reports, a married woman charged
+with fraudulently representing herself to be the missing widow of
+an officer in the merchant service, who was supposed to have been
+drowned. The name of the prisoner's husband (living) and the name
+of the officer (a very common one, both as to Christian and
+surname) happened to be identically the same. There was money to
+be got by it (sorely wanted by the prisoner's husband, to whom
+she was devotedly attached), if the fraud had succeeded. The
+woman took it all on herself. Her husband was helpless and ill,
+and the bailiffs were after him. The circumstances, as you may
+read for yourself, were all in her favor, and were so well
+managed by her that the lawyers themselves acknowledged she might
+have succeeded, if the supposed drowned man had not turned up
+alive and well in the nick of time to confront her. The scene
+took place at the lawyer's office, and came out in the evidence
+at the police court. The woman was handsome, and the sailor was a
+good-natured man. He wanted, at first, if the lawyers would have
+allowed him, to let her off. He said to her, among other things:
+"You didn't count on the drowned man coming back, alive and
+hearty, did you, ma'am?" "It's lucky for you," she said, "I
+didn't count on it. You have escaped the sea, but you wouldn't
+have escaped _me._" "Why, what would you have done, if you _had_
+known I was coming back?" says the sailor. She looked him
+steadily in the face, and answered: "I would have killed you."
+There! Do you think such a woman as that would have written to
+tell me I was pressing her further than she had courage to go? A
+handsome woman, too, like yourself. You would drive some men in
+my position to wish they had her now in your place.'
+
+
+"I read no further. When I had got on, line by line, to those
+words, it burst on me like a flash of lightning. In an instant I
+saw it as plainly as I see it now. It is horrible, it is unheard
+of, it outdares all daring; but, if I can only nerve myself to
+face one terrible necessity, it is to be done. _I may personate
+the richly provided widow of Allan Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose, if
+I can count on Allan Armadale's death in a given time._
+
+"There, in plain words, is the frightful temptation under which I
+now feel myself sinking. It is frightful in more ways than one;
+for it has come straight out of that other temptation to which I
+yielded in the by-gone time.
+
+"Yes; there the letter has been waiting for me in my box, to
+serve a purpose never thought of by the villain who wrote it.
+There is the Case, as he called it--only quoted to taunt me;
+utterly unlike my own case at the time--there it has been,
+waiting and lurking for me through all the changes in my life,
+till it has come to be like _my_ case at last.
+
+"It might startle any woman to see this, and even this is not the
+worst. The whole thing has been in my Diary, for days past,
+without my knowing it! Every idle fancy that escaped me has been
+tending secretly that one way! And I never saw, never suspected
+it, till the reading of the letter put my own thoughts before me
+in a new light--till I saw the shadow of my own circumstances
+suddenly reflected in one special circumstance of that other
+woman's case!
+
+"It is to be done, if I can but look the necessity in the face.
+It is to be done, _if I can count on Allan Armadale's death in a
+given time._
+
+"All but his death is easy. The whole series of events under
+which I have been blindly chafing and fretting for more than a
+week past have been, one and all--though I was too stupid to see
+it--events in my favor; events paving the way smoothly and more
+smoothly straight to the end.
+
+"In three bold steps--only three!--that end might be reached. Let
+Midwinter marry me privately, under his real name--step the
+first! Let Armadale leave Thorpe Ambrose a single man, and die in
+some distant place among strangers--step the second!
+
+"Why am I hesitating? Why not go on to step the third, and last?
+
+"I _will_ go on. Step the third, and last, is my appearance,
+after the announcement of Armadale's death has reached this
+neighborhood, in the character of Armadale's widow, with my
+marriage certificate in my hand to prove my claim. It is as clear
+as the sun at noonday. Thanks to the exact similarity between the
+two names, and thanks to the careful manner in which the secret
+of that similarity has been kept, I may be the wife of the dark
+Allan Armadale, known as such to nobody but my husband and
+myself; and I may, out of that very position, claim the character
+of widow of the light Allan Armadale, with proof to support me
+(in the shape of my marriage certificate) which would be proof in
+the estimation of the most incredulous person living.
+
+"To think of my having put all this in my Diary! To think of my
+having actually contemplated this very situation, and having seen
+nothing more in it, at the time, than a reason (if I married
+Midwinter) for consenting to appear in the world under my
+husband's assumed name!
+
+"What is it daunts me? The dread of obstacles? The fear of
+discovery?
+
+"Where are the obstacles? Where is the fear of discovery?
+
+"I am actually suspected all over the neighborhood of intriguing
+to be mistress of Thorpe Ambrose. I am the only person who knows
+the real turn that Armadale's inclinations have taken. Not a
+creature but myself is as yet aware of his early morning meetings
+with Miss Milroy. If it is necessary to part them, I can do it at
+any moment by an anonymous line to the major. If it is necessary
+to remove Armadale from Thorpe Ambrose, I can get him away at
+three days' notice. His own lips informed me, when I last spoke
+to him, that he would go to the ends of the earth to be friends
+again with Midwinter, if Midwinter would let him. I have only to
+tell Midwinter to write from London, and ask to be reconciled;
+and Midwinter would obey me--and to London Armadale would go.
+Every difficulty, at starting, is smoothed over ready to my hand.
+Every after-difficulty I could manage for myself. In the whole
+venture--desperate as it looks to pass myself off for the widow
+of one man, while I am all the while the wife of the other--there
+is absolutely no necessity that wants twice considering, but the
+one terrible necessity of Armadale's death.
+
+"His death! It might be a terrible necessity to any other woman;
+but is it, ought it to be terrible to Me?
+
+"I hate him for his mother's sake. I hate him for his own sake. I
+hate him for going to London behind my back, and making inquiries
+about me. I hate him for forcing me out of my situation before I
+wanted to go. I hate him for destroying all my hopes of marrying
+him, and throwing me back helpless on my own miserable life. But,
+oh, after what I have done already in the past time, how can I?
+how can I?
+
+"The girl, too--the girl who has come between us; who has taken
+him away from me; who has openly insulted me this very day--how
+the girl whose heart is set on him would feel it if he  died! What
+a vengeance on _her,_ if I did it! And when I was received as
+Armadale's widow what a triumph fo r _me._ Triumph! It is more
+than triumph--it is the salvation of me. A name that can't be
+assailed, a station that can't be assailed, to hide myself in
+from my past life! Comfort, luxury, wealth! An income of twelve
+hundred a year secured to me secured by a will which has been
+looked at by a lawyer: secured independently of anything Armadale
+can say or do himself! I never had twelve hundred a year. At my
+luckiest time, I never had half as much, really my own. What have
+I got now? Just five pounds left in the world--and the prospect
+next week of a debtor's prison.
+
+"But, oh, after what I have done already in the past time, how
+can I? how can I?
+
+"Some women--in my place, and with my recollections to look back
+on--would feel it differently. Some women would say, 'It's easier
+the second time than the first.' Why can't I? why can't I?
+
+"Oh, you Devil tempting me, is there no Angel near to raise some
+timely obstacle between this and to-morrow which might help me to
+give it up?
+
+"I shall sink under it--I shall sink, if I write or think of it
+any more! I'll shut up these leaves and go out again. I'll get
+some common person to come with me, and we will talk of common
+things. I'll take out the woman of the house, and her children.
+We will go and see something. There is a show of some kind in the
+town--I'll treat them to it. I'm not such an ill-natured woman
+when I try; and the landlady has really been kind to me. Surely I
+might occupy my mind a little in seeing her and her children
+enjoying themselves.
+
+
+"A minute since, I shut up these leaves as I said I would; and
+now I have opened them again, I don't know why. I think my brain
+is turned. I feel as if something was lost out of my mind; I feel
+as if I ought to find it here
+
+"I have found it! _Midwinter!!!_
+
+"Is it possible that I can have been thinking of the reasons For
+and Against, for an hour past--writing Midwinter's name over and
+over again--speculating seriously on marrying him--and all the
+time not once remembering that, even with every other impediment
+removed, _he_ alone, when the time came, would be an
+insurmountable obstacle in my way? Has the effort to face the
+consideration of Armadale's death absorbed me to _that_ degree? I
+suppose it has. I can't account for such extraordinary
+forgetfulness on my part in any other way.
+
+"Shall I stop and think it out, as I have thought out all the
+rest? Shall I ask myself if the obstacle of Midwinter would,
+after all, when the time came, be the unmanageable obstacle that
+it looks at present? No! What need is there to think of it? I
+have made up my mind to get the better of the temptation. I have
+made up my mind to give my landlady and her children a treat; I
+have made up my mind to close my Diary. And closed it shall be.
+
+
+"Six o'clock.--The landlady's gossip is unendurable; the
+landlady's children distract me. I have left them to run back
+here before post time and write a line to Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+"The dread that I shall sink under the temptation has grown
+stronger and stronger on me. I have determined to put it beyond
+my power to have my own way and follow my own will. Mother
+Oldershaw shall be the salvation of me for the first time since I
+have known her. If I can't pay my note of hand, she threatens me
+with an arrest. Well, she _shall_ arrest me. In the state my mind
+is in now, the best thing that can happen to me is to be taken
+away from Thorpe Ambrose, whether I like it or not. I will write
+and say that I am to be found here I will write and tell her, in
+so many words, that the best service she can render me is to lock
+me up.
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--The letter has gone to the post. I had begun to
+feel a little easier, when the children came in to thank me for
+taking them to the show. One of them is a girl, and the girl
+upset me. She is a forward child, and her hair is nearly the
+color of mine. She said, 'I shall be like you when I have grown
+bigger, shan't I?' Her idiot of a mother said, 'Please to excuse
+her, miss,' and took her out of the room, laughing. Like me! I
+don't pretend to be fond of the child; but think of her being
+like Me!
+
+
+"Saturday morning.--I have done well for once in acting on
+impulse, and writing as I did to Mrs. Oldershaw. The only new
+circumstance that has happened is another circumstance in my
+favor!
+
+"Major Milroy has answered Armadale's letter, entreating
+permission to call at the cottage and justify himself. His
+daughter read it in silence, when Armadale handed it to her at
+their meeting this morning, in the park. But they talked about it
+afterward, loud enough for me to hear them. The major persists in
+the course he has taken. He says his opinion of Armadale's
+conduct has been formed, not on common report, but on Armadale's
+own letters, and he sees no reason to alter the conclusion at
+which he arrived when the correspondence between them was closed.
+
+"This little matter had, I confess, slipped out of my memory. It
+might have ended awkwardly for _me._ If Major Milroy had been
+less obstinately wedded to his own opinion, Armadale might have
+justified himself; the marriage engagement might have been
+acknowledged; and all _my_ power of influencing the matter might
+have been at an end. As it is, they must continue to keep the
+engagement strictly secret; and Miss Milroy, who has never
+ventured herself near the great house since the thunder-storm
+forced her into it for shelter, will be less likely than ever to
+venture there now. I can part them when I please; with an
+anonymous line to the major, I can part them when I please!
+
+"After having discussed the letter, the talk between them turned
+on what they were to do next. Major Milroy's severity, as it soon
+appeared, produced the usual results. Armadale returned to the
+subject of the elopement; and this time she listened to him.
+There is everything to drive her to it. Her outfit of clothes is
+nearly ready; and the summer holidays, at the school which has
+been chosen for her, end at the end of next week. When I left
+them, they had decided to meet again and settle something on
+Monday.
+
+"The last words I heard him address to her, before I went away,
+shook me a little. He said: 'There is one difficulty, Neelie,
+that needn't trouble us, at any rate. I have got plenty of
+money.' And then he kissed her. The way to his life began to look
+an easier way to me when he talked of his money, and kissed her.
+
+"Some hours have passed, and the more I think of it, the more I
+fear the blank interval between this time and the time when Mrs.
+Oldershaw calls in the law, and protects me against myself. It
+might have been better if I had stopped at home this morning. But
+how could I? After the insult she offered me yesterday, I tingled
+all over to go and look at her.
+
+"To-day; Sunday; Monday; Tuesday. They can't arrest me for the
+money before Wednesday. And my miserable five pounds are
+dwindling to four! And he told her he had plenty of money! And
+she blushed and trembled when he kissed her. It might have been
+better for him, better for her, and better for me, if my debt had
+fallen due yesterday, and if the bailiffs had their hands on me
+at this moment.
+
+"Suppose I had the means of leaving Thorpe Ambrose by the next
+train, and going somewhere abroad, and absorbing myself in some
+new interest, among new people. Could I do it, rather than look
+again at that easy way to his life which would smooth the way to
+everything else?
+
+"Perhaps I might. But where is the money to come from? Surely
+some way of getting it struck me a day or two since? Yes; that
+mean idea of asking Armadale to help me! Well; I _will_ be mean
+for once. I'll give him the chance of making a generous use of
+that well-filled purse which it is such a comfort to him to
+reflect on in his present circumstances. It would soften my heart
+toward any man if he lent me money in my present extremity; and,
+if Armadale lends me money, it might soften my heart toward him.
+When shall I go? At once! I won't give myself time to feel the
+degradation of it, and to change my mind.
+
+
+"Three 'clock.--I mark the hour. He has sealed his own doom. He
+has insulted me.
+
+"Yes! I have suffered it once from Miss Milroy. And I have now
+suffered it a second time from Arm adale himself. An insult--a
+marked, merciless, deliberate insult in the open day!
+
+"I had got through the town, and had advanced a few hundred yards
+along the road that leads to the great house, when I saw Armadale
+at a little distance, coming toward me. He was walking
+fast--evidently with some errand of his own to take him to the
+town. The instant he caught sight of me he stopped, colored up,
+took off his hat, hesitated, and turned aside down a lane behind
+him, which I happen to know would take him exactly in the
+contrary direction to the direction in which he was walking when
+he first saw me. His conduct said in so many words, 'Miss Milroy
+may hear of it; I daren't run the risk of being seen speaking to
+you.' Men have used me heartlessly; men have done and said hard
+things to me; but no man living ever yet treated me as if I was
+plague-struck, and as if the very air about me was infected by my
+presence!
+
+"I say no more. When he walked away from me down that lane, he
+walked to his death. I have written to Midwinter to expect me in
+London nest week, and to be ready for our marriage soon
+afterward.
+
+
+"Four o'clock.--Half an hour since, I put on my bonnet to go out
+and post the letter to Midwinter myself. And here I am, still in
+my room, with my mind torn by doubts, and my letter on the table.
+
+"Armadale counts for nothing in the perplexities that are now
+torturing me. It is Midwinter who makes me hesitate. Can I take
+the first of those three steps that lead me to the end, without
+the common caution of looking at consequences? Can I marry
+Midwinter, without knowing beforehand how to meet the obstacle of
+my husband, when the time comes which transforms me from the
+living Armadale's wife to the dead Armadale's widow?
+
+"Why can't I think of it, when I know I _must_ think of it? Why
+can't I look at it as steadily as I have looked at all the rest?
+I feel his kisses on my lips; I feel his tears on my bosom; I
+feel his arms round me again. He is far away in London; and yet,
+he is here and won't let me think of it!
+
+"Why can't I wait a little? Why can't I let Time help me? Time?
+It's Saturday! What need is there to think of it, unless I like?
+There is no post to London to-day. I _must_ wait. If I posted the
+letter, it wouldn't go. Besides, to- morrow I may hear from Mrs.
+Oldershaw. I ought to wait to hear from Mrs. Oldershaw. I can't
+consider myself a free woman till I know what Mrs. Oldershaw
+means to do. There is a necessity for waiting till to-morrow. I
+shall take my bonnet off, and lock the letter up in my desk.
+
+
+"Sunday morning.--There is no resisting it! One after another the
+circumstances crowd on me. They come thicker and thicker, and
+they all force me one way.
+
+"I have got Mother Oldershaw's answer. The wretch fawns on me,
+and cringes to me. I can see, as plainly as if she had
+acknowledged it, that she suspects me of seeing my own way to
+success at Thorpe Ambrose without her assistance . Having found
+threatening me useless, she tries coaxing me now. I am her
+darling Lydia again! She is quite shocked that I could imagine
+she ever really intended to arrest her bosom friend; and she has
+only to entreat me, as a favor to herself, to renew the bill!
+
+"I say once more, no mortal creature could resist it! Time after
+time I have tried to escape the temptation; and time after time
+the circumstances drive me back again. I can struggle no longer.
+The post that takes the letters to-night shall take my letter to
+Midwinter among the rest.
+
+"To-night! If I give myself till to-night, something else may
+happen. If I give myself till to-night, I may hesitate again. I'm
+weary of the torture of hesitating. I must and will have relief
+in the present, cost what it may in the future. My letter to
+Midwinter will drive me mad if I see it staring and staring at me
+in my desk any longer. I can post it in ten minutes' time--and I
+will!
+
+"It is done. The first of the three steps that lead me to the end
+is a step taken. My mind is quieter--the letter is in the post.
+
+"By to-morrow Midwinter will receive it. Before the end of the
+week Armadale must be publicly seen to leave Thorpe Ambrose; and
+I must be publicly seen to leave with him.
+
+"Have I looked at the consequences of my marriage to Midwinter?
+No! Do I know how to meet the obstacle of my husband, when the
+time comes which transforms me from the living Armadale's wife to
+the dead Armadale's widow?
+
+"No! When the time comes, I must meet the obstacle as I best may.
+I am going blindfold, then--so far as Midwinter is
+concerned--into this frightful risk? Yes; blindfold. Am I out of
+my senses? Very likely. Or am I a little too fond of him to look
+the thing in the face? I dare say. Who cares?
+
+"I won't, I won't, I won't think of it! Haven't I a will of my
+own? And can't I think, if I like, of something else?
+
+"Here is Mother Jezebel's cringing letter. _That_ is something
+else to think of. I'll answer it. I am in a fine humor for
+writing to Mother Jezebel.
+
+                              * * * * * * *
+
+_Conclusion of Miss Gwilt's Letter to Mrs. Oldershaw._
+
+".... I told you, when I broke off, that I would wait before I
+finished this, and ask my Diary if I could safely tell you what I
+have now got it in my mind to do. Well, I have asked; and my
+Diary says, 'Don't tell her!' Under these circumstances I close
+my letter--with my best excuses for leaving you in the dark.
+
+"I shall probably be in London before long--and I may tell you by
+word of mouth what I don't think it safe to write here. Mind, I
+make no promise! It all depends on how I feel toward you at the
+time. I don't doubt your discretion; but (under certain
+circumstances) I am not so sure of your courage. L. G."
+
+"P. S.--My best thanks for your permission to renew the bill. I
+decline profiting by the proposal. The money will be ready when
+the money is due. I have a friend now in London who will pay it
+if I ask him. Do you wonder who the friend is? You will wonder at
+one or two other things, Mrs. Oldershaw, before many weeks more
+are over your head and mine."
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+LOVE AND LAW.
+
+ON the morning of Monday, the 28th of July, Miss Gwilt--once more
+on the watch for Allan and Neelie--reached her customary post of
+observation in the park, by the usual roundabout way.
+
+She was a little surprised to find Neelie alone at the place of
+meeting. She was more seriously astonished, when the tardy Allan
+made his appearance ten minutes later, to see him mounting the
+side of the dell, with a large volume under his arm, and to hear
+him say, as an apology for being late, that "he had muddled away
+his time in hunting for the Books; and that he had only found
+one, after all, which seemed in the least likely to repay either
+Neelie or himself for the trouble of looking into it."
+
+If Miss Gwilt had waited long enough in the park, on the previous
+Saturday, to hear the lovers' parting words on that occasion, she
+would have been at no loss to explain the mystery of the volume
+under Allan's arm, and she would have understood the apology
+which he now offered for being late as readily as Neelie herself.
+
+There is a certain exceptional occasion in life--the occasion of
+marriage--on which even girls in their teens sometimes become
+capable (more or less hysterically) of looking at consequences.
+At the farewell moment of the interview on Saturday, Neelie's
+mind had suddenly precipitated itself into the future; and she
+had utterly confounded Allan by inquiring whether the
+contemplated elopement was an offense punishable by the Law? Her
+memory satisfied her that she had certainly read somewhere, at
+some former period, in some book or other (possibly a novel), of
+an elopement with a dreadful end--of a bride dragged home in
+hysterics--and of a bridegroom sentenced to languish in prison,
+with all his beautiful hair cut off, by Act of Parliament, close
+to his head. Supposing she could bring herself to consent to the
+elopement at all--which she positively declined to promise--she
+must first insist on discovering whether there was any fear of
+the police being concerned in her marriage as well  as the parson
+and the clerk. Allan, being a man, ought to know; and to Allan
+she looked for information--with
+ this preliminary assurance to assist him in laying down the law,
+that she would die of a broken heart a thousand times over,
+rather than be the innocent means of sending him to languish in
+prison, and of cutting his hair off, by Act of Parliament, close
+to his head. "It's no laughing matter," said Neelie, resolutely,
+in conclusion; "I decline even to think of our marriage till my
+mind is made easy first on the subject of the Law."
+
+"But I don't know anything about the law, not even as much as you
+do," said Allan. "Hang the law! I don't mind my head being
+cropped. Let's risk it."
+
+"Risk it?" repeated Neelie, indignantly. "Have you no
+consideration for me? I won't risk it! Where there's a will,
+there's a way. We must find out the law for ourselves."
+
+"With all my heart," said Allan. "How?"
+
+"Out of books, to be sure! There must be quantities of
+information in that enormous library of yours at the great house.
+If you really love me, you won't mind going over the backs of a
+few thousand books, for my sake!"
+
+"I'll go over the backs of ten thousand!" cried Allan, warmly.
+"Would you mind telling me what I'm to look for?"
+
+"For 'Law,' to be sure! When it says 'Law' on the back, open it,
+and look inside for Marriage--read every word of it--and then
+come here and explain it to me. What! you don't think your head
+is to be trusted to do such a simple thing as that?"
+
+"I'm certain it isn't, " said Allan. "Can't you help me?"
+
+"Of course I can, if you can't manage without me! Law may be
+hard, but it can't be harder than music; and I must, and will,
+satisfy my mind. Bring me all the books you can find, on Monday
+morning--in a wheelbarrow, if there are a good many of them, and
+if you can't manage it in any other way."
+
+The result of this conversation was Allan's appearance in the
+park, with a volume of Blackstone's Commentaries under his arm,
+on the fatal Monday morning, when Miss Gwilt's written engagement
+of marriage was placed in Midwinter's hands. Here again, in this,
+as in all other human instances, the widely discordant elements
+of the grotesque and the terrible were forced together by that
+subtle law of contrast which is one of the laws of mortal life.
+Amid all the thickening complications now impending over their
+heads--with the shadow of meditated murder stealing toward one of
+them already from the lurking-place that hid Miss Gwilt--the two
+sat down, unconscious of the future, with the book between them;
+and applied themselves to the study of the law of marriage, with
+a grave resolution to understand it, which, in two such students,
+was nothing less than a burlesque in itself!
+
+
+"Find the place," said Neelie, as soon as they were comfortably
+established. "We must manage this by what they call a division of
+labor. You shall read, and I'll take notes."
+
+She produced forthwith a smart little pocket-book and pencil, and
+opened the book in the middle, where there was a blank page on
+the right hand and the left. At the top of the right-hand page
+she wrote the word _Good._ At the top of the left-hand page she
+wrote the word _Bad._ " 'Good' means where the law is on our
+side," she explained; "and 'Bad' means where the law is against
+us. We will have 'Good' and 'Bad' opposite each other, all down
+the two pages; and when we get to the bottom, we'll add them up,
+and act accordingly. They say girls have no heads for business.
+Haven't they! Don't look at me--look at Blackstone, and begin."
+
+"Would you mind giving one a kiss first?" asked Allan.
+
+"I should mind it very much. In our serious situation, when we
+have both got to exert our intellects, I wonder you can ask for
+such a thing!"
+
+"That's why I asked for it," said the unblushing Allan. "I feel
+as if it would clear my head."
+
+"Oh, if it would clear your head, that's quite another thing! I
+must clear your head, of course, at any sacrifice. Only one,
+mind," she whispered, coquettishly; "and pray be careful of
+Blackstone, or you'll lose the place."
+
+There was a pause in the conversation. Blackstone and the
+pocket-book both rolled on the ground together.
+
+"If this happens again," said Neelie, picking up the pocket-book,
+with her eyes and her complexion at their brightest and best, "I
+shall sit with my back to you for the rest of the morning. _Will_
+you go on?"
+
+Allan found his place for the second time, and fell headlong into
+the bottomless abyss of the English Law.
+
+"Page 280," he began. "Law of husband and wife. Here's a bit I
+don't understand, to begin with: 'It may be observed generally
+that the law considers marriage in the light of a Contract.' What
+does that mean? I thought a contract was the sort of a thing a
+builder signs when he promises to have the workmen out of the
+house in a given time, and when the time comes (as my poor mother
+used to say) the workmen never go."
+
+"Is there nothing about Love?" asked Neelie. "Look a little lower
+down."
+
+"Not a word. He sticks to his confounded 'Contract' all the way
+through."
+
+"Then he's a brute! Go on to something else that's more in our
+way."
+
+"Here's a bit that's more in our way: 'Incapacities. If any
+persons under legal incapacities come together, it is a
+meretricious, and not a matrimonial union.' (Blackstone's a good
+one at long words, isn't he? I wonder what he means by
+meretricious?) 'The first of these legal disabilities is a prior
+marriage, and having another husband or wife living--' "
+
+"Stop!" said Neelie; "I must make a note of that." She gravely
+made her first entry on the page headed "Good," as follows: "I
+have no husband, and Allan has no wife. We are both entirely
+unmarried at the present time."
+
+"All right, so far," remarked Allan, looking over her shoulder.
+
+"Go on," said Neelie. "What next?"
+
+" 'The next disability,' " proceeded Allan, " 'is want of age.
+The age for consent to matrimony is, fourteen in males, and
+twelve in females.' Come!" cried Allan, cheerfully, "Blackstone
+begins early enough, at any rate!"
+
+Neelie was too business-like to make any other remark, on her
+side, than the necessary remark in the pocket-book. She made
+another entry under the head of "Good": "I am old enough to
+consent, and so is Allan too. Go on," resumed Neelie, looking
+over the reader's shoulder. "Never mind all that prosing of
+Blackstone's, about the husband being of years of discretion, and
+the wife under twelve. Abominable wretch! the wife under twelve!
+Skip to the third incapacity, if there is one."
+
+" 'The third incapacity,' " Allan went on, " 'is want of reason.'
+"
+
+Neelie immediately made a third entry on the side of "Good":
+"Allan and I are both perfectly reasonable. Skip to the next
+page."
+
+Allan skipped. " 'A fourth incapacity is in respect of proximity
+of relationship.' "
+
+A fourth entry followed instantly on the cheering side of the
+pocket-book: "He loves me, and I love him--without our being in
+the slightest degree related to each other. Any more?" asked
+Neelie, tapping her chin impatiently with the end of the pencil.
+
+"Plenty more," rejoined Allan; "all in hieroglyphics. Look here:
+'Marriage Acts, 4 Geo. IV., c. 76, and 6 and 7 Will. IV., c. 85
+(_q_).' Blackstone's intellect seems to be wandering here. Shall
+we take another skip, and see if he picks himself up again on the
+next page?"
+
+"Wait a little," said Neelie; "what's that I see in the middle?"
+She read for a minute in silence, over Allan's shoulder, and
+suddenly clasped her hands in despair. "I knew I was right!" she
+exclaimed. "Oh, heavens, here it is!"
+
+"Where?" asked Allan. "I see nothing about languishing in prison,
+and cropping a fellow's hair close to his head, unless it's in
+the hieroglyphics. Is '4 Geo. IV.' short for 'Lock him up'? and
+does 'c. 85 (_q_)' mean, 'Send for the hair-cutter'?"
+
+"Pray be serious," remonstrated Neelie. "We are both sitting on a
+volcano. There," she said pointing to the place. "Read it! If
+anything can bring you to a proper sense of our situation, _that_
+will."
+
+Allan cleared his throat, and Neelie held the point of her pencil
+ready on the depressing side of the account--otherwise the "Bad"
+page of the pocket-book.
+
+" 'And as it is the policy of our law,' " Allan began, " 'to
+prevent the marriage of persons under the age of twenty-one,
+without the co nsent of parents and guardians' "--(Neelie made
+her first entry on the side of "Bad!" "I'm only seventeen next
+birthday, and circumstances forbid me to confide my attachment to
+papa")--" 'it is provided that in the case of the publication of
+banns of a person under twenty-one, not being a widower or widow,
+who are deemed emancipated' "--(Neelie made another entry on the
+depressing side: "Allan is not a widower, and I am not a widow;
+consequently, we are neither of us emancipated")--" 'if the
+parent or guardian openly signifies his dissent at the time the
+banns are published' "--("which papa would be certain to do")--"
+'such publication would be void.' I'll take breath here if you'll
+allow me," said Allan. "Blackstone might put it in shorter
+sentences, I think, if he can't put it in fewer words. Cheer up,
+Neelie! there must be other ways of marrying, besides this
+roundabout way, that ends in a Publication and a Void. Infernal
+gibberish! I could write better English myself."
+
+"We are not at the end of it yet," said Neelie. "The Void is
+nothing to what is to come."
+
+"Whatever it is," rejoined Allan, "we'll treat it like a dose of
+physic--we'll take it at once, and be done with it." He went on
+reading: " 'And no license to marry without banns shall be
+granted, unless oath shall be first made by one of the parties
+that he or she believes that there is no impediment of kindred or
+alliance'--well, I can take my oath of that with a safe
+conscience! What next? 'And one of the said parties must, for the
+space of fifteen days immediately preceding such license, have
+had his or her usual place of abode within the parish or chapelry
+within which such marriage is to be solemnized!' Chapelry! I'd
+live fifteen days in a dog-kennel with the greatest pleasure. I
+say, Neelie, all this seems like plain sailing enough. What are
+you shaking your head about? Go on, and I shall see? Oh, all
+right; I'll go on. Here we are: 'And where one of the said
+parties, not being a widower or widow, shall be under the age of
+twenty-one years, oath must first be made that the consent of the
+person or persons whose consent is required has been obtained, or
+that there is no person having authority to give such consent.
+The consent required by this act is that of the father--' " At
+those last formidable words Allan came to a full stop. "The
+consent of the father," he repeated, with all needful seriousness
+of look and manner. "I couldn't exactly swear to that, could I?"
+
+Neelie answered in expressive silence. She handed him the
+pocket-book, with the final entry completed, on the side of
+"Bad," in these terms: "Our marriage is impossible, unless Allan
+commits perjury."
+
+The lovers looked at each other, across the insuperable obstacle
+of Blackstone, in speechless dismay.
+
+"Shut up the book," said Neelie, resignedly. "I have no doubt we
+should find the police, and the prison, and the hair-cutting--all
+punishments for perjury, exactly as I told you!--if we looked at
+the next page. But we needn't trouble ourselves to look; we have
+found out quite enough already. It's all over with us. I must go
+to school on Saturday, and you must manage to forget me as soon
+as you can. Perhaps we may meet in after-life, and you may be a
+widower and I may be a widow, and the cruel law may consider us
+emancipated, when it's too late to be of the slightest use. By
+that time, no doubt, I shall be old and ugly, and you will
+naturally have ceased to care about me, and it will all end in
+the grave, and the sooner the better. Good-by," concluded Neelie,
+rising mournfully, with the tears in her eyes. "It's only
+prolonging our misery to stop here, unless--unless you have
+anything to propose?"
+
+"I've got something to propose," cried the headlong Allan. "It's
+an entirely new idea. Would you mind trying the blacksmith at
+Gretna Green?"
+
+"No earthly consideration," answered Neelie, indignantly, "would
+induce me to be married by a blacksmith!"
+
+"Don't be offended," pleaded Allan; "I meant it for the best.
+Lots of people in our situation have tried the blacksmith, and
+found him quite as good as a clergyman, and a most amiable man, I
+believe, into the bargain. Never mind! We must try another string
+to our bow."
+
+"We haven't got another to try," said Neelie.
+
+"Take my word for it," persisted Allan, stoutly, "there must be
+ways and means of circumventing Blackstone (without perjury), if
+we only knew of them. It's a matter of law, and we must consult
+somebody in the profession. I dare say it's a risk. But nothing
+venture, nothing have. What do you say to young Pedgift? He's a
+thorough good fellow. I'm sure we could trust young Pedgift to
+keep our secret."
+
+"Not for worlds!" exclaimed Neelie. "You may be willing to trust
+your secrets to the vulgar little wretch; I won't have him
+trusted with mine. I hate him. No!" she concluded, with a
+mounting color and a peremptory stamp of her foot on the grass.
+"I positively forbid you to take any of the Thorpe Ambrose people
+into your confidence. They would instantly suspect me, and it
+would be all over the place in a moment. My attachment may be an
+unhappy one, " remarked Neelie, with her handkerchief to her
+eyes, "and papa may nip it in the bud, but I won't have it
+profaned by the town gossip!"
+
+"Hush! hush!" said Allan. "I won't say a word at Thorpe Ambrose,
+I won't indeed!" He paused, and considered for a moment. "There's
+another way!" he burst out, brightening up on the instant. "We've
+got the whole week before us. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll go
+to London!"
+
+There was a sudden rustling--heard neither by one nor the
+other--among the trees behind them that screened Miss Gwilt. One
+more of the difficulties in her way (the difficulty of getting
+Allan to London) now promised to be removed by an act of Allan's
+own will.
+
+"To London?" repeated Neelie, looking up in astonishment.
+
+"To London!" reiterated Allan. "That's far enough away from
+Thorpe Ambrose, surely? Wait a minute, and don't forget that this
+is a question of law. Very well, I know some lawyers in London
+who managed all my business for me when I first came in for this
+property; they are just the men to consult. And if they decline
+to be mixed up in it, there's their head clerk, who is one of the
+best fellows I ever met with in my life. I asked him to go
+yachting with me, I remember; and, though he couldn't go, he said
+he felt the obligation all the same. That's the man to help us.
+Blackstone's a mere infant to him. Don't say it's absurd; don't
+say it's exactly like _me._ Do pray hear me out. I won't breathe
+your name or your father's. I'll describe you as 'a young lady to
+whom I am devotedly attached.' And if my friend the clerk asks
+where you live, I'll say the north of Scotland, or the west of
+Ireland, or the Channel Islands, or anywhere else you like. My
+friend the clerk is a total stranger to Thorpe Ambrose and
+everybody in it (which is one recommendation); and in five
+minutes' time he'd put me up to what to do (which is another). If
+you only knew him! He's one of those extraordinary men who appear
+once or twice in a century--the sort of man who won't allow you
+to make a mistake if you try. All I have got to say to him
+(putting it short) is, 'My dear fellow, I want to be privately
+married without perjury.' All he has got to say to me (putting it
+short) is, 'You must do so-and-so and so-and-so, and you must be
+careful to avoid this, that, and the other.' I have nothing in
+the world to do but to follow his directions; and you have
+nothing in the world to do but what the bride always does when
+the bridegroom is ready and willing!" His arm stole round
+Neelie's waist, and his lips pointed the moral of the last
+sentence with that inarticulate eloquence which is so uniformly
+successful in persuading a woman against her will.
+
+All Neelie's meditated objections dwindled, in spite of her, to
+one feeble little question. "Suppose I allow you to go, Allan?"
+she whispered, toying nervously with the stud in the bosom of his
+shirt. "Shall you be very long away?"
+
+"I'll be off to-day," said Allan, "by the eleven o'clock train.
+And I'll be back to-morrow, if I and my friend the clerk can
+settle it all in time. If not, by Wednesday at latest."
+
+"You'll write to me even day?" pleaded Neelie, clinging a little
+closer to him. "I shall sink under the suspense, if you don't
+promise to write to me every day."
+
+Allan promised to write twice a day, if she
+liked--letter-writing, which was such an effort to other men, was
+no effort to _him!_
+
+"And mind, whatever those people may say to you in London,"
+proceeded Neelie, "I insist on your coming back for me. I
+positively decline to run away, unless you promise to fetch me."
+
+Allan promised for the second time, on his sacred word of honor,
+and at the full compass of his voice. But Neelie was not
+satisfied even yet. She reverted to first principles, and
+insisted on knowing whether Allan was quite sure he loved her.
+Allan called Heaven to witness how sure he was; and got another
+question directly for his pains. Could he solemnly declare that
+he would never regret taking Neelie away from home? Allan called
+Heaven to witness again, louder than ever. All to no purpose! The
+ravenous female appetite for tender protestations still hungered
+for more. "I know what will happen one of these days," persisted
+Neelie. "You will see some other girl who is prettier than I am;
+and you will wish you had married her instead of Me!"
+
+As Allan opened his lips for a final outburst of asseveration,
+the stable clock at the great house was faintly audible in the
+distance striking the hour. Neelie started guiltily. It was
+breakfast-time at the cottage--in other words, time to take
+leave. At the last moment her heart went back to her father; and
+her head sank on Allan's bosom as she tried to say, Good-by.
+"Papa has always been so kind to me, Allan," she whispered,
+holding him back tremulously when he turned to leave her. "It
+seems so guilty and so heartless to go away from him and be
+married in secret. Oh, do, do think before you really go to
+London; is there no way of making him a little kinder and juster
+to _you?_" The question was useless; the major's resolutely
+unfavorable reception of Allan's letter rose in Neelie's memory,
+and answered her as the words passed her lips. With a girl's
+impulsiveness she pushed Allan away before he could speak, and
+signed to him impatiently to go. The conflict of contending
+emotions, which she had mastered thus far, burst its way outward
+in spite of her after he had waved his hand for the last time,
+and had disappeared in the depths of the dell. When she turned
+from the place, on her side, her long-restrained tears fell
+freely at last, and made the lonely way back to the cottage the
+dimmest prospect that Neelie had seen for many a long day past.
+
+As she hurried homeward, the leaves parted behind her, and Miss
+Gwilt stepped softly into the open space. She stood there in
+triumph, tall, beautiful, and resolute. Her lovely color
+brightened while she watched Neelie's retreating figure hastening
+lightly away from her over the grass.
+
+"Cry, you little fool!" she said, with her quiet, clear tones,
+and her steady smile of contempt. "Cry as you have never cried
+yet! You have seen the last of your sweetheart."
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A SCANDAL AT THE STATION.
+
+AN hour later, the landlady at Miss Gwilt's lodgings was lost in
+astonishment, and the clamorous tongues of the children were in a
+state of ungovernable revolt. "Unforeseen circumstances" had
+suddenly obliged the tenant of the first floor to terminate the
+occupation of her apartments, and to go to London that day by the
+eleven o'clock train.
+
+"Please to have a fly at the door at half-past ten," said Miss
+Gwilt, as the amazed landlady followed her upstairs. "And excuse
+me, you good creature, if I beg and pray not to be disturbed till
+the fly comes. "Once inside the room, she locked the door, and
+then opened her writing-desk. "Now for my letter to the major!"
+she said. "How shall I word it?"
+
+A moment's consideration apparently decided her. Searching
+through her collection of pens, she carefully selected the worst
+that could be found, and began the letter by writing the date of
+the day on a soiled sheet of note-paper, in crooked, clumsy
+characters, which ended in a blot made purposely with the feather
+of the pen. Pausing, sometimes to think a little, sometimes to
+make another blot, she completed the letter in these words:
+
+
+"HON'D SIR--It is on my conscience to tell you something, which I
+think you ought to know. You ought to know of the goings-on of
+Miss, your daughter, with young Mister Armadale. I wish you to
+make sure, and, what is more, I advise you to be quick about it,
+if she is going the way you want her to go, when she takes her
+morning walk before breakfast. I scorn to make mischief, where
+there is true love on both sides. But I don't think the young man
+means truly by Miss. What I mean is, I think Miss only has his
+fancy. Another person, who shall be nameless betwixt us, has his
+true heart. Please to pardon my not putting my name; I am only a
+humble person, and it might get me into trouble. This is all at
+present, dear sir, from yours,
+
+"A WELL-WISHER."
+
+
+"There!" said Miss Gwilt, as she folded the letter up. "If I had
+been a professed novelist, I could hardly have written more
+naturally in the character of a servant than that!" She wrote the
+necessary address to Major Milroy; looked admiringly for the last
+time at the coarse and clumsy writing which her own delicate hand
+had produced; and rose to post the letter herself, before she
+entered next on the serious business of packing up. "Curious!"
+she thought, when the letter had been posted, and she was back
+again making her traveling preparations in her own room; "here I
+am, running headlong into a frightful risk--and I never was in
+better spirits in my life!"
+
+The boxes were ready when the fly was at the door, and Miss Gwilt
+was equipped (as becomingly as usual) in her neat traveling
+costume. The thick veil, which she was accustomed to wear in
+London, appeared on her country straw bonnet for the first time."
+One meets such rude men occasionally in the railway," she said to
+the landlady. "And though I dress quietly, my hair is so very
+remarkable." She was a little paler than usual; but she had never
+been so sweet-tempered and engaging, so gracefully cordial and
+friendly, as now, when the moment of departure had come. The
+simple people of the house were quite moved at taking leave of
+her. She insisted on shaking hands with the landlord--on speaking
+to him in her prettiest way, and sunning him in her brightest
+smiles. "Come!" she said to the landlady, "you have been so kind,
+you have been so like a mother to me, you must give me a kiss at
+parting." She embraced the children all together in a lump, with
+a mixture of humor and tenderness delightful to see, and left a
+shilling among them to buy a cake. "If I was only rich enough to
+make it a sovereign," she whispered to the mother, "how glad I
+should be!" The awkward lad who ran on errands stood waiting at
+the fly door. He was clumsy, he was frowsy, he had a gaping mouth
+and a turn-up nose; but the ineradicable female delight in being
+charming accepted him, for all that, in the character of a last
+chance. "You dear, dingy John!" she said, kindly, at the carriage
+door. "I am so poor I have only sixpence to give you--with my
+very best wishes. Take my advice, John--grow to be a fine man,
+and find yourself a nice sweetheart! Thank you a thousand times!"
+She gave him a friendly little pat on the cheek with two of her
+gloved fingers, and smiled, and nodded, and got into the fly.
+
+"Armadale next!" she said to herself as the carriage drove off.
+
+Allan's anxiety not to miss the train had brought him to the
+station in better time than usual. After taking his ticket and
+putting his portmanteau under the porter's charge, he was pacing
+the platform and thinking of Neelie, when he heard the rustling
+of a lady's dress behind him, and, turning round to look, found
+himself face to face with Miss Gwilt.
+
+There was no escaping her this time. The station wall was on his
+right hand, and the line was on his left; a tunnel was behind
+him, and Miss Gwilt was in front, inquiring in her sweetest  tones
+whether Mr. Armadale was going to London.
+
+Allan colored scarlet with vexation and surprise. There he was
+ obviously waiting for the train; and there was his portmanteau
+close by, with his name on it, already labeled for London! What
+answer but the true one could he make after that? Could he let
+the train go without him, and lose the precious hours so vitally
+important to Neelie and himself? Impossible! Allan helplessly
+confirmed the printed statement on his portmanteau, and heartily
+wished himself at the other end of the world as he said the
+words.
+
+"How very fortunate!" rejoined Miss Gwilt. "I am going to London
+too. Might I ask you Mr. Armadale (as you seem to be quite
+alone), to be my escort on the journey?"
+
+Allan looked at the little assembly of travelers, and travelers'
+friends, collected on the platform, near the booking-office door.
+They were all Thorpe Ambrose people. He was probably known by
+sight, and Miss Gwilt was probably known by sight, to every one
+of them. In sheer desperation, hesitating more awkwardly than
+ever, he produced his cigar case. "I should be delighted," he
+said, with an embarrassment which was almost an insult under the
+circumstances. "But I--I'm what the people who get sick over a
+cigar call a slave to smoking."
+
+"I delight in smoking!" said Miss Gwilt, with undiminished
+vivacity and good humor. "It's one of the privileges of the men
+which I have always envied. I'm afraid, Mr. Armadale, you must
+think I am forcing myself on you. It certainly looks like it. The
+real truth is, I want particularly to say a word to you in
+private about Mr. Midwinter."
+
+The train came up at the same moment. Setting Midwinter out of
+the question, the common decencies of politeness left Allan no
+alternative but to submit. After having been the cause of her
+leaving her situation at Major Milroy's, after having pointedly
+avoided her only a few days since on the high-road, to have
+declined going to London in the same carriage with Miss Gwilt
+would have been an act of downright brutality which it was simply
+impossible to commit. "Damn her!" said Allan, internally, as he
+handed his traveling companion into an empty carriage,
+officiously placed at his disposal, before all the people at the
+station, by the guard. "You shan't be disturbed, sir," the man
+whispered, confidentially, with a smile and a touch of his hat.
+Allan could have knocked him down with the utmost pleasure.
+"Stop!" he said, from the window. "I don't want the carriage--"
+It was useless; the guard was out of hearing; the whistle blew,
+and the train started for London.
+
+The select assembly of travelers' friends, left behind on the
+platform, congregated in a circle on the spot, with the
+station-master in the center.
+
+The station-master--otherwise Mr. Mack--was a popular character
+in the neighborhood. He possessed two social qualifications which
+invariably impress the average English mind--he was an old
+soldier, and he was a man of few words. The conclave on the
+platform insisted on taking his opinion, before it committed
+itself positively to an opinion of its own. A brisk fire of
+remarks exploded, as a matter of course, on all sides; but
+everybody's view of the subject ended interrogatively, in a
+question aimed pointblank at the station-master's ears.
+
+"She's got him, hasn't she?" "She'll come back 'Mrs. Armadale,'
+won't she?" "He'd better have stuck to Miss Milroy, hadn't he?"
+"Miss Milroy stuck to _him._ She paid him a visit at the great
+house, didn't she?" "Nothing of the sort; it's a shame to take
+the girl's character away. She was caught in a thunder-storm
+close by; he was obliged to give her shelter; and she's never
+been near the place since. Miss Gwilt's been there, if you like,
+with no thunderstorm to force _her_ in; and Miss Gwilt's off with
+him to London in a carriage all to themselves, eh, Mr. Mack?"
+"Ah, he's a soft one, that Armadale! with all his money, to take
+up with a red-haired woman, a good eight or nine years older than
+he is! She's thirty if she's a day. That's what I say, Mr. Mack.
+What do you say?" "Older or younger, she'll rule the roast at
+Thorpe Ambrose; and I say, for the sake of the place, and for the
+sake of trade, let's make the best of it; and Mr. Mack, as a man
+of the world, sees it in the same light as I do, don't you, sir?"
+
+"Gentlemen," said the station-master, with his abrupt military
+accent, and his impenetrable military manner, "she's a devilish
+fine woman. And when I was Mr. Armadale's age, it's my opinion,
+if her fancy had laid that way, she might have married Me."
+
+With that expression of opinion the station-master wheeled to the
+right, and intrenched himself impregnably in the stronghold of
+his own office.
+
+The citizens of Thorpe Ambrose looked at the closed door, and
+gravely shook their heads. Mr. Mack had disappointed them. No
+opinion which openly recognizes the frailty of human nature is
+ever a popular opinion with mankind. "It's as good as saying that
+any of _us_ might have married her if _we_ had been Mr.
+Armadale's age!" Such was the general impression on the minds of
+the conclave, when the meeting had been adjourned, and the
+members were leaving the station.
+
+The last of the party to go was a slow old gentleman, with a
+habit of deliberately looking about him. Pausing at the door,
+this observant person stared up the platform and down the
+platform, and discovered in the latter direction, standing behind
+an angle of the wall, an elderly man in black, who had escaped
+the notice of everybody up to that time. "Why, bless my soul!"
+said the old gentleman, advancing inquisitively by a step at a
+time, "it can't be Mr. Bashwood!"
+
+It _was_ Mr. Bashwood--Mr. Bashwood, whose constitutional
+curiosity had taken him privately to the station, bent on solving
+the mystery of Allan's sudden journey to London--Mr. Bashwood,
+who had seen and heard, behind his angle in the wall, what
+everybody else had seen and heard, and who appeared to have been
+impressed by it in no ordinary way. He stood stiffly against the
+wall, like a man petrified, with one hand pressed on his bare
+head, and the other holding his hat--he stood, with a dull flush
+on his face, and a dull stare in his eyes, looking straight into
+the black depths of the tunnel outside the station, as if the
+train to London had disappeared in it but the moment before.
+
+"Is your head bad?" asked the old gentleman. "Take my advice. Go
+home and lie down."
+
+Mr. Bashwood listened mechanically, with his usual attention, and
+answered mechanically, with his usual politeness.
+
+"Yes, sir," he said, in a low, lost tone, like a man between
+dreaming and waking; "I'll go home and lie down."
+
+"That's right," rejoined the old gentleman, making for the door.
+"And take a pill, Mr. Bashwood--take a pill."
+
+Five minutes later, the porter charged with the business of
+locking up the station found Mr. Bashwood, still standing
+bare-headed against the wall, and still looking straight into the
+black depths of the tunnel, as if the train to London had
+disappeared in it but a moment since.
+
+"Come, sir!" said the porter; "I must lock up. Are you out of
+sorts? Anything wrong with your inside? Try a drop of
+gin-and-bitters."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Bashwood, answering the porter, exactly as he had
+answered the old gentleman; "I'll try a drop of gin-and-bitters."
+
+The porter took him by the arm, and led him out. "You'll get it
+there," said the man, pointing confidentially to a public-house;
+"and you'll get it good."
+
+"I shall get it there," echoed Mr. Bashwood, still mechanically
+repeating what was said to him; "and I shall get it good."
+
+His will seemed to be paralyzed; his actions depended absolutely
+on what other people told him to do. He took a few steps in the
+direction of the public-house, hesitated, staggered, and caught
+at the pillar of one of the station lamps near him.
+
+The porter followed, and took him by the arm once more.
+
+"Why, you've been drinking already!" exclaimed the man, with a
+suddenly quickened interest in Mr. Bashwood's case. "What was it?
+Beer?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood, in his low, lost tones, echoed the last word.
+
+It was close on the porter's dinner-time. But, when the lower
+orders of the English people believe they have discovered an
+intoxicated man, their sympathy with him is boundless. The porter
+let his dinner take i ts chance, and carefully assisted Mr.
+Bashwood to reach the public-house. "Gin-and-bitters will put you
+on your legs again," whispered this Samaritan setter-right of the
+alcoholic disasters of mankind.
+
+If Mr. Bashwood had really been intoxicated, the effect of the
+porter's remedy would have been marvelous indeed. Almost as soon
+as the glass was emptied, the stimulant did its work. The
+long-weakened nervous system of the deputy-steward, prostrated
+for the moment by the shock that had fallen on it, rallied again
+like a weary horse under the spur. The dull flush on his cheeks,
+the dull stare in his eyes, disappeared simultaneously. After a
+momentary effort, he recovered memory enough of what had passed
+to thank the porter, and to ask whether he would take something
+himself. The worthy creature instantly accepted a dose of his own
+remedy--in the capacity of a preventive--and went home to dinner
+as only those men can go home who are physically warmed by
+gin-and-bitters and morally elevated by the performance of a good
+action.
+
+Still strangely abstracted (but conscious now of the way by which
+he went), Mr. Bashwood left the public-house a few minutes later,
+in his turn. He walked on mechanically, in his dreary black
+garments, moving like a blot on the white surface of the
+sun-brightened road, as Midwinter had seen him move in the early
+days at Thorpe Ambrose, when they had first met. Arrived at the
+point where he had to choose between the way that led into the
+town and the way that led to the great house, he stopped,
+incapable of deciding, and careless, apparently, even of making
+the attempt. "I'll be revenged on her!" he whispered to himself,
+still absorbed in his jealous frenzy of rage against the woman
+who had deceived him. "I'll be revenged on her," he repeated, in
+louder tones, "if I spend every half-penny I've got!"
+
+Some women of the disorderly sort, passing on their way to the
+town, heard him. "Ah, you old brute," they called out, with the
+measureless license of their class, "whatever she did, she served
+you right!"
+
+The coarseness of the voices startled him, whether he
+comprehended the words or not. He shrank away from more
+interruption and more insult, into the quieter road that led to
+the great house.
+
+At a solitary place by the wayside he stopped and sat down. He
+took off his hat and lifted his youthful wig a little from his
+bald old head, and tried desperately to get beyond the one
+immovable conviction which lay on his mind like lead--the
+conviction that Miss Gwilt had been purposely deceiving him from
+the first. It was useless. No effort would free him from that one
+dominant impression, and from the one answering idea that it had
+evoked--the idea of revenge. He got up again, and put on his hat
+and walked rapidly forward a little way--then turned without
+knowing why, and slowly walked back again "If I had only dressed
+a little smarter!" said the poor wretch, helplessly. "If I had
+only been a little bolder with her, she might have overlooked my
+being an old man!" The angry fit returned on him. He clinched his
+clammy, trembling hands, and shook them fiercely in the empty
+air. "I'll be revenged on her," he reiterated. "I'll be revenged
+on her, if I spend every half-penny I've got!" It was terribly
+suggestive of the hold she had taken on him, that his vindictive
+sense of injury could not get far enough away from her to reach
+the man whom he believed to be his rival, even yet. In his rage,
+as in his love, he was absorbed, body and soul, by Miss Gwilt.
+
+In a moment more, the noise of running wheels approaching from
+behind startled him. He turned and looked round. There was Mr.
+Pedgift the elder, rapidly overtaking him in the gig, just as Mr.
+Pedgift had overtaken him once already, on that former occasion
+when he had listened under the window at the great house, and
+when the lawyer had bluntly charged him with feeling a curiosity
+about Miss Gwilt!
+
+In an instant the inevitable association of ideas burst on his
+mind. The opinion of Miss Gwilt, which he had heard the lawyer
+express to Allan at parting, flashed back into his memory, side
+by side with Mr. Pedgift's sarcastic approval of anything in the
+way of inquiry which his own curiosity might attempt. "I may be
+even with her yet," he thought, "if Mr. Pedgift will help
+me!--Stop, sir!" he called out, desperately, as the gig came up
+with him. "If you please, sir, I want to speak to you."
+
+Pedgift Senior slackened the pace of his fast-trotting mare,
+without pulling up. "Come to the office in half an hour," he
+said; "I'm busy now." Without waiting for an answer, without
+noticing Mr. Bashwood's bow, he gave the mare the rein again, and
+was out of sight in another minute.
+
+Mr. Bashwood sat down once more in a shady place by the roadside.
+He appeared to be incapable of feeling any slight but the one
+unpardonable slight put upon him by Miss Gwilt. He not only
+declined to resent, he even made the best of Mr. Pedgift's
+unceremonious treatment of him. "Half an hour," he said,
+resignedly. "Time enough to compose myself; and I want time. Very
+kind of Mr. Pedgift, though he mightn't have meant it."
+
+The sense of oppression in his head forced him once again to
+remove his hat. He sat with it on his lap, deep in thought; his
+face bent low, and the wavering fingers of one hand drumming
+absently on the crown of the hat. If Mr. Pedgift the elder,
+seeing him as he sat now, could only have looked a little way
+into the future, the monotonously drumming hand of the
+deputy-steward might have been strong enough, feeble as it was,
+to stop the lawyer by the roadside. It was the worn, weary,
+miserable old hand of a worn, weary, miserable old man; but it
+was, for all that (to use the language of Mr. Pedgift's own
+parting prediction to Allan), the hand that was now destined to
+"let the light in on Miss Gwilt."
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+AN OLD MAN'S HEART.
+
+PUNCTUAL to the moment, when the half hour's interval had
+expired, Mr. Bashwood was announced at the office as waiting to
+see Mr. Pedgift by special appointment.
+
+The lawyer looked up from his papers with an air of annoyance: he
+had totally forgotten the meeting by the roadside. "See what he
+wants," said Pedgift Senior to Pedgift Junior, working in the
+same room with him. "And if it's nothing of importance, put it
+off to some other time."
+
+Pedgift Junior swiftly disappeared and swiftly returned.
+
+"Well?" asked the father.
+
+"Well," answered the son, "he is rather more shaky and
+unintelligible than usual. I can make nothing out of him, except
+that he persists in wanting to see you. My own idea," pursued
+Pedgift Junior, with his usual, sardonic gravity, "is that he is
+going to have a fit, and that he wishes to acknowledge your
+uniform kindness to him by obliging you with a private view of
+the whole proceeding."
+
+Pedgift Senior habitually matched everybody--his son
+included--with their own weapons. "Be good enough to remember,
+Augustus," he rejoined, "that my Room is not a Court of Law. A
+bad joke is not invariably followed by 'roars of laughter'
+_here._ Let Mr. Bashwood come in."
+
+Mr. Bashwood was introduced, and Pedgift Junior withdrew. "You
+mustn't bleed him, sir," whispered the incorrigible joker, as he
+passed the back of his father's chair. "Hot-water bottles to the
+soles of his feet, and a mustard plaster on the pit of his
+stomach--that's the modern treatment."
+
+"Sit down, Bashwood," said Pedgift Senior when they were alone.
+"And don't forget that time's money. Out with it, whatever it is,
+at the quickest possible rate, and in the fewest possible words."
+
+These preliminary directions, bluntly but not at all unkindly
+spoken, rather increased than diminished the painful agitation
+under which Mr. Bashwood was suffering. He stammered more
+helplessly, he trembled more continuously than usual, as he made
+his little speech of thanks, and added his apologies at the end
+for intruding on his patron in business hours.
+
+"Everybody in the place, Mr. Pedgift, sir, knows your time is
+valuable. Oh, dear, yes! oh, dear, yes! most valuable, most
+valuable! Excuse me, sir, I'm coming out with it. Your
+goodness--or rather your business--no, your goodness gave me half
+an hour to wait--and I ha ve thought of what I had to say, and
+prepared it, and put it short." Having got as far as that, he
+stopped with a pained, bewildered look. He had put it away in his
+memory, and now, when the time came, he was too confused to find
+it. And there was Mr. Pedgift mutely waiting; his face and manner
+expressive alike of that silent sense of the value of his own
+time which every patient who has visited a great doctor, every
+client who has consulted a lawyer in large practice, knows so
+well. "Have you heard the news, sir?" stammered Mr. Bashwood,
+shifting his ground in despair, and letting the uppermost idea in
+his mind escape him, simply because it was the one idea in him
+that was ready to come out.
+
+"Does it concern _me?_" asked Pedgift Senior, mercilessly brief,
+and mercilessly straight in coming to the point.
+
+"It concerns a lady, sir--no, not a lady--a young man, I ought to
+say, in whom you used to feel some interest. Oh, Mr. Pedgift,
+sir, what do you think! Mr. Armadale and Miss Gwilt have gone up
+to London together to-day--alone, sir--alone in a carriage
+reserved for their two selves. Do you think he's going to marry
+her? Do you really think, like the rest of them, he's going to
+marry her?"
+
+He put the question with a sudden flush in his face and a sudden
+energy in his manner. His sense of the value of the lawyer's
+time, his conviction of the greatness of the lawyer's
+condescension, his constitutional shyness and timidity--all
+yielded together to his one overwhelming interest in hearing Mr.
+Pedgift's answer. He was loud for the first time in his life in
+putting the question.
+
+"After my experience of Mr. Armadale," said the lawyer, instantly
+hardening in look and manner, "I believe him to be infatuated
+enough to marry Miss Gwilt a dozen times over, if Miss Gwilt
+chose to ask him. Your news doesn't surprise me in the least,
+Bashwood. I'm sorry for him. I can honestly say that, though he
+_has_ set my advice at defiance. And I'm more sorry still," he
+continued, softening again as his mind reverted to his interview
+with Neelie under the trees of the park--"I'm more sorry still
+for another person who shall be nameless. But what have I to do
+with all this? And what on earth is the matter with you?" he
+resumed, noticing for the first time the abject misery in Mr.
+Bashwood's manner, the blank despair in Mr. Bashwood's face,
+which his answer had produced. "Are you ill? Is there something
+behind the curtain that you're afraid to bring out? I don't
+understand it. Have you come here--here in my private room, in
+business hours--with nothing to tell me but that young Armadale
+has been fool enough to ruin his prospects for life? Why, I
+foresaw it all weeks since, and what is more, I as good as told
+him so at the last conversation I had with him in the great
+house."
+
+At those last words, Mr. Bashwood suddenly rallied. The lawyer's
+passing reference to the great house had led him back in a moment
+to the purpose that he had in view.
+
+"That's it, sir!" he said, eagerly; "that's what I wanted to
+speak to you about; that's what I've been preparing in my mind.
+Mr. Pedgift, sir, the last time you were at the great house, when
+you came away in your gig, you--you overtook me on the drive."
+
+"I dare say I did," remarked Pedgift, resignedly. "My mare
+happens to be a trifle quicker on her legs than you are on yours,
+Bashwood. Go on, go on. We shall come in time, I suppose, to what
+you are driving at."
+
+"You stopped, and spoke to me, sir," proceeded Mr. Bashwood,
+advancing more and more eagerly to his end. "You said you
+suspected me of feeling some curiosity about Miss Gwilt, and you
+told me (I remember the exact words, sir)--you told me to gratify
+my curiosity by all means, for you didn't object to it."
+
+Pedgift Senior began for the first time to look interested in
+hearing more.
+
+"I remember something of the sort," he replied; "and I also
+remember thinking it rather remarkable that you should
+_happen_--we won't put it in any more offensive way--to be
+exactly under Mr. Armadale's open window while I was talking to
+him. It might have been accident, of course; but it looked rather
+more like curiosity. I could only judge by appearances,"
+concluded Pedgift, pointing his sarcasm with a pinch of snuff;
+"and appearances, Bashwood, were decidedly against you."
+
+"I don't deny it, sir. I only mentioned the circumstance because
+I wished to acknowledge that I _was_ curious, and _am_ curious
+about Miss Gwilt."
+
+"Why?" asked Pedgift Senior, seeing something under the surface
+in Mr. Bashwood's face and manner, but utterly in the dark thus
+far as to what that something might be.
+
+There was silence for a moment. The moment passed, Mr. Bashwood
+took the refuge usually taken by nervous, unready men, placed in
+his circumstances, when they are at a loss for an answer. He
+simply reiterated the assertion that he had just made. "I feel
+some curiosity sir," he said, with a strange mixture of
+doggedness and timidity, "about Miss Gwilt."
+
+There was another moment of silence. In spite of his practiced
+acuteness and knowledge of the world, the lawyer was more puzzled
+than ever. The case of Mr. Bashwood presented the one human
+riddle of all others which he was least qualified to solve.
+Though year after year witnesses in thousands and thousands of
+cases, the remorseless disinheriting of nearest and dearest
+relations, the unnatural breaking-up of sacred family ties, the
+deplorable severance of old and firm friendships, due entirely to
+the intense self-absorption which the sexual passion can produce
+when it enters the heart of an old man, the association of love
+with infirmity and gray hairs arouses, nevertheless, all the
+world over, no other idea than the idea of extravagant
+improbability or extravagant absurdity in the general mind. If
+the interview now taking place in Mr. Pedgift's consulting-room
+had taken place at his dinner-table instead, when wine had opened
+his mind to humorous influences, it is possible that he might, by
+this time, have suspected the truth. But, in his business hours,
+Pedgift Senior was in the habit of investigating men's motives
+seriously from the business point of view; and he was on that
+very account simply incapable of conceiving any improbability so
+startling, any absurdity so enormous, as the absurdity and
+improbability of Mr. Bashwood's being in love.
+
+Some men in the lawyer's position would have tried to force their
+way to enlightenment by obstinately repeating the unanswered
+question. Pedgift Senior wisely postponed the question until he
+had moved the conversation on another step. "Well," he resumed,
+"let us say you feel a curiosity about Miss Gwilt. What next?"
+
+The palms of Mr. Bashwood's hands began to moisten under the
+influence of his agitation, as they had moistened in the past
+days when he had told the story of his domestic sorrows to
+Midwinter at the great house. Once more he rolled his
+handkerchief into a ball, and dabbed it softly to and fro from
+one hand to the other.
+
+"May I ask if I am right, sir," he began, "in believing that you
+have a very unfavorable opinion of Miss Gwilt? You are quite
+convinced, I think--"
+
+"My good fellow," interrupted Pedgift Senior, "why need you be in
+any doubt about it? You were under Mr. Armadale's open window all
+the while I was talking to him; and your ears, I presume, were
+not absolutely shut."
+
+Mr. Bashwood showed no sense of the interruption. The little
+sting of the lawyer's sarcasm was lost in the nobler pain that
+wrung him from the wound inflicted by Miss Gwilt.
+
+"You are quite convinced, I think, sir," he resumed, "that there
+are circumstances in this lady's past life which would be highly
+discreditable to her if they were discovered at the present
+time?"
+
+"The window was open at the great house, Bashwood; and your ears,
+I presume, were not absolutely shut."
+
+Still impenetrable to the sting, Mr. Bashwood persisted more
+obstinately than ever.
+
+"Unless I am greatly mistaken," he said, "your long experience in
+such things has even suggested to you, sir, that Miss Gwilt might
+turn out to be known to the police?"
+
+Pedgift Senior's patience gave way. "You have been over ten
+minutes in this room," he broke out. "Can you, or can you not,
+tell me in plain English what you want?"
+
+In plain English--with the passion that had transformed him, the
+passion which (in Miss Gwilt's own words) had made a man of him,
+burning in his haggard cheeks--Mr. Bashwood met the challenge,
+and faced the lawyer (as, the worried sheep faces the dog) on his
+own ground.
+
+"I wish to say, sir," he answered, "that your opinion in this
+matter is my opinion too. I believe there is something wrong in
+Miss Gwilt's past life which she keeps concealed from everybody,
+and I want to be the man who knows it."
+
+Pedgift Senior saw his chance, and instantly reverted to the
+question that he had postponed. "Why?" he asked for the second
+time.
+
+For the second time Mr. Bashwood hesitated.
+
+Could he acknowledge that he had been mad enough to love her, and
+mean enough to be a spy for her? Could he say, She has deceived
+me from the first, and she has deserted me, now her object is
+served. After robbing me of my happiness, robbing me of my honor,
+robbing me of my last hope left in life, she has gone from me
+forever, and left me nothing but my old man's longing, slow and
+sly, and strong and changeless, for revenge. Revenge that I may
+have, if I can poison her success by dragging her frailties into
+the public view. Revenge that I will buy (for what is gold or
+what is life to me?) with the last farthing of my hoarded money
+and the last drop of my stagnant blood. Could he say that to the
+man who sat waiting for his answer? No; he could only crush it
+down and be silent.
+
+The lawyer's expression began to harden once more.
+
+"One of us must speak out," he said; "and as you evidently won't,
+I will. I can only account for this extraordinary anxiety of
+yours to make yourself acquainted with Miss Gwilt's secrets, in
+one of two ways. Your motive is either an excessively mean one
+(no offense, Bashwood, I am only putting the case), or an
+excessively generous one. After my experience of your honest
+character and your creditable conduct, it is only your due that I
+should absolve you at once of the mean motive. I believe you are
+as incapable as I am--I can say no more--of turning to mercenary
+account any discoveries you might make to Miss Gwilt's prejudice
+in Miss Gwilt's past life. Shall I go on any further? or would
+you prefer, on second thoughts, opening your mind frankly to me
+of your own accord?"
+
+"I should prefer not interrupting you, sir," said Mr. Bashwood.
+
+"As you please, " pursued Pedgift Senior. "Having absolved you of
+the mean motive, I come to the generous motive next. It is
+possible that you are an unusually grateful man; and it is
+certain that Mr. Armadale has been remarkably kind to you. After
+employing you under Mr. Midwinter, in the steward's office, he
+has had confidence enough in your honesty and your capacity, now
+his friend has left him, to put his business entirely and
+unreservedly in your hands. It's not in my experience of human
+nature--but it may be possible, nevertheless---that you are so
+gratefully sensible of that confidence, and so gratefully
+interested in your employer's welfare, that you can't see him, in
+his friendless position, going straight to his own disgrace and
+ruin, without making an effort to save him. To put it in two
+words. Is it your idea that Mr. Armadale might be prevented from
+marrying Miss Gwilt, if he could be informed in time of her real
+character? And do you wish to be the man who opens his eyes to
+the truth? If that is the case--"
+
+He stopped in astonishment. Acting under some uncontrollable
+impulse, Mr. Bashwood had started to his feet. He stood, with his
+withered face lit up by a sudden irradiation from within, which
+made him look younger than his age by a good twenty years--he
+stood, gasping for breath enough to speak, and gesticulated
+entreatingly at the lawyer with both hands.
+
+"Say it again, sir!" he burst out, eagerly, recovering his breath
+before Pedgift Senior had recovered his surprise. "The question
+about Mr. Armadale, sir!--only once more!--only once more, Mr.
+Pedgift, please!"
+
+With his practiced observation closely and distrustfully at work
+on Mr. Bashwood' s face, Pedgift Senior motioned to him to sit
+down again, and put the question for the second time.
+
+"Do I think," said Mr. Bashwood, repeating the sense, but not the
+words of the question, "that Mr. Armadale might be parted from
+Miss Gwilt, if she could be shown to him as she really is? Yes,
+sir ! And do I wish to be the man who does it? Yes, sir! yes,
+sir! ! yes, sir! ! !"
+
+"It's rather strange," remarked the lawyer, looking at him more
+and more distrustfully, "that you should be so violently
+agitated, simply because my question happens to have hit the
+mark."
+
+The question happened to have hit a mark which Pedgift little
+dreamed of. It had released Mr. Bashwood's mind in an instant
+from the dead pressure of his one dominant idea of revenge, and
+had shown him a purpose to be achieved by the discovery of Miss
+Gwilt's secrets which had never occurred to him till that moment.
+The marriage which he had blindly regarded as inevitable was a
+marriage that might be stopped--not in Allan's interests, but in
+his own--and the woman whom he believed that he had lost might
+yet, in spite of circumstances, be a woman won! His brain whirled
+as he thought of it. His own roused resolution almost daunted
+him, by its terrible incongruity with all the familiar habits of
+his mind, and all the customary proceedings of his life.
+
+Finding his last remark unanswered, Pedgift Senior considered a
+little before he said anything more.
+
+"One thing is clear," reasoned the lawyer with himself. "His true
+motive in this matter is a motive which he is afraid to avow. My
+question evidently offered him a chance of misleading me, and he
+has accepted it on the spot. That's enough for _me._ If I was Mr.
+Armadale's lawyer, the mystery might be worth investigating. As
+things are, it's no interest of mine to hunt Mr. Bashwood from
+one lie to another till I run him to earth at last. I have
+nothing whatever to do with it; and I shall leave him free to
+follow his own roundabout courses, in his own roundabout way."
+Having arrived at that conclusion, Pedgift Senior pushed back his
+chair, and rose briskly to terminate the interview.
+
+"Don't be alarmed, Bashwood," he began. "The subject of our
+conversation is a subject exhausted, so far as I am concerned. I
+have only a few last words to say, and it's a habit of mine, as
+you know, to say my last words on my legs. Whatever else I may be
+in the dark about, I have made one discovery, at any rate. I have
+found out what you really want with me--at last! You want me to
+help you."
+
+"If you would be so very, very kind, sir!" stammered Mr.
+Bashwood. "If you would only give me the great advantage of your
+opinion and advice."
+
+"Wait a bit, Bashwood We will separate those two things, if you
+please. A lawyer may offer an opinion like any other man; but
+when a lawyer gives his advice--by the Lord Harry, sir, it's
+Professional! You're welcome to my opinion in this matter; I have
+disguised it from nobody. I believe there have been events in
+Miss Gwilt's career which (if they could be discovered) would
+even make Mr. Armadale, infatuated as he is, afraid to marry
+her--supposing, of course, that he really _is_ going to marry
+her; for, though the appearances are in favor of it so far, it is
+only an assumption, after all. As to the mode of proceeding by
+which the blots on this woman's character might or might not be
+brought to light in time--she may be married by license in a
+fortnight if she likes--_that_ is a branch of the question on
+which I positively decline to enter. It implies speaking in my
+character as a lawyer, and giving you, what I decline positively
+to give you, my professional advice."
+
+"Oh, sir, don't say that!" pleaded Mr. Bashwood. "Don't deny me
+the great favor, the inestimable advantage of your advice! I have
+such a poor head, Mr. Pedgift! I am so old and so slow, sir, and
+I get so sadly startled and worried when I'm thrown out of my
+ordinary ways. It's quite natural you should be a little
+impatient with me for taking up your time--I know that time is
+money, to a clever man like you. Would you excuse me --would you
+please excuse me, if I venture to say that I have saved a little
+something, a few pounds, sir; and being quite lonely, with nobody
+dependent on me, I'm sure I may spend my savings as I please?"
+Blind to every consideration but the one consideration of
+propitiating Mr. Pedgift, he took out a dingy, ragged old
+pocket-book, and tried, with trembling fingers, to open it on the
+lawyer's table.
+
+"Put your pocket-book back directly," said Pedgift Senior.
+"Richer men than you have tried that argument with me, and have
+found that there is such a thing (off the stage) as a lawyer who
+is not to be bribed. I will have nothing to do with the case,
+under existing circumstances. If you want to know why, I beg to
+inform you that Miss Gwilt ceased to be professionally
+interesting to me on the day when I ceased to be Mr. Armadale's
+lawyer. I may have other reasons besides, which I don't think it
+necessary to mention. The reason already given is explicit
+enough. Go your own way, and take your responsibility on your own
+shoulders. You _may_ venture within reach of Miss Gwilt's claws
+and come out again without being scratched. Time will show. In
+the meanwhile, I wish you good-morning--and I own, to my shame,
+that I never knew till today what a hero you were."
+
+This time, Mr. Bashwood felt the sting. Without another word of
+expostulation or entreaty, without even saying "Good-morning" on
+his side, he walked to the door, opened it, softly, and left the
+room.
+
+The parting look in his face, and the sudden silence that had
+fallen on him, were not lost on Pedgift Senior. "Bashwood will
+end badly," said the lawyer, shuffling his papers, and returning
+impenetrably to his interrupted work.
+
+The change in Mr. Bashwood's face and manner to something dogged
+and self-contained was so startlingly uncharacteristic of him,
+that it even forced itself on the notice of Pedgift Junior and
+the clerks as he passed through the outer office. Accustomed to
+make the old man their butt, they took a boisterously comic view
+of the marked alteration in him. Deaf to the merciless raillery
+with which he was assailed on all sides, he stopped opposite
+young Pedgift, and, looking him attentively in the face, said, in
+a quiet, absent manner, like a man thinking aloud, "I wonder
+whether _you_ would help me?"
+
+"Open an account instantly," said Pedgift Junior to the clerks,
+"in the name of Mr. Bashwood. Place a chair for Mr. Bashwood,
+with a footstool close by, in case he wants it. Supply me with a
+quire of extra double-wove satin paper, and a gross of picked
+quills, to take notes of Mr. Bashwood's case; and inform my
+father instantly that I am going to leave him and set up in
+business for myself, on the strength of Mr. Bashwood's patronage.
+Take a seat, sir, pray take a seat, and express your feelings
+freely."
+
+Still impenetrably deaf to the raillery of which he was the
+object, Mr. Bashwood waited until Pedgift Junior had exhausted
+himself, and then turned quietly away.
+
+"I ought to have known better," he said, in the same absent
+manner as before. "He is his father's son all over--he would make
+game of me on my death-bed." He paused a moment at the door,
+mechanically brushing his hat with his hand, and went out into
+the street.
+
+The bright sunshine dazzled his eyes, the passing vehicles and
+foot-passengers startled and bewildered him. He shrank into a
+by-street, and put his hand over his eyes. "I'd better go home,"
+he thought, "and shut myself up, and think about it in my own
+room."
+
+His lodging was in a small house, in the poor quarter of the
+town. He let himself in with his key, and stole softly upstairs
+The one little room he possessed met him cruelly, look round it
+where he might, with silent memorials of Miss Gwilt. On the
+chimney-piece were the flowers she had given him at various
+times, all withered long since, and all preserved on a little
+china pedestal, protected by a glass shade. On the wall hung a
+wretched colored print of a woman, which he had caused to be
+nicely framed and glazed, because there was a look in it that
+reminded him of her face. In his clumsy old mahogany writing-desk
+were the few letters, brief and peremptory, which she had written
+to him at the time when he was watching and listening meanly at
+Thorpe Ambrose to please _her._ And when, turning his back on
+these, he sat down wearily on his sofa-bedstead--there, hanging
+over one end of it, was the gaudy cravat of blue satin, which he
+had bought because she had told him she liked bright colors, and
+which he had never yet had the courage to wear, though he had
+taken it out morning after morning with the resolution to put it
+on! Habitually quiet in his actions, habitually restrained in his
+language, he now seized the cravat as if it was a living thing
+that could feel, and flung it to the other end of the room with
+an oath.
+
+The time passed; and still, though his resolution to stand
+between Miss Gwilt and her marriage remained unbroken, he was as
+far as ever from discovering the means which might lead him to
+his end. The more he thought and thought of it, the darker and
+the darker his course in the future looked to him.
+
+He rose again, as wearily as he had sat down, and went to his
+cupboard. "I'm feverish and thirsty," he said; "a cup of tea may
+help me." He opened his canister, and measured out his small
+allowance of tea, less carefully than usual. "Even my own hands
+won't serve me to-day!" he thought, as he scraped together the
+few grains of tea that he had spilled, and put them carefully
+back in the canister.
+
+In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the
+kitchen fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his
+teapot in his hand.
+
+Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the
+many English matrons whose path through this world is a path of
+thorns; and who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity
+is afforded them, in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet
+of other people in a like condition with themselves. Her one vice
+was of the lighter sort--the vice of curiosity; and among the
+many counterbalancing virtues she possessed was the virtue of
+greatly respecting Mr. Bashwood, as a lodger whose rent was
+regularly paid, and whose ways were always quiet and civil from
+one year's end to another.
+
+"What did you please to want, sir?" asked the landlady. "Boiling
+water, is it? Did you ever know the water boil, Mr. Bashwood,
+when you wanted it? Did you ever see a sulkier fire than that?
+I'll put a stick or two in, if you'll wait a little, and give me
+the chance. Dear, dear me, you'll excuse my mentioning it, sir,
+but how poorly you do look to-day!"
+
+The strain on Mr. Bashwood's mind was beginning to tell.
+Something of the helplessness which he had shown at the station
+appeared again in his face and manner as he put his teapot on the
+kitchen table and sat down.
+
+"I'm in trouble, ma'am," he said, quietly; "and I find trouble
+gets harder to bear than it used to be."
+
+"Ah, you may well say that!" groaned the landlady. "_I'm_ ready
+for the undertaker, Mr. Bashwood, when _my_ time comes, whatever
+you may be. You're too lonely, sir. When you're in trouble, it's
+some help--though not much--to shift a share of it off on another
+person's shoulders. If your good lady had only been alive now,
+sir, what a comfort you would have found her, wouldn't you?"
+
+A momentary spasm of pain passed across Mr. Bashwood's face. The
+landlady had ignorantly recalled him to the misfortunes of his
+married life. He had been long since forced to quiet her
+curiosity about his family affairs by telling her that he was a
+widower, and that his domestic circumstances had not been happy
+ones; but he had taken her no further into his confidence than
+this. The sad story which he had related to Midwinter, of his
+drunken wife who had ended her miserable life in a lunatic
+asylum, was a story which he had shrunk from confiding to the
+talkative woman, who would have confided it in her turn to every
+one else in the house.
+
+"What I always say to my husband when he's low, sir," pursued the
+landlady, intent on the kettle, "is, 'What would you do _now,_
+Sam, without Me?' When his temper don't get the better of him (
+it will boil directly, Mr. Bashwood), he says, 'Elizabeth, I
+could do nothing.' When his temper does get the better of him, he
+says, 'I should try the public-house, missus; and I'll try it
+now.' Ah, I've got _my_ troubles! A man with grown-up sons and
+daughters tippling in a public-house! I don't call to mind, Mr.
+Bashwood, whether _you_ ever had any sons and daughters? And yet,
+now I think of it, I seem to fancy you said yes, you had.
+Daughters, sir, weren't they? and, ah, dear! dear! to be sure!
+all dead."
+
+"I had one daughter, ma'am," said Mr. Bashwood, patiently--"only
+one, who died before she was a year old."
+
+"Only one!" repeated the sympathizing landlady. "It's as near
+boiling as it ever will be, sir; give me the tea-pot. Only one!
+Ah, it comes heavier (don't it?) when it's an only child? You
+said it was an only child, I think, didn't you, sir?"
+
+For a moment, Mr. Bashwood looked at the woman with vacant eyes,
+and without attempting to answer her. After ignorantly recalling
+the memory of the wife who had disgraced him, she was now, as
+ignorantly, forcing him back on the miserable remembrance of the
+son who had ruined and deserted him. For the first time, since he
+had told his story to Midwinter, at their introductory interview
+in the great house, his mind reverted once more to the bitter
+disappointment and disaster of the past. Again he thought of the
+bygone days, when he had become security for his son, and when
+that son's dishonesty had forced him to sell everything he
+possessed to pay the forfeit that was exacted when the forfeit
+was due. "I have a son, ma'am," he said, becoming conscious that
+the landlady was looking at him in mute and melancholy surprise.
+"I did my best to help him forward in the world, and he has
+behaved very badly to me."
+
+"Did he, now?" rejoined the landlady, with an appearance of the
+greatest interest. "Behaved badly to you--almost broke your
+heart, didn't he? Ah, it will come home to him, sooner or later.
+Don't you fear! 'Honor your father and mother,' wasn't put on
+Moses's tables of stone for nothing, Mr. Bashwood. Where may he
+be, and what is he doing now, sir?"
+
+The question was in effect almost the same as the question which
+Midwinter had put when the circumstances had been described to
+him. As Mr. Bashwood had answered it on the former occasion, so
+(in nearly the same words) he answered it now.
+
+"My son is in London, ma'am, for all I know to the contrary. He
+was employed, when I last heard of him, in no very creditable
+way, at the Private Inquiry Office--"
+
+At those words he suddenly checked himself. His face flushed, his
+eyes brightened; he pushed away the cup which had just been
+filled for him, and rose from his seat. The landlady started back
+a step. There was something in her lodger's face that she had
+never seen in it before.
+
+"I hope I've not offended you, sir," said the woman, recovering
+her self-possession, and looking a little too ready to take
+offense on her side, at a moment's notice.
+
+"Far from it, ma'am, far from it!" he rejoined, in a strangely
+eager, hurried way. "I have just remembered something--something
+very important. I must go upstairs--it's a letter, a letter, a
+letter. I'll come back to my tea, ma'am. I beg your pardon, I'm
+much obliged to you, you've been very kind--I'll say good-by, if
+you'll allow me, for the present." To the landlady's amazement,
+he cordially shook hands with her, and made for the door, leaving
+tea and tea-pot to take care of themselves.
+
+The moment he reached his own room, he locked himself in. For a
+little while he stood holding by the chimney-piece, waiting to
+recover his breath. The moment he could move again, he opened his
+writing-desk on the table. "That for you, Mr. Pedgift and Son!"
+he said, with a snap of his fingers as he sat down. "I've got a
+son too!"
+
+There was a knock at the door--a knock, soft, considerate, and
+confidential. The anxious landlady wished to know whether Mr.
+Bashwood was ill, and begged to intimate for the second time that
+she earnestly trusted she had given him no offense.
+
+"No! no!" he called through the door. "I'm quite well--I'm
+writing, ma'am, I'm writing--please to excuse me. She's a good
+woman; she's an excellent woman," he thought, when the landlady
+had retired. "I'll make her a little present. My mind's so
+unsettled, I might never have thought of it but for her. Oh, if
+my boy is at the office still! Oh, if I can only write a letter
+that will make him pity me!"
+
+He took up his pen, and sat thinking anxiously, thinking long,
+before he touched the paper. Slowly, with many patient pauses to
+think and think again, and with more than ordinary care to make
+his writing legible, he traced these lines:
+
+
+"MY DEAR JAMES--You will be surprised, I am afraid, to see my
+handwriting. Pray don't suppose I am going to ask you for money,
+or to reproach you for having sold me out of house and home when
+you forfeited your security, and I had to pay. I am willing and
+anxious to let by-gones be by-gones, and to forget the past.
+
+"It is in your power (if you are still at the Private Inquiry
+Office) to do me a great service. I am in sore anxiety and
+trouble on the subject of a person in whom I am interested. The
+person is a lady. Please don't make game of me for confessing
+this, if you can help it. If you knew what I am now suffering, I
+think you would be more inclined to pity than to make game of me.
+
+"I would enter into particulars, only I know your quick temper,
+and I fear exhausting your patience. Perhaps it may be enough to
+say that I have reason to believe the lady's past life has not
+been a very creditable one, and that I am interested--more
+interested than words can tell--in finding out what her life has
+really been, and in making the discovery within a fortnight from
+the present time.
+
+"Though I know very little about the ways of business in an
+office like yours, I can understand that, without first having
+the lady's present address, nothing can be done to help me.
+Unfortunately, I am not yet acquainted with her present address.
+I only know that she went to town to-day, accompanied by a
+gentleman, in whose employment I now am, and who (as I believe)
+will be likely to write to me for money before many days more are
+over his head.
+
+"Is this circumstance of a nature to help us? I venture to say
+'us,' because I count already, my dear boy, on your kind
+assistance and advice. Don't let money stand between us; I have
+saved a little something, and it is all freely at your disposal.
+Pray, pray write to me by return of post! If you will only try
+your best to end the dreadful suspense under which I am now
+suffering, you will atone for all the grief and disappointment
+you caused me in times that are past, and you will confer an
+obligation that he will never forget on
+
+"Your affectionate father,
+
+"FELIX BASHWOOD."
+
+
+After waiting a little, to dry his eyes, Mr. Bashwood added the
+date and address, and directed the letter to his son, at "The
+Private Inquiry Office, Shadyside Place, London." That done, he
+went out at once, and posted his letter with his own hands. It
+was then Monday; and, if the answer was sent by return of post,
+the answer would be received on Wednesday morning.
+
+The interval day, the Tuesday, was passed by Mr. Bashwood in the
+steward's office at the great house. He had a double motive for
+absorbing himself as deeply as might be in the various
+occupations connected with the management of the estate. In the
+first place, employment helped him to control the devouring
+impatience with which he looked for the coming of the next day.
+In the second place, the more forward he was with the business of
+the office, the more free he would be to join his son in London,
+without attracting suspicion to himself by openly neglecting the
+interests placed under his charge.
+
+Toward the Tuesday afternoon, vague rumors of something wrong at
+the cottage found their way (through Major Milroy's servants) to
+the servants at the great house, and attempted ineffectually
+through this latter channel to engage the attention of Mr.
+Bashwood, impenetrably fixed on other things. The major and Miss
+Neelie had been shut up together in mysterious conference; and
+Miss Neelie's appearance after the close of the interview plainly
+showed that she had been crying. This had happened on the Monday
+afternoon; and on the next day (that present Tuesday) the major
+had startled the household by announcing briefly that his
+daughter wanted a change to the air of the seaside, and that he
+proposed taking her himself, by the next train, to Lowestoft. The
+two had gone away together, both very serious and silent, but
+both, apparently, very good friends, for all that. Opinions at
+the great house attributed this domestic revolution to the
+reports current on the subject of Allan and Miss Gwilt. Opinions
+at the cottage rejected that solution of the difficulty, on
+practical grounds. Miss Neelie had remained inaccessibly shut up
+in her own room, from the Monday afternoon to the Tuesday morning
+when her father took her away. The major, during the same
+interval, had not been outside the door, and had spoken to nobody
+And Mrs. Milroy, at the first attempt of her new attendant to
+inform her of the prevailing scandal in the town, had sealed the
+servant's lips by flying into one of her terrible passions the
+instant Miss Gwilt's name was mentioned. Something must have
+happened, of course, to take Major Milroy and his daughter so
+suddenly from home; but that something was certainly not Mr.
+Armadale's scandalous elopement, in broad daylight, with Miss
+Gwilt.
+
+The afternoon passed, and the evening passed, and no other event
+happened but the purely private and personal event which had
+taken place at the cottage. Nothing occurred (for nothing in the
+nature of things _could_ occur) to dissipate the delusion on
+which Miss Gwilt had counted--the delusion which all Thorpe
+Ambrose now shared with Mr. Bashwood, that she had gone privately
+to London with Allan in the character of Allan's future wife.
+
+On the Wednesday morning, the postman, entering the street in
+which Mr. Bashwood lived, was encountered by Mr. Bashwood
+himself, so eager to know if there was a letter for him that he
+had come out without his hat. There _was_ a letter for him--the
+letter that he longed for from his vagabond son.
+
+These were the terms in which Bashwood the younger answered his
+father's supplication for help--after having previously ruined
+his father's prospects for life:
+
+
+"Shadyside Place. Tuesday, July 29th.
+
+"MY DEAR DAD--We have some little practice in dealing with
+mysteries at this office; but the mystery of your letter beats me
+altogether. Are you speculating on the interesting hidden
+frailties of some charming woman? Or, after _your_ experience of
+matrimony, are you actually going to give me a stepmother at this
+time of day? Whichever it is, upon my life your letter interests
+me.
+
+"I am not joking, mind--though the temptation is not an easy one
+to resist. On the contrary, I have given you a quarter of an hour
+of my valuable time already. The place you date from sounded
+somehow familiar to me. I referred back to the memorandum book,
+and found that I was sent down to Thorpe Ambrose to make private
+inquiries not very long since. My employer was a lively old lady,
+who was too sly to give us her right name and address. As a
+matter of course, we set to work at once, and found out who she
+was. Her name is Mrs. Oldershaw; and, if you think of _her_ for
+my stepmother, I strongly recommend you to think again before you
+make her Mrs. Bashwood.
+
+"If it is not Mrs. Oldershaw, then all I can do, so far, is to
+tell you how you may find out the unknown lady's address. Come to
+town yourself as soon as you get the letter you expect from the
+gentleman who has gone away with her (I hope he is not a handsome
+young man, for your sake) and call here. I will send somebody to
+help you in watching his hotel or lodgings; and if he
+communicates with the lady, or the lady with him, you may
+consider her address discovered from that moment. Once let me
+identify her, and know where she is, and you shall see all her
+charming little secrets as plainly as you see the paper on which
+your affectionate son is now writing to you.
+
+"A word more about the terms. I am as willing as you are to be
+friends again; but, though I own you were out of pocket by me
+once, I can't afford to be out of pocket by you. It must be
+understood that you are answerable for all the expenses of the
+inquiry. We may have to employ some of the women attached to this
+office, if your lady is too wideawake or too nice-looking to be
+dealt with by a man. There will be cab hire, and
+postage-stamps--admissions to public amusements, if she is
+inclined that way--shillings for pew-openers, if she is serious,
+and takes our people into churches to hear popular preachers, and
+so on. My own professional services you shall have gratis; but I
+can't lose by you as well. Only remember that, and you shall have
+your way. By-gones shall be by-gones, and we will forget the
+past.
+
+"Your affectionate son,
+
+"JAMES BASHWOOD."
+
+
+In the ecstasy of seeing help placed at last within his reach,
+the father put his son's atrocious letter to his lips. "My good
+boy!" he murmured, tenderly--"my dear, good boy!"
+
+He put the letter down, and fell into a new train of thought. The
+next question to face was the serious question of time. Mr.
+Pedgift had told him Miss Gwilt might be married in a fortnight.
+One day of the fourteen had passed already, and another was
+passing. He beat his hand impatiently on the table at his side,
+wondering how soon the want of money would force Allan to write
+to him from London. "To-morrow?" he asked himself. "Or next day?"
+
+The morrow passed, and nothing happened. The next day came, and
+the letter arrived! It was on business, as he had anticipated; it
+asked for money, as he had anticipated; and there, at the end of
+it, in a postscript, was the address added, concluding with the
+words, "You may count on my staying here till further notice."
+
+He gave one deep gasp of relief, and instantly busied
+himself--though there were nearly two hours to spare before the
+train started for London--in packing his bag. The last thing he
+put in was his blue satin cravat. "She likes bright colors," he
+said, "and she may see me in it yet!"
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
+
+"All Saints' Terrace, New Road, London, July 28th, Monday
+night.--I can hardly hold my head up, I am so tired. But in my
+situation, I dare not trust anything to memory. Before I go to
+bed, I must write my customary record of the events of the day.
+
+"So far, the turn of luck in my favor (it was long enough before
+it took the turn!) seems likely to continue. I succeeded in
+forcing Armadale--the brute required nothing short of
+forcing!--to leave Thorpe Ambrose for London, alone in the same
+carriage with me, before all the people in the station. There was
+a full attendance of dealers in small scandal, all staring hard
+at us, and all evidently drawing their own conclusions. Either I
+knew nothing of Thorpe Ambrose--or the town gossip is busy enough
+by this time with Mr. Armadale and Miss Gwilt.
+
+"I had some difficulty with him for the first half-hour after we
+left the station. The guard (delightful man! I felt so grateful
+to him!) had shut us up together, in expectation of half a crown
+at the end of the journey. Armadale was suspicious of me, and he
+showed it plainly. Little by little I tamed my wild beast--partly
+by taking care to display no curiosity about his journey to town,
+and partly by interesting him on the subject of his friend
+Midwinter; dwelling especially on the opportunity that now
+offered itself for a reconciliation between them. I kept harping
+on this string till I set his tongue going, and made him amuse me
+as a gentleman is bound to do when he has the honor of escorting
+a lady on a long railway journey.
+
+"What little mind he has was full, of course, of his own affairs
+and Miss Milroy's. No words can express the clumsiness he showed
+in trying to talk about himself, without taking me into his
+confidence or mentioning Miss Milroy's name.
+
+"He was going to London, he gravely informed me, on a matter of
+indescribable interest to him. It was a secret for the present,
+but he hoped to tell it me soon; it had made a great difference
+already in the way in which he looked at the sl anders spoken of
+him in Thorpe Ambrose; he was too happy to care what the
+scandal-mongers said of him now, and he should soon stop their
+mouths by appearing in a new character that would surprise them
+all. So he blundered on, with the firm persuasion that he was
+keeping me quite in the dark. It was hard not to laugh, when I
+thought of my anonymous letter on its way to the major; but I
+managed to control myself--though, I must own, with some
+difficulty. As the time wore on, I began to feel a terrible
+excitement; the position was, I think, a little too much for me.
+There I was, alone with him, talking in the most innocent, easy,
+familiar manner, and having it in my mind all the time to brush
+his life out of my way, when the moment comes, as I might brush a
+stain off my gown. It made my blood leap, and my checks flush. I
+caught myself laughing once or twice much louder than I ought;
+and long before we got to London I thought it desirable to put my
+face in hiding by pulling down my veil.
+
+"There was no difficulty, on reaching the terminus, in getting
+him to come in the cab with me to the hotel where Midwinter is
+staying. He was all eagerness to be reconciled with his dear
+friend--principally, I have no doubt, because he wants the dear
+friend to lend a helping hand to the elopement. The real
+difficulty lay, of course, with Midwinter. My sudden journey to
+London had allowed me no opportunity of writing to combat his
+superstitious conviction that he and his former friend are better
+apart. I thought it wise to leave Armadale in the cab at the
+door, and to go into the hotel by myself to pave the way for him.
+
+"Fortunately, Midwinter had not gone out. His delight at seeing
+me some days sooner than he had hoped had something infectious in
+it, I suppose. Pooh! I may own the truth to my own diary! There
+was a moment when _I_ forgot everything in the world but our two
+selves as completely as he did. I felt as if I was back in my
+teens--until I remembered the lout in the cab at the door. And
+then I was five-and-thirty again in an instant.
+
+"His face altered when he heard who was below, and what it was I
+wanted of him; he looked not angry, but distressed. He yielded,
+however, before long, not to my reasons, for I gave him none, but
+to my entreaties. His old fondness for his friend might possibly
+have had some share in persuading him against his will; but my
+own opinion is that he acted entirely under the influence of his
+fondness for Me.
+
+"I waited in the sitting-room while he went down to the door; so
+I knew nothing of what passed between them when they first saw
+each other again. But oh, the difference between the two men when
+the interval had passed, and they came upstairs together and
+joined me.
+
+"They were both agitated, but in such different ways! The hateful
+Armadale, so loud and red and clumsy; the dear, lovable
+Midwinter, so pale and quiet, with such a gentleness in his voice
+when he spoke, and such tenderness in his eyes every time they
+turned my way. Armadale overlooked me as completely as if I had
+not been in the room. _He_ referred to me over and over again in
+the conversation; _he_ constantly looked at me to see what I
+thought, while I sat in my corner silently watching them; _he_
+wanted to go with me and see me safe to my lodgings, and spare me
+all trouble with the cabman and the luggage. When I thanked him
+and declined, Armadale looked unaffectedly relieved at the
+prospect of seeing my back turned, and of having his friend all
+to himself. I left him, with his awkward elbows half over the
+table, scrawling a letter (no doubt to Miss Milroy), and shouting
+to the waiter that he wanted a bed at the hotel. I had calculated
+on his staying, as a matter of course, where he found his friend
+staying. It was pleasant to find my anticipations realized, and
+to know that I have as good as got him now under my own eye.
+
+"After promising to let Midwinter know where he could see me
+to-morrow, I went away in the cab to hunt for lodgings by myself.
+
+"With some difficulty I have succeeded in getting an endurable
+sitting-room and bedroom in this house, where the people are
+perfect strangers to me. Having paid a week's rent in advance
+(for I naturally preferred dispensing with a reference), I find
+myself with exactly three shillings and ninepence left in my
+purse. It is impossible to ask Midwinter for money, after he has
+already paid Mrs. Oldershaw's note of hand. I must borrow
+something to-morrow on my watch and chain at the pawnbroker's.
+Enough to keep me going for a fortnight is all, and more than
+all, that I want. In that time, or in less than that time,
+Midwinter will have married me.
+
+
+"July 29th.--Two o'clock.--Early in the morning I sent a line to
+Midwinter, telling him that he would find me here at three this
+afternoon. That done, I devoted the morning to two errands of my
+own. One is hardly worth mentioning--it was only to raise money
+on my watch and chain. I got more than I expected; and more (even
+supposing I buy myself one or two little things in the way of
+cheap summer dress) than I am at all likely to spend before the
+wedding-day.
+
+"The other errand was of a far more serious kind. It led me into
+an attorney's office.
+
+"I was well aware last night (though I was too weary to put it
+down in my diary), that I could not possibly see Midwinter this
+morning--in the position he now occupies toward me--without at
+least _appearing_ to take him into my confidence on the subject
+of myself and my circumstances. Excepting one necessary
+consideration which I must be careful not to overlook. there is
+not the least difficulty in my drawing on my invention, and
+telling him any story I please--for thus far I have told no story
+to anybody. Midwinter went away to London before it was possible
+to approach the subject. As to the Milroys (having provided them
+with the customary reference), I could fortunately keep them at
+arms-length on all questions relating purely to myself. And
+lastly, when I affected my reconciliation with Armadale on the
+drive in front of the house, he was fool enough to be too
+generous to let me defend my character. When I had expressed my
+regret for having lost my temper and threatened Miss Milroy, and
+when I had accepted his assurance that my pupil had never done or
+meant to do me any injury, he was too magnanimous to hear a word
+on the subject of my private affairs. Thus I am quite unfettered
+by any former assertions of my own; and I may tell any story I
+please--with the one drawback hinted at already in the shape of a
+restraint. Whatever I may invent in the way of pure fiction, I
+must preserve the character in which I have appeared at Thorpe
+Ambrose; for, with the notoriety that is attached to _my other
+name,_ I have no other choice but to marry Midwinter in my maiden
+name as 'Miss Gwilt.'
+
+"This was the consideration that took me into the lawyer's
+office. I felt that I must inform myself, before I saw Midwinter
+later in the day, of any awkward consequences that may follow the
+marriage of a widow if she conceals her widow's name.
+
+"Knowing of no other professional person whom I could trust, I
+went boldly to the lawyer who had my interests in his charge, at
+that terrible past time in my life, which I have more reason than
+ever to shrink from thinking of now. He was astonished, and, as I
+could plainly detect, by no means pleased to see me. I had hardly
+opened my lips before he said he hoped I was not consulting him
+_again_ (with a strong emphasis on the word) on my own account. I
+took the hint, and put the question I had come to ask, in the
+interests of that accommodating personage on such occasions--an
+absent friend. The lawyer evidently saw through it at once; but
+he was sharp enough to turn my 'friend' to good account on his
+side. He said he would answer the question as a matter of
+courtesy toward a lady represented by myself; but he must make it
+a condition that this consultation of him by deputy should go no
+further.
+
+"I accepted his terms; for I really respected the clever manner
+in which he contrived to keep me at arms-length without violating
+the laws of good-breeding. In two minutes I heard what he had to
+say, mastered it in my own mi nd, and went out.
+
+"Short as it was, the consultation told me everything I wanted to
+know. I risk nothing by marrying Midwinter in my maiden instead
+of my widow's name. The marriage is a good marriage in this way:
+that it can only be set aside if my husband finds out the
+imposture, and takes proceedings to invalidate our marriage in my
+lifetime. That is the lawyer's answer in the lawyer's own words.
+It relieves me at once--in this direction, at any rate--of all
+apprehension about the future. The only imposture my husband will
+ever discover--and then only if he happens to be on the spot--is
+the imposture that puts me in the place, and gives me the income,
+of Armadale's widow; and by that time I shall have invalidated my
+own marriage forever.
+
+"Half-past two! Midwinter will be here in half an hour. I must go
+and ask my glass how I look. I must rouse my invention, and make
+up my little domestic romance. Am I feeling nervous about it?
+Something flutters in the place where my heart used to be. At
+five-and-thirty, too! and after such a life as mine!
+
+
+Six o'clock.--He has just gone. The day for our marriage is a day
+determined on already.
+
+"I have tried to rest and recover myself. I can't rest. I have
+come back to these leaves. There is much to be written in them
+since Midwinter has been here, that concerns me nearly.
+
+"Let me begin with what I hate most to remember, and so be the
+sooner done with it--let me begin with the paltry string of
+falsehoods which I told him about my family troubles.
+
+"What _can_ be the secret of this man's hold on me? How is it
+that he alters me so that I hardly know myself again? I was like
+myself in the railway carriage yesterday with Armadale. It was
+surely frightful to be talking to the living man, through the
+whole of that long journey, with the knowledge in me all the
+while that I meant to be his widow--and yet I was only excited
+and fevered. Hour after hour I never shrunk once from speaking to
+Armadale; but the first trumpery falsehood I told Midwinter
+turned me cold when I saw that he believed it! I felt a dreadful
+hysterical choking in the throat when he entreated me not to
+reveal my troubles. And once--I am horrified when I think of
+it--once, when he said, 'If I _could_ love you more dearly, I
+should love you more dearly now,' I was within a hair-breadth of
+turning traitor to myself. I was on the very point of crying out
+to him, 'Lies! all lies! I'm a fiend in human shape! Marry the
+wretchedest creature that prowls the streets, and you will marry
+a better woman than me!' Yes! the seeing his eyes moisten, the
+hearing his voice tremble, while I was deceiving him, shook me in
+that way. I have seen handsomer men by hundreds, cleverer men by
+dozens. What can this man have roused in me? Is it Love? I
+thought I _had_ loved, never to love again. Does a woman not love
+when the man's hardness to her drives her to drown herself? A man
+drove _me_ to that last despair in days gone by. Did all my
+misery at that time come from something which was not Love? Have
+I lived to be five-and-thirty, and am I only feeling now what
+Love really is?--now, when it is too late? Ridiculous! Besides,
+what is the use of asking? What do I know about it? What does any
+woman ever know? The more we think of it, the more we deceive
+ourselves. I wish I had been born an animal. My beauty might have
+been of some use to me then--it might have got me a good master.
+
+"Here is a whole page of my diary filled; and nothing written yet
+that is of the slightest use to me! My miserable made-up story
+must be told over again here, while the incidents are fresh in my
+memory--or how am I to refer to it consistently on
+after-occasions when I may be obliged to speak of it again?
+
+"There was nothing new in what I told him; it was the commonplace
+rubbish of the circulating libraries. A dead father; a lost
+fortune; vagabond brothers, whom I dread ever seeing again; a
+bedridden mother dependent on my exertions--No! I can't write it
+down! I hate myself, I despise myself, when I remember that _he_
+believed it because I said it--that _he_ was distressed by it
+because it was my story! I will face the chances of contradicting
+myself--I will risk discovery and ruin--anything rather than
+dwell on that contemptible deception of him a moment longer.
+
+"My lies came to an end at last. And then he talked to me of
+himself and of his prospects. Oh, what a relief it was to turn to
+that at the time! What a relief it is to come to it now!
+
+"He has accepted the offer about which he wrote to me at Thorpe
+Ambrose; and he is now engaged as occasional foreign
+correspondent to the new newspaper. His first destination is
+Naples. I wish it had been some other place, for I have certain
+past associations with Naples which I am not at all anxious to
+renew. It has been arranged that he is to leave England not later
+than the eleventh of next month. By that time, therefore, I, who
+am to go with him, must go with him as his wife.
+
+"There is not the slightest difficulty about the marriage. All
+this part of it is so easy that I begin to dread an accident.
+
+"The proposal to keep the thing strictly private--which it might
+have embarrassed me to make--comes from Midwinter. Marrying me in
+his own name--the name that he has kept concealed from every
+living creature but myself and Mr. Brock--it is his interest that
+not a soul who knows him should be present at the ceremony; his
+friend Armadale least of all. He has been a week in London
+already. When another week has passed, he proposes to get the
+License, and to be married in the church belonging to the parish
+in which the hotel is situated. These are the only necessary
+formalities. I had but to say 'Yes' (he told me), and to feel no
+further anxiety about the future. I said 'Yes' with such a
+devouring anxiety about the future that I was afraid he would see
+it. What minutes the next few minutes were, when he whispered
+delicious words to me, while I hid my face on his breast!
+
+"I recovered myself first, and led him back to the subject of
+Armadale, having my own reasons for wanting to know what they
+said to each other after I had left them yesterday.
+
+"The manner in which Midwinter replied showed me that he was
+speaking under the restraint of respecting a confidence placed in
+him by his friend. Long before he had done, I detected what the
+confidence was. Armadale had been consulting him (exactly as I
+anticipated) on the subject of the elopement. Although he appears
+to have remonstrated against taking the girl secretly away from
+her home, Midwinter seems to have felt some delicacy about
+speaking strongly, remembering (widely different as the
+circumstances are) that he was contemplating a private marriage
+himself. I gathered, at any rate, that he had produced very
+little effect by what he had said; and that Armadale had already
+carried out his absurd intention of consulting the head-clerk in
+the office of his London lawyers.
+
+"Having got as far as this, Midwinter put the question which I
+felt must come sooner or later. He asked if I objected to our
+engagement being mentioned, in the strictest secrecy, to his
+friend.
+
+" 'I will answer,' he said, 'for Allan's respecting any
+confidence that I place in him. And I will undertake, when the
+time comes, so to use my influence over him as to prevent his
+being present at the marriage, and discovering (what he must
+never know) that my name is the same as his own. It would help
+me,' he went on, 'to speak more strongly about the object that
+has brought him to London, if I can requite the frankness with
+which he has spoken of his private affairs to me by the same
+frankness on my side.'
+
+"I had no choice but to give the necessary permission, and I gave
+it. It is of the utmost importance to me to know what course
+Major Milroy takes with his daughter and Armadale after receiving
+my anonymous letter; and, unless I invite Armadale's confidence
+in some way, I am nearly certain to be kept in the dark. Let him
+once be trusted with the knowledge that I am to be Midwinter's
+wife, and what he tells his friend about his love affair he will
+tell me.
+
+"When it had been understood between us that Armadale was to be
+taken into our confid ence, we began to talk about ourselves
+again. How the time flew! What a sweet enchantment it was to
+forget everything in his arms! How he loves me!--ah, poor fellow,
+how he loves me!
+
+"I have promised to meet him to-morrow morning in the Regent's
+Park. The less he is seen here the better. The people in this
+house are strangers to me, certainly; but it may be wise to
+consult appearances, as if I was still at Thorpe Ambrose, and not
+to produce the impression, even on their minds, that Midwinter is
+engaged to me. If any after-inquiries are made, when I have run
+my grand risk, the testimony of my London landlady might be
+testimony worth having.
+
+"That wretched old Bashwood! Writing of Thorpe Ambrose reminds me
+of him. What will he say when the town gossip tells him that
+Armadale has taken me to London, in a carriage reserved for
+ourselves? It really is too absurd in a man of Bashwood's age and
+appearance to presume to be in love! . . . .
+
+
+"July 30th.---News at last! Armadale has heard from Miss Milroy.
+My anonymous letter has produced its effect. The girl is removed
+from Thorpe Ambrose already; and the whole project of the
+elopement is blown to the winds at once and forever. This was the
+substance of what Midwinter had to tell me when I met him in the
+Park. I affected to be excessively astonished, and to feel the
+necessary feminine longing to know all the particulars. 'Not that
+I expect to have my curiosity satisfied,' I added, 'for Mr.
+Armadale and I are little better than mere acquaintances, after
+all.'
+
+" 'You are far more than a mere acquaintance in Allan's eyes,'
+said Midwinter. 'Having your permission to trust him, I have
+already told him how near and dear you are to me.'
+
+"Hearing this, I thought it desirable, before I put any questions
+about Miss Milroy, to attend to my own interests first, and to
+find out what effect the announcement of my coming marriage had
+produced on Armadale. It was possible that he might be still
+suspicious of me, and that the inquiries he made in London, at
+Mrs. Milroy's instigation, might be still hanging on his mind.
+
+" 'Did Mr. Armadale seem surprised,' I asked, 'when you told him
+of our engagement, and when you said it was to be kept a secret
+from everybody?'
+
+" 'He seemed greatly surprised,' said Midwinter, 'to hear that we
+were going to be married. All he said when I told him it must be
+kept a secret was that he supposed there were reasons on your
+side for making the marriage a private one.'
+
+" 'What did you say,' I inquired, 'when he made that remark?'
+
+" 'I said the reasons were on my side,' answered Midwinter. 'And
+I thought it right to add--considering that Allan had allowed
+himself to be misled by the ignorant distrust of you at Thorpe
+Ambrose--that you had confided to me the whole of your sad family
+story, and that you had amply justified your unwillingness; under
+any ordinary circumstances, to speak of your private affairs.'
+
+("I breathed freely again. He had said just what was wanted, just
+in the right way.)
+
+" 'Thank you,' I said, 'for putting me right in your friend's
+estimation. Does he wish to see me?' I added, by way of getting
+back to the other subject of Miss Milroy and the elopement.
+
+" 'He is longing to see you,' returned Midwinter. 'He is in great
+distress, poor fellow--distress which I have done my best to
+soothe, but which, I believe, would yield far more readily to a
+woman's sympathy than to mine.'
+
+" 'Where is he now?' I asked.
+
+"He was at the hotel; and to the hotel I instantly proposed that
+we should go. It is a busy, crowded place; and (with my veil
+down) I have less fear of compromising myself there than at my
+quiet lodgings. Besides, it is vitally important to me to know
+what Armadale does next, under this total change of
+circumstances--for I must so control his proceedings as to get
+him away from England if I can. We took a cab: such was my
+eagerness to sympathize with the heart-broken lover, that we took
+a cab!
+
+"Anything so ridiculous as Armadale's behavior under the double
+shock of discovering that his young lady has been taken away from
+him, and that I am to be married to Midwinter, I never before
+witnessed in all my experience. To say that he was like a child
+is a libel on all children who are not born idiots. He
+congratulated me on my coming marriage, and execrated the unknown
+wretch who had written the anonymous letter, little thinking that
+he was speaking of one and the same person in one and the same
+breath. Now he submissively acknowledged that Major Milroy had
+his rights as a father, and now he reviled the major as having no
+feeling for anything but his mechanics and his clock. At one
+moment he started up, with the tears in his eyes, and declared
+that his 'darling Neelie' was an angel on earth. At another he
+sat down sulkily, and thought that a girl of her spirit might
+have run away on the spot and joined him in London. After a good
+half-hour of this absurd exhibition, I succeeded in quieting him;
+and then a few words of tender inquiry produced what I had
+expressly come to the hotel to see--Miss Milroy's letter.
+
+"It was outrageously long, and rambling, and confused; in short,
+the letter of a fool. I had to wade through plenty of vulgar
+sentiment and lamentation, and to lose time and patience over
+maudlin outbursts of affection, and nauseous kisses inclosed in
+circles of ink. However, I contrived to extract the information I
+wanted at last; and here it is:
+
+
+"The major, on receipt of my anonymous warning, appears to have
+sent at once for his daughter, and to have shown her the letter.
+'You know what a hard life I lead with your mother; don't make it
+harder still, Neelie, by deceiving me.' That was all the poor old
+gentleman said. I always did like the major; and, though he was
+afraid to show it, I know he always liked me. His appeal to his
+daughter (if _her_ account of it is to be believed) cut her to
+the heart. She burst out crying (let her alone for crying at the
+right moment!) and confessed everything.
+
+"After giving her time to recover herself (if he had given her a
+good box on the ears it would have been more to the purpose!),
+the major seems to have put certain questions, and to have become
+convinced (as I was convinced myself) that his daughter's heart,
+or fancy, or whatever she calls it, was really and truly set on
+Armadale. The discovery evidently distressed as well as surprised
+him. He appears to have hesitated, and to have maintained his own
+unfavorable opinion of Miss Neelie's lover for some little time.
+But his daughter's tears and entreaties (so like the weakness of
+the dear old gentleman!) shook him at last. Though he firmly
+refused to allow of any marriage engagement at present, he
+consented to overlook the clandestine meetings in the park, and
+to put Armadale's fitness to become his son-in-law to the test,
+on certain conditions.
+
+"These conditions are, that for the next six months to come all
+communication is to be broken off, both personally and by
+writing, between Armadale and Miss Milroy. That space of time is
+to be occupied by the young gentleman as he himself thinks best,
+and by the young lady in completing her education at school. If,
+when the six months have passed, they are both still of the same
+mind, and if Armadale's conduct in the interval has been such as
+to improve the major's opinion of him, he will be allowed to
+present himself in the character of Miss Milroy's suitor, and, in
+six months more, if all goes well, the marriage may take place.
+
+"I declare I could kiss the dear old major, if I was only within
+reach of him! If I had been at his elbow, and had dictated the
+conditions myself, I could have asked for nothing better than
+this. Six months of total separation between Armadale and Miss
+Milroy! In half that time--with all communication cut off between
+the two--it must go hard with me, indeed, if I don't find myself
+dressed in the necessary mourning, and publicly recognized as
+Armadale's widow.
+
+"But I am forgetting the girl's letter. She gives her father's
+reasons for making his conditions, in her father's own words. The
+major seems to have spoken so sensibly and so feelingly that he
+left his daughter no decent alternative--and he leaves Armadale
+no decent alternative--but to submit. As well as I can remember,
+he seems to have expressed himself to Miss Neelie in these, or
+nearly in these terms:
+
+" 'Don't think I am behaving cruelly to you, my dear: I am merely
+asking you to put Mr. Armadale to the proof. It is not only
+right, it is absolutely necessary, that you should hold no
+communication with him for some time to come; and I will show you
+why. In the first place, if you go to school, the necessary rules
+in such places--necessary for the sake of the other girls--would
+not permit you to see Mr. Armadale or to receive letters from
+him; and, if you are to become mistress of Thorpe Ambrose, to
+school you must go, for you would be ashamed, and I should be
+ashamed, if you occupied the position of a lady of station
+without having the accomplishments which all ladies of station
+are expected to possess. In the second place, I want to see
+whether Mr. Armadale will continue to think of you as he thinks
+now, without being encouraged in his attachment by seeing you, or
+reminded of it by hearing from you. If I am wrong in thinking him
+flighty and unreliable, and if your opinion of him is the right
+one, this is not putting the young man to an unfair test--true
+love survives much longer separations than a separation of six
+months. And when that time is over, and well over; and when I
+have had him under my own eye for another six months, and have
+learned to think as highly of him as you do--even then, my dear,
+after all that terrible delay, you will still be a married woman
+before you are eighteen. Think of this, Neelie, and show that you
+love me and trust me, by accepting my proposal. I will hold no
+communication with Mr. Armadale myself. I will leave it to you to
+write and tell him what has been decided on. He may write back
+one letter, and one only, to acquaint you with his decision.
+After that, for the sake of your reputation, nothing more is to
+be said, and nothing more is to be done, and the matter is to be
+kept strictly private until the six months' interval is at an
+end.'
+
+"To this effect the major spoke. His behavior to that little slut
+of a girl has produced a stronger impression on me than anything
+else in the letter. It has set me thinking (me, of all the people
+in the world!) of what they call 'a moral difficulty.' We are
+perpetually told that there can be no possible connection between
+virtue and vice. Can there not? Here is Major Milroy doing
+exactly what an excellent father, at once kind and prudent,
+affectionate and firm, would do under the circumstances; and by
+that very course of conduct he has now smoothed the way for _me,_
+as completely as if he had been the chosen accomplice of that
+abominable creature, Miss Gwilt. Only think of my reasoning in
+this way! But I am in such good spirits, I can do anything
+to-day. I have not looked so bright and so young as I look now
+for months past!
+
+"To return to the letter, for the last time--it is so excessively
+dull and stupid that I really can't help wandering away from it
+into reflections of my own, as a mere relief.
+
+"After solemnly announcing that she meant to sacrifice herself to
+her beloved father's wishes (the brazen assurance of her setting
+up for a martyr after what has happened exceeds anything I ever
+heard or read of!), Miss Neelie next mentioned that the major
+proposed taking her to the seaside for change of air, during the
+few days that were still to elapse before she went to school.
+Armadale was to send his answer by return of post, and to address
+her, under cover to her father, at Lowestoft. With this, and with
+a last outburst of tender protestation, crammed crookedly into a
+corner of the page, the letter ended. (N.B.--The major's object
+in taking her to the seaside is plain enough. He still privately
+distrusts Armadale, and he is wisely determined to prevent any
+more clandestine meetings in the park before the girl is safely
+disposed of at school.)
+
+
+"When I had done with the letter--I had requested permission to
+read parts of it which I particularly admired, for the second and
+third time!--we all consulted together in a friendly way about
+what Armadale was to do.
+
+"He was fool enough, at the outset, to protest against submitting
+to Major Milroy's conditions. He declared, with his odious red
+face looking the picture of brute health, that he should never
+survive a six months' separation from his beloved Neelie.
+Midwinter (as may easily be imagined) seemed a little ashamed of
+him, and joined me in bringing him to his senses. We showed him,
+what would have been plain enough to anybody but a booby, that
+there was no honorable or even decent alternative left but to
+follow the example of submission set by the young lady. 'Wait,
+and you will have her for your wife,' was what I said. 'Wait, and
+you will force the major to alter his unjust opinion of you,' was
+what Midwinter added. With two clever people hammering common
+sense into his head at that rate, it is needless to say that his
+head gave way, and he submitted.
+
+"Having decided him to accept the major's conditions (I was
+careful to warn him, before he wrote to Miss Milroy, that my
+engagement to Midwinter was to be kept as strictly secret from
+her as from everybody else), the next question we had to settle
+related to his future proceedings. I was ready with the necessary
+arguments to stop him, if he had proposed returning to Thorpe
+Ambrose. But he proposed nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he
+declared, of his own accord, that nothing would induce him to go
+back. The place and the people were associated with everything
+that was hateful to him. There would be no Miss Milroy now to
+meet him in the park, and no Midwinter to keep him company in the
+solitary house. 'I'd rather break stones on the road,' was the
+sensible and cheerful way in which he put it, 'than go back to
+Thorpe Ambrose.'
+
+"The first suggestion after this came from Midwinter. The sly old
+clergyman who gave Mrs. Oldershaw and me so much trouble has, it
+seems, been ill, but has been latterly reported better. 'Why not
+go to Somersetshire,' said Midwinter, 'and see your good friend,
+and my good friend, Mr. Brock?'
+
+"Armadale caught at the proposal readily enough. He longed, in
+the first place, to see 'dear old Brock,' and he longed, in the
+second place, to see his yacht. After staying a few days more in
+London with Midwinter, he would gladly go to Somersetshire. But
+what after that?
+
+"Seeing my opportunity, _I_ came to the rescue this time. 'You
+have got a yacht, Mr. Armadale,' I said; 'and you know that
+Midwinter is going to Italy. When you are tired of Somersetshire,
+why not make a voyage to the Mediterranean, and meet your friend,
+and your friend's wife, at Naples?'
+
+"I made the allusion to 'his friend's wife' with the most
+becoming modesty and confusion. Armadale was enchanted. I had hit
+on the best of all ways of occupying the weary time. He started
+up, and wrung my hand in quite an ecstasy of gratitude. How I do
+hate people who can only express their feelings by hurting other
+people's hands!
+
+"Midwinter was as pleased with my proposal as Armadale; but he
+saw difficulties in the way of carrying it out. He considered the
+yacht too small for a cruise to the Mediterranean, and he thought
+it desirable to hire a larger vessel. His friend thought
+otherwise. I left them arguing the question. It was quite enough
+for me to have made sure, in the first place, that Armadale will
+not return to Thorpe Ambrose; and to have decided him, in the
+second place, on going abroad. He may go how he likes. I should
+prefer the small yacht myself; for there seems to be a chance
+that the small yacht might do me the inestimable service of
+drowning him. . . .
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--The excitement of feeling that I had got
+Armadale's future movements completely under my own control made
+me so restless, when I returned to my lodgings, that I was
+obliged to go out again, and do something. A new interest to
+occupy me being what I wanted, I went to Pimlico to have it out
+with Mother Oldershaw.
+
+"I walked; and made up my mind, on the way, that I would begin by
+quarreling with her.
+
+"One of my notes of hand being paid already, an d Midwinter being
+willing to pay the other two when they fall due, my present
+position with the old wretch is as independent a one as I could
+desire. I always get the better of her when it comes to a
+downright battle between us, and find her wonderfully civil and
+obliging the moment I have made her feel that mine is the
+strongest will of the two. In my present situation, she might be
+of use to me in various ways, if I could secure her assistance,
+without trusting her with secrets which I am now more than ever
+determined to keep to myself. That was my idea as I walked to
+Pimlico. Upsetting Mother Oldershaw's nerves, in the first place,
+and then twisting her round my little finger, in the second,
+promised me, as I thought, an interesting occupation for the rest
+of the afternoon.
+
+"When I got to Pimlico, a surprise was in store for we. The house
+was shut up--not only on Mrs. Oldershaw's side, but on Doctor
+Downward's as well. A padlock was on the shop door; and a man was
+hanging about on the watch, who might have been an ordinary idler
+certainly, but who looked, to my mind, like a policeman in
+disguise.
+
+"Knowing the risks the doctor runs in his particular form of
+practice, I suspected at once that something serious had
+happened, and that even cunning Mrs. Oldershaw was compromised
+this time. Without stopping, or making any inquiry, therefore, I
+called the first cab that passed me, and drove to the post-office
+to which I had desired my letters to be forwarded if any came for
+me after I left my Thorpe Ambrose lodging.
+
+"On inquiry a letter was produced for 'Miss Gwilt.' It was in
+Mother Oldershaw's handwriting, and it told me (as I had
+supposed) that the doctor had got into a serious difficulty--that
+she was herself most unfortunately mixed up in the matter, and
+that they were both in hiding for the present. The letter ended
+with some sufficiently venomous sentences about my conduct at
+Thorpe Ambrose, and with a warning that I have not heard the last
+of Mrs. Oldershaw yet. It relieved me to find her writing in this
+way--for she would have been civil and cringing if she had had
+any suspicion of what I have really got in view. I burned the
+letter as soon as the candles came up. And there, for the
+present, is an end of the connection between Mother Jezebel and
+me. I must do all my own dirty work now; and I shall be all the
+safer, perhaps, for trusting nobody's hands to do it but my own.
+
+
+"July 31st.--More useful information for me. I met Midwinter
+again in the Park (on the pretext that my reputation might suffer
+if he called too often at my lodgings), and heard the last news
+of Armadale since I left the hotel yesterday.
+
+"After he had written to Miss Milroy, Midwinter took the
+opportunity of speaking to him about the necessary business
+arrangements during his absence from the great house. It was
+decided that the servants should be put on board wages, and that
+Mr. Bashwood should be left in charge. (Somehow, I don't like
+this re-appearance of Mr. Bashwood in connection with my present
+interests, but there is no help for it.) The next question--the
+question of money--was settled at once by Mr. Armadale himself.
+All his available ready-money (a large sum) is to be lodged by
+Mr. Bashwood in Coutts's Bank, and to be there deposited in
+Armadale's name. This, he said, would save him the worry of any
+further letter-writing to his steward, and would enable him to
+get what he wanted, when he went abroad, at a moment's notice.
+The plan thus proposed, being certainly the simplest and the
+safest, was adopted with Midwinter's full concurrence; and here
+the business discussion would have ended, if the everlasting Mr.
+Bashwood had not turned up again in the conversation, and
+prolonged it in an entirely new direction.
+
+"On reflection, it seems to have struck Midwinter that the whole
+responsibility at Thorpe Ambrose ought not to rest on Mr.
+Bashwood's shoulders. Without in the least distrusting him,
+Midwinter felt, nevertheless, that he ought to have somebody set
+over him, to apply to in case of emergency. Armadale made no
+objection to this; he only asked, in his helpless way, who the
+person was to be?
+
+"The answer was not an easy one to arrive at.
+
+"Either of the two solicitors at Thorpe Ambrose might have been
+employed, but Armadale was on bad terms with both of them. Any
+reconciliation with such a bitter enemy as the elder lawyer, Mr.
+Darch, was out of the question; and reinstating Mr. Pedgift in
+his former position implied a tacit sanction on Armadale's part
+of the lawyer's abominable conduct toward _me,_ which was
+scarcely consistent with the respect and regard that he felt for
+a lady who was soon to be his friend's wife. After some further
+discussion, Midwinter hit on a new suggestion which appeared to
+meet the difficulty. He proposed that Armadale should write to a
+respectable solicitor at Norwich, stating his position in general
+terms, and requesting that gentleman to act as Mr. Bashwood's
+adviser and superintendent when occasion required. Norwich being
+within an easy railway ride of Thorpe Ambrose, Armadale saw no
+objection to the proposal, and promised to write to the Norwich
+lawyer. Fearing that he might make some mistake if he wrote
+without assistance, Midwinter had drawn him out a draft of the
+necessary letter, and Armadale was now engaged in copying the
+draft, and also in writing to Mr. Bashwood to lodge the money
+immediately in Coutts's Bank.
+
+"These details are so dry and uninteresting in themselves that I
+hesitated at first about putting them down in my diary. But a
+little reflection has convinced me that they are too important to
+be passed over. Looked at from my point of view, they mean
+this--that Armadale's own act is now cutting him off from all
+communication with Thorpe Ambrose, even by letter. _He is as good
+as dead already to everybody he leaves behind him._ The causes
+which have led to such a result as that are causes which
+certainly claim the best place I can give them in these pages.
+
+
+"August 1st.--Nothing to record, but that I have had a long,
+quiet, happy day with Midwinter. He hired a carriage, and we
+drove to Richmond, and dined there. After to-day's experience, it
+is impossible to deceive myself any longer. Come what may of it,
+I love him.
+
+"I have fallen into low spirits since he left me. A persuasion
+has taken possession of my mind that the smooth and prosperous
+course of my affairs since I have been in London is too smooth
+and prosperous to last. There is something oppressing me
+to-night, which is more than the oppression of the heavy London
+air.
+
+
+"August 2d.--Three o'clock.--My presentiments, like other
+people's, have deceived me often enough; but I am almost afraid
+that my presentiment of last night was really prophetic, for once
+in a way.
+
+"I went after breakfast to a milliner's in this neighborhood to
+order a few cheap summer things, and thence to Midwinter's hotel
+to arrange with him for another day in the country. I drove to
+the milliner's and to the hotel, and part of the way back. Then,
+feeling disgusted with the horrid close smell of the cab
+(somebody had been smoking in it, I suppose), I got out to walk
+the rest of the way. Before I had been two minutes on my feet, I
+discovered that I was being followed by a strange man.
+
+"This may mean nothing but that an idle fellow has been struck by
+my figure, and my appearance generally. My face could have made
+no impression on him, for it was hidden as usual by my veil.
+Whether he followed me (in a cab, of course) from the milliner's,
+or from the hotel, I cannot say. Nor am I quite certain whether
+he did or did not track me to this door. I only know that I lost
+sight of him before I got back. There is no help for it but to
+wait till events enlighten me. If there is anything serious in
+what has happened, I shall soon discover it.
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--It _is_ serious. Ten minutes since, I was in my
+bedroom, which communicates with the sitting-room. I was just
+coming out, when I heard a strange voice on the landing
+outside--a woman's voice. The next instant the sitting-room door
+was suddenly opened; the woman's voice said, 'Are these the
+apartments you have got to let?' and though
+ the landlady, behind her, answered, 'No! higher up, ma'am,' the
+woman came on straight to my bedroom, as if she had not heard. I
+had just time to slam the door in her face before she saw me. The
+necessary explanations and apologies followed between the
+landlady and the stranger in the sitting-room, and then I was
+left alone again.
+
+"I have no time to write more. It is plain that somebody has an
+interest in trying to identify me, and that, but for my own
+quickness, the strange woman would have accomplished this object
+by taking me by surprise. She and the man who followed me in the
+street are, I suspect, in league together; and there is probably
+somebody in the background whose interests they are serving. Is
+Mother Oldershaw attacking me in the dark? or who else can it be?
+No matter who it is; my present situation is too critical to be
+trifled with. I must get away from this house to-night, and leave
+no trace behind me by which I can be followed to another place.
+
+
+"August 3d.--Gary Street, Tottenham Court Road.--I got away last
+night (after writing an excuse to Midwinter, in which 'my invalid
+mother' figured as the all-sufficient cause of my disappearance);
+and I have found refuge here. It has cost me some money; but my
+object is attained! Nobody can possibly have traced me from All
+Saints' Terrace to this address.
+
+"After paying my landlady the necessary forfeit for leaving her
+without notice, I arranged with her son that he should take my
+boxes in a cab to the cloak-room at the nearest railway station,
+and send me the ticket in a letter, to wait my application for it
+at the post-office. While he went his way in one cab, I went mine
+in another, with a few things for the night in my little
+hand-bag.
+
+"I drove straight to the milliner's shop, which I had observed,
+when I was there yesterday, had a back entrance into a mews, for
+the apprentices to go in and out by. I went in at once, leaving
+the cab waiting for me at the door. 'A man is following me,' I
+said, 'and I want to get rid of him. Here is my cab fare; wait
+ten minutes before you give it to the driver, and let me out at
+once by the back way!' In a moment I was out in the mews; in
+another, I was in the next street; in a third, I hailed a passing
+omnibus, and was a free woman again.
+
+"Having now cut off all communication between me and my last
+lodgings, the next precaution (in case Midwinter or Armadale are
+watched) is to cut off all communication, for some days to come
+at least, between me and the hotel. I have written to
+Midwinter--making my supposititious mother once more the
+excuse--to say that I am tied to my nursing duties, and that we
+must communicate by writing only for the present. Doubtful as I
+still am of who my hidden enemy really is, I can do no more to
+defend myself than I have done now.
+
+
+"August 4th.--The two friends at the hotel had both written to
+me. Midwinter expresses his regret at our separation, in the
+tenderest terms. Armadale writes an entreaty for help under very
+awkward circumstances. A letter from Major Milroy has been
+forwarded to him from the great house, and he incloses it in his
+letter to me.
+
+"Having left the seaside, and placed his daughter safely at the
+school originally chosen for her (in the neighborhood of Ely),
+the major appears to have returned to Thorpe Ambrose at the close
+of last week; to have heard then, for the first time, the reports
+about Armadale and me; and to have written instantly to Armadale
+to tell him so.
+
+"The letter is stern and short. Major Milroy dismisses the report
+as unworthy of credit, because it is impossible for him to
+believe in such an act of 'cold-blooded treachery,' as the
+scandal would imply, if the scandal were true. He simply writes
+to warn Armadale that, if he is not more careful in his actions
+for the future, he must resign all pretensions to Miss Milroy's
+hand. 'I neither expect, nor wish for, an answer to this' (the
+letter ends), 'for I desire to receive no mere protestations in
+words. By your conduct, and by your conduct alone, I shall judge
+you as time goes on. Let me also add that I positively forbid you
+to consider this letter as an excuse for violating the terms
+agreed on between us, by writing again to my daughter. You have
+no need to justify yourself in her eyes, for I fortunately
+removed her from Thorpe Ambrose before this abominable report had
+time to reach her; and I shall take good care, for her sake, that
+she is not agitated and unsettled by hearing it where she is
+now.'
+
+"Armadale's petition to me, under these circumstances, entreats
+(as I am the innocent cause of the new attack on his character)
+that I will write to the major to absolve him of all indiscretion
+in the matter, and to say that he could not, in common
+politeness, do otherwise than accompany me to London.
+
+"I forgive the impudence of his request, in consideration of the
+news that he sends me. It is certainly another circumstance in my
+favor that the scandal at Thorpe Ambrose is not to be allowed to
+reach Miss Milroy's ears. With her temper (if she did hear it)
+she might do something desperate in the way of claiming her
+lover, and might compromise me seriously. As for my own course
+with Armadale, it is easy enough. I shall quiet him by promising
+to write to Major Milroy; and I shall take the liberty, in my own
+private interests, of not keeping my word.
+
+"Nothing in the least suspicious has happened to-day. Whoever my
+enemies are, they have lost me, and between this and the time
+when I leave England they shall not find me again. I have been to
+the post-office, and have got the ticket for my luggage, inclosed
+to me in a letter from All Saints' Terrace, as I directed. The
+luggage itself I shall still leave at the cloak-room, until I see
+the way before me more clearly than I see it now.
+
+
+"August 5th.--Two letters again from the hotel. Midwinter writes
+to remind me, in the prettiest possible manner, that he will have
+lived long enough in the parish by to-morrow to be able to get
+our marriage-license, and that he proposes applying for it in the
+usual way at Doctors' Commons. Now, if I am ever to say it, is
+the time to say No. I can't say No. There is the plain truth--and
+there is an end of it!
+
+"Armadale's letter is a letter of farewell. He thanks me for my
+kindness in consenting to write to the major, and bids me
+good-by, till we meet again at Naples. He has learned from his
+friend that there are private reasons which will oblige him to
+forbid himself the pleasure of being present at our marriage.
+Under these circumstances, there is nothing to keep him in
+London. He has made all his business arrangements; he goes to
+Somersetshire by to-night's train; and, after staying some time
+with Mr. Brock, he will sail for the Mediterranean from the
+Bristol Channel (in spite of Midwinter's objections) in his own
+yacht.
+
+"The letter incloses a jeweler's box, with a ring in
+it--Armadale's present to me on my marriage. It is a ruby--but
+rather a small one, and set in the worst possible taste. He would
+have given Miss Milroy a ring worth ten times the money, if it
+had been _her_ marriage present. There is no more hateful
+creature, in my opinion, than a miserly young man. I wonder
+whether his trumpery little yacht will drown him?
+
+"I am so excited and fluttered, I hardly know what I am writing.
+Not that I shrink from what is coming--I only feel as if I was
+being hurried on faster than I quite like to go. At this rate, if
+nothing happens, Midwinter will have married me by the end of the
+week. And then--!
+
+
+"August 6th.--If anything could startle me now, I should feel
+startled by the news that has reached me to-day.
+
+"On his return to the hotel this morning, after getting the
+marriage-license, Midwinter found a telegram waiting for him. It
+contained an urgent message from Armadale, announcing that Mr.
+Brock had had a relapse, and that all hope of his recovery was
+pronounced by the doctors to be at an end. By the dying man's own
+desire, Midwinter was summoned to take leave of him, and was
+entreated by Armadale not to lose a moment in starting for the
+rectory by the first train.
+
+"The hurried letter which tells me this tells me also that, by
+the time I recei ve it, Midwinter will be on his way to the West.
+He promises to write at greater length, after he has seen Mr.
+Brock, by to-night's post.
+
+"This news has an interest for me, which Midwinter little
+suspects. There is but one human creature, besides myself, who
+knows the secret of his birth and his name; and that one is the
+old man who now lies waiting for him at the point of death. What
+will they say to each other at the last moment? Will some chance
+word take them back to the time when I was in Mrs. Armadale's
+service at Madeira? Will they speak of Me?
+
+
+"August 7th.--The promised letter has just reached me. No parting
+words have been exchanged between them: it was all over before
+Midwinter reached Somersetshire. Armadale met him at the rectory
+gate with the news that Mr. Brock was dead.
+
+"I try to struggle against it, but, coming after the strange
+complication of circumstances that has been closing round me for
+weeks past, there is something in this latest event of all that
+shakes my nerves. But one last chance of detection stood in my
+way when I opened my diary yesterday. When I open it to-day, that
+chance is removed by Mr. Brock's death. It means something; I
+wish I knew what.
+
+"The funeral is to be on Saturday morning. Midwinter will attend
+it as well as Armadale. But he proposes returning to London
+first; and he writes word that he will call to-night, in the hope
+of seeing me, on his way from the station to the hotel. Even if
+there was any risk in it, I should see him, as things are now.
+But there is no risk if he comes here from the station instead of
+coming from the hotel.
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--I was not mistaken in believing that my nerves
+were all unstrung. Trifles that would not have cost me a second
+thought at other times weigh heavily on my mind now.
+
+"Two hours since, in despair of knowing how to get through the
+day, I bethought myself of the milliner who is making my summer
+dress. I had intended to go and try it on yesterday; but it
+slipped out of my memory in the excitement of hearing about Mr.
+Brock. So I went this afternoon, eager to do anything that might
+help me to get rid of myself. I have returned, feeling more
+uneasy and more depressed than I felt when I went out; for I have
+come back fearing that I may yet have reason to repent not having
+left my unfinished dress on the milliner's hands.
+
+"Nothing happened to me, this time, in the street. It was only in
+the trying-on room that my suspicions were roused; and there it
+certainly did cross my mind that the attempt to discover me,
+which I defeated at All Saints' Terrace, was not given up yet,
+and that some of the shop-women had been tampered with, if not
+the mistress herself.
+
+"Can I give myself anything in the shape of a reason for this
+impression? Let me think a little.
+
+"I certainly noticed two things which were out of the ordinary
+routine, under the circumstances. In the first place, there were
+twice as many women as were needed in the trying-on room. This
+looked suspicious; and yet I might have accounted for it in more
+ways than one. Is it not the slack time now? and don't I know by
+experience that I am the sort of woman about whom other women are
+always spitefully curious? I thought again, in the second place,
+that one of the assistants persisted rather oddly in keeping me
+turned in a particular direction, with my face toward the glazed
+and curtained door that led into the work-room. But, after all,
+she gave a reason when I asked for it. She said the light fell
+better on me that way; and, when I looked round, there was the
+window to prove her right. Still, these trifles produced such an
+effect on me, at the time, that I purposely found fault with the
+dress, so as to have an excuse for trying it on again, before I
+told them where I lived, and had it sent home. Pure fancy, I dare
+say. Pure fancy, perhaps, at the present moment. I don't care; I
+shall act on instinct (as they say), and give up the dress. In
+plainer words still, I won't go back.
+
+
+"Midnight.--Midwinter came to see me as he promised. An hour has
+passed since we said good-night; and here I still sit, with my
+pen in my hand, thinking of him. No words of mine can describe
+what has passed between us. The end of it is all I can write in
+these pages; and the end of it is that he has shaken my
+resolution. For the first time since I saw the easy way to
+Armadale's life at Thorpe Ambrose, I feel as if the man whom I
+have doomed in my own thoughts had a chance of escaping me.
+
+"Is it my love for Midwinter that has altered me? Or is it _his_
+love for _me_ that has taken possession not only of all I wish to
+give him, but of all I wish to keep from him as well? I feel as
+if I had lost myself--lost myself, I mean, in _him_--all through
+the evening. He was in great agitation about what had happened in
+Somersetshire; and he made me feel as disheartened and as
+wretched about it as he did. Though he never confessed it in
+words, I know that Mr. Brock's death has startled him as an ill
+omen for our marriage--I know it, because I feel Mr. Brock's
+death as an ill omen too. The superstition--_his_
+superstition--took so strong a hold on me, that when we grew
+calmer and he spoke of time future--when he told me that he must
+either break his engagement with his new employers or go abroad,
+as he is pledged to go, on Monday next--I actually shrank at the
+thought of our marriage following close on Mr. Brock's funeral; I
+actually said to him, in the impulse of the moment, 'Go, and
+begin your new life alone! go, and leave me here to wait for
+happier times.'
+
+"He took me in his arms. He sighed, and kissed me with an angelic
+tenderness. He said--oh, so softly and so sadly!--I have no life
+now, apart from _you._' As those words passed his lips, the
+thought seemed to rise in my mind like an echo, 'Why not live out
+all the days that are left to me, happy and harmless in a love
+like this!' I can't explain it--I can't realize it. That was the
+thought in me at the time; and that is the thought in me still. I
+see my own hand while I write the words--and I ask myself whether
+it is really the hand of Lydia Gwilt!
+
+"Armadale--
+
+"No! I will never write, I will never think of Armadale again.
+
+"Yes! Let me write once more--let me think once more of him,
+because it quiets me to know that he is going away, and that the
+sea will have parted us before I am married. His old home is home
+to him no longer, now that the loss of his mother has been
+followed by the loss of his best and earliest friend. When the
+funeral is over, he has decided to sail the same day for the
+foreign seas. We may, or we may not, meet at Naples. Shall I be
+an altered woman if we do? I wonder; I wonder!
+
+
+"August 8th.--A line from Midwinter. He has gone back to
+Somersetshire to be in readiness for the funeral to-morrow; and
+he will return here (after bidding Armadale good-by) to-morrow
+evening.
+
+"The last forms and ceremonies preliminary to our marriage have
+been complied with. I am to be his wife on Monday next. The hour
+must not be later than half-past ten--which will give us just
+time, when the service is over, to get from the church door to
+the railway, and to start on our journey to Naples the same day.
+
+"To-day--Saturday--Sunday! I am not afraid of the time; the time
+will pass. I am not afraid of myself, if I can only keep all
+thoughts but one out of my mind. I love him! Day and night, till
+Monday comes, I will think of nothing but that. I love him!
+
+
+"Four o'clock.--Other thoughts are forced into my mind in spite
+of me. My suspicions of yesterday were no mere fancies; the
+milliner has been tampered with. My folly in going back to her
+house has led to my being traced here. I am absolutely certain
+that I never gave the woman my address; and yet my new gown was
+sent home to me at two o'clock to-day!
+
+"A man brought it with the bill, and a civil message, to say
+that, as I had not called at the appointed time to try it on
+again, the dress had been finished and sent to me. He caught me
+in the passage; I had no choice but to pay the bill, and dismiss
+him. Any other proceeding, as events have now turned out, would
+have been pure folly. The messenger (not the man who followed me
+in the st reet, but another spy sent to look at me, beyond all
+doubt) would have declared he knew nothing about it, if I had
+spoken to him. The milliner would tell me to my face, if I went
+to her, that I had given her my address. The one useful thing to
+do now is to set my wits to work in the interests of my own
+security, and to step out of the false position in which my own
+rashness has placed me--if I can.
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--My spirits have risen again. I believe I am in a
+fair way of extricating myself already.
+
+"I have just come back from a long round in a cab. First, to the
+cloak-room of the Great Western, to get the luggage which I sent
+there from All Saints' Terrace. Next, to the cloak-room of the
+Southeastern, to leave my luggage (labeled in Midwinter's name),
+to wait for me till the starting of the tidal train on Monday.
+Next, to the General Post-office, to post a letter to Midwinter
+at the rectory, which he will receive to-morrow morning. Lastly,
+back again to this house--from which I shall move no more till
+Monday comes.
+
+"My letter to Midwinter will, I have little doubt, lead to his
+seconding (quite innocently) the precautions that I am taking for
+my own safety. The shortness of the time at our disposal on
+Monday will oblige him to pay his bill at the hotel and to remove
+his luggage before the marriage ceremony takes place. All I ask
+him to do beyond this is to take the luggage himself to the
+Southeastern (so as to make any inquiries useless which may
+address themselves to the servants at the hotel)--and, that done,
+to meet me at the church door, instead of calling for me here.
+The rest concerns nobody but myself. When Sunday night or Monday
+morning comes, it will be hard, indeed--freed as I am now from
+all incumbrances--if I can't give the people who are watching me
+the slip for the second time.
+
+"It seems needless enough to have written to Midwinter to-day,
+when he is coming back to me to-morrow night. But it was
+impossible to ask, what I have been obliged to ask of him,
+without making my false family circumstances once more the
+excuse; and having this to do--I must own the truth--I wrote to
+him because, after what I suffered on the last occasion, I can
+never again deceive him to his face.
+
+
+"August 9th.--Two o'clock.--I rose early this morning, more
+depressed in spirits than usual. The re-beginning of one's life,
+at the re-beginning of every day, has already been something
+weary and hopeless to me for years past. I dreamed, too, all
+through the night--not of Midwinter and of my married life, as I
+had hoped to dream--but of the wretched conspiracy to discover
+me, by which I have been driven from one place to another, like a
+hunted animal. Nothing in the shape of a new revelation
+enlightened me in my sleep. All I could guess dreaming was what I
+had guessed waking, that Mother Oldershaw is the enemy who is
+attacking me in the dark.
+
+"My restless night has, however, produced one satisfactory
+result. It has led to my winning the good graces of the servant
+here, and securing all the assistance she can give me when the
+time comes for making my escape.
+
+"The girl noticed this morning that I looked pale and anxious. I
+took her into my confidence, to the extent of telling her that I
+was privately engaged to be married, and that I had enemies who
+were trying to part me from my sweetheart. This instantly roused
+her sympathy, and a present of a ten-shilling piece for her kind
+services to me did the rest. In the intervals of her housework
+she has been with me nearly the whole morning; and I found out,
+among other things, that _her_ sweetheart is a private soldier in
+the Guards, and that she expects to see him to-morrow. I have got
+money enough left, little as it is, to turn the head of any
+Private in the British army; and, if the person appointed to
+watch me to-morrow is a man, I think it just possible that he may
+find his attention disagreeably diverted from Miss Gwilt in the
+course of the evening.
+
+"When Midwinter came here last from the railway, he came at
+half-past eight. How am I to get through the weary, weary hours
+between this and the evening? I think I shall darken my bedroom,
+and drink the blessing of oblivion from my bottle of Drops.
+
+
+"Eleven o'clock.--We have parted for the last time before the day
+comes that makes us man and wife.
+
+"He has left me. as he left me before, with an absorbing subject
+of interest to think of in his absence. I noticed a change in him
+the moment he entered the room. When he told me of the funeral,
+and of his parting with Armadale on board the yacht, though he
+spoke with feelings deeply moved, he spoke with a mastery over
+himself which is new to me in my experience of him. It was the
+same when our talk turned next on our own hopes and prospects. He
+was plainly disappointed when he found that my family
+embarrassments would prevent our meeting to-morrow, and plainly
+uneasy at the prospect of leaving me to find my way by myself on
+Monday to the church. But there was a certain hopefulness and
+composure of manner underlying it all, which produced so strong
+an impression on me that I was obliged to notice it.
+
+" 'You know what odd fancies take possession of me sometimes,' I
+said. 'Shall I tell you the fancy that has taken possession of me
+now? I can't help thinking that something has happened since we
+last saw each other which you have not told me yet.
+
+" 'Something _has_ happened,' he answered. 'And it is something
+which you ought to know.'
+
+"With those words he took out his pocket-book, and produced two
+written papers from it. One he looked at and put back. The other
+he placed on the table.
+
+" 'Before I tell you what this is, and how it came into my
+possession,' he said, 'I must own something that I have concealed
+from you. It is no more serious confession than the confession of
+my own weakness.'
+
+"He then acknowledged to me that the renewal of his friendship
+with Armadale had been clouded, through the whole period of their
+intercourse in London, by his own superstitious misgivings. He
+had obeyed the summons which called him to the rector's bedside,
+with the firm intention of confiding his previsions of coming
+trouble to Mr. Brock; and he had been doubly confirmed in his
+superstition when he found that Death had entered the house
+before him, and had parted them, in this world, forever. More
+than this, he had traveled back to be present at the funeral,
+with a secret sense of relief at the prospect of being parted
+from Armadale, and with a secret resolution to make the
+after-meeting agreed on between us three at Naples a meeting that
+should never take place. With that purpose in his heart, he had
+gone up alone to the room prepared for him on his arrival at the
+rectory, and had opened a letter which he found waiting for him
+on the table. The letter had only that day been
+discovered--dropped and lost--under the bed on which Mr. Brock
+had died. It was in the rector's handwriting throughout; and the
+person to whom it was addressed was Midwinter himself.
+
+"Having told me this, nearly in the words in which I have written
+it, he gave me the written paper that lay on the table between
+us.
+
+" 'Read it,' he said; 'and you will not need to be told that my
+mind is at peace again, and that I took Allan's hand at parting
+with a heart that was worthier of Allan's love.'
+
+"I read the letter. There was no superstition to be conquered in
+_my_ mind; there were no old feelings of gratitude toward
+Armadale to be roused in _my_ heart; and yet, the effect which
+the letter had had on Midwinter was, I firmly believe, more than
+matched by the effect that the letter now produced on Me.
+
+"It was vain to ask him to leave it, and to let me read it again
+(as I wished) when I was left by myself. He is determined to keep
+it side by side with that other paper which I had seen him take
+out of his pocket-book, and which contains the written narrative
+of Armadale's Dream. All I could do was to ask his leave to copy
+it; and this he granted readily. I wrote the copy in his
+presence; and I now place it here in my diary, to mark a day
+which is one of the memorable days in my life.
+
+"Boscombe Rectory, August 2d.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--For the first time si nce the beginning of my
+illness, I found strength enough yesterday to look over my
+letters. One among them is a letter from Allan, which has been
+lying unopened on my table for ten days past. He writes to me in
+great distress, to say that there has been dissension between
+you, and that you have left him. If you still remember what
+passed between us. when you first opened your heart to me in the
+Isle of Man, you will be at no loss to understand how I have
+thought over this miserable news, through the night that has now
+passed, and you will not be surprised to hear that I have roused
+myself this morning to make the effort of writing to you.
+
+"I want no explanation of the circumstances which have parted you
+from your friend. If my estimate of your character is not founded
+on an entire delusion, the one influence which can have led to
+your estrangement from Allan is the influence of that evil spirit
+of Superstition which I have once already cast out of your
+heart--which I will once again conquer, please God, if I have
+strength enough to make my pen speak my mind to you in this
+letter.
+
+"It is no part of my design to combat the belief which I know you
+to hold, that mortal creatures may be the objects of supernatural
+intervention in their pilgrimage through this world. Speaking as
+a reasonable man, I own that I cannot prove you to be wrong.
+Speaking as a believer in the Bible, I am bound to go further,
+and to admit that you possess a higher than any human warrant for
+the faith that is in you. The one object which I have it at heart
+to attain is to induce you to free yourself from the paralyzing
+fatalism of the heathen and the savage, and to look at the
+mysteries that perplex, and the portents that daunt you, from the
+Christian's point of view. If I can succeed in this, I shall
+clear your mind of the ghastly doubts that now oppress it, and I
+shall reunite you to your friend, never to be parted from him
+again.
+
+"I have no means of seeing and questioning you. I can only send
+this letter to Allan to be forwarded, if he knows, or can
+discover, your present address. Placed in this position toward
+you, I am bound to assume all that _can_ be assumed in your
+favor. I will take it for granted that something has happened to
+you or to Allan which to your mind has not only confirmed the
+fatalist conviction in which your father died, but has added a
+new and terrible meaning to the warning which he sent you in his
+death-bed letter.
+
+"On this common ground I meet you. On this common ground I appeal
+to your higher nature and your better sense.
+
+"Preserve your present conviction that the events which have
+happened (be they what they may) are not to be reconciled with
+ordinary mortal coincidences and ordinary mortal laws; and view
+your own position by the best and clearest light that your
+superstition can throw on it. What are you? You are a helpless
+instrument in the hands of Fate. You are doomed, beyond all human
+capacity of resistance, to bring misery and destruction blindfold
+on a man to whom you have harmlessly and gratefully united
+yourself in the bonds of a brother's love. All that is morally
+firmest in your will and morally purest in your aspirations
+avails nothing against the hereditary impulsion of you toward
+evil, caused by a crime which your father committed before you
+were born. In what does that belief end? It ends in the darkness
+in which you are now lost; in the self-contradictions in which
+you are now bewildered; in the stubborn despair by which a man
+profanes his own soul, and lowers himself to the level of the
+brutes that perish.
+
+"Look up, my poor suffering brother--look up, my hardly tried, my
+well-loved friend, higher than this! Meet the doubts that now
+assail you from the blessed vantage-ground of Christian courage
+and Christian hope; and your heart will turn again to Allan, and
+your mind will be at peace. Happen what may, God is all-merciful,
+God is all-wise: natural or supernatural, it happens through Him.
+The mystery of Evil that perplexes our feeble minds, the sorrow
+and the suffering that torture us in this little life, leave the
+one great truth unshaken that the destiny of man is in the hands
+of his Creator, and that God's blessed Son died to make us
+worthier of it. Nothing that is done in unquestioning submission
+to the wisdom of the Almighty is done wrong. No evil exists out
+of which, in obedience to his laws, Good may not come. Be true to
+what Christ tells you is true. Encourage in yourself, be the
+circumstances what they may, all that is loving, all that is
+grateful, all that is patient, all that is forgiving, toward your
+fellow-men. And humbly and trustfully leave the rest to the God
+who made you, and to the Saviour who loved you better than his
+own life.
+
+"This is the faith in which I have lived, by the Divine help and
+mercy, from my youth upward. I ask you earnestly, I ask you
+confidently, to make it your faith, too. It is the mainspring of
+all the good I have ever done, of all the happiness I have ever
+known; it lightens my darkness, it sustains my hope; it comforts
+and quiets me, lying here, to live or die, I know not which. Let
+it sustain, comfort, and enlighten you. It will help you in your
+sorest need, as it has helped me in mine. It will show you
+another purpose in the events which brought you and Allan
+together than the purpose which your guilty father foresaw.
+Strange things, I do not deny it, have happened to you already.
+Stranger things still may happen before long, which I may not
+live to see. Remember, if that time comes, that I died firmly
+disbelieving in your influence over Allan being other than an
+influence for good. The great sacrifice of the Atonement--I say
+it reverently--has its mortal reflections, even in this world. If
+danger ever threatens Allan, you, whose father took his father's
+life--YOU, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of
+God has appointed to save him.
+
+"Come to me if I live. Go back to the friend who loves you,
+whether I live or die.
+
+"Yours affectionately to the last,
+
+"DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+" 'YOU, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of God
+has appointed to save him!'
+
+"Those are the words which have shaken me to the soul. Those are
+the words which make me feel as if the dead man had left his
+grave, and had put his hand on the place in my heart where my
+terrible secret lies hidden from every living creature but
+myself. One part of the letter has come true already. The danger
+that it foresees threatens Armadale at this moment--and threatens
+him from Me!
+
+"If the favoring circumstances which have driven me thus far
+drive me on to the end, and if that old man's last earthly
+conviction is prophetic of the truth, Armadale will escape me, do
+what I may. And Midwinter will be the victim who is sacrificed to
+save his life.
+
+"It is horrible! it is impossible! it shall never be! At the
+thinking of it only, my hand trembles and my heart sinks. I bless
+the trembling that unnerves me! I bless the sinking that turns me
+faint! I bless those words in the letter which have revived the
+relenting thoughts that first came to me two days since! Is it
+hard, now that events are taking me, smoothly and safely, nearer
+and nearer to the End--is it hard to conquer the temptation to go
+on? No! If there is only a chance of harm coming to Midwinter,
+the dread of that chance is enough to decide me--enough to
+strengthen me to conquer the temptation, for his sake. I have
+never loved him yet, never, never, never as I love him now!
+
+
+"Sunday, August 10th.--The eve of my wedding-day! I close and
+lock this book, never to write in it, never to open it again.
+
+"I have won the great victory; I have trampled my own wickedness
+under foot. I am innocent; I am happy again. My love! my angel!
+when to-morrow gives me to you, I will not have a thought in my
+heart which is not _your_ thought, as well as mine!"
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE WEDDING-DAY.
+
+THE time was nine o'clock in the morning. The place was a private
+room in one of the old-fashioned inns which still remain on the
+Borough side of the Thames. The date was Monday, the 11th of
+August. And the person was Mr. Bashwood, who had traveled to
+London on a summons from his son, and had taken up his abode at
+the inn on the previous day.
+
+He had never yet looked so pitiably old and helpless as he looked
+now. The fever and chill of alternating hope and despair had
+dried, and withered, and wasted him. The angles of his figure had
+sharpened. The outline of his face had shrunk. His dress pointed
+the melancholy change in him with a merciless and shocking
+emphasis. Never, even in his youth, had he worn such clothes as
+he wore now. With the desperate resolution to leave no chance
+untried of producing an impression on Miss Gwilt, he had cast
+aside his dreary black garments; he had even mustered the courage
+to wear his blue satin cravat. His coat was a riding-coat of
+light gray. He had ordered it, with a vindictive subtlety of
+purpose, to be made on the pattern of a coat that he had seen
+Allan wear. His waistcoat was white; his trousers were of the
+gayest summer pattern, in the largest check. His wig was oiled
+and scented, and brushed round, on either side, to hide the
+wrinkles on his temples. He was an object to laugh at; he was an
+object to weep over. His enemies, if a creature so wretched could
+have had enemies, would have forgiven him, on seeing him in his
+new dress. His friends--had any of his friends been left--would
+have been less distressed if they had looked at him in his coffin
+than if they had looked at him as he was now. Incessantly
+restless, he paced the room from end to end. Now he looked at his
+watch; now he looked out of the window; now he looked at the
+well-furnished breakfast-table--always with the same wistful,
+uneasy inquiry in his eyes. The waiter coming in, with the urn of
+boiling water, was addressed for the fiftieth time in the one
+form of words which the miserable creature seemed to be capable
+of uttering that morning: "My son is coming to breakfast. My son
+is very particular. I want everything of the best--hot things and
+cold things--and tea and coffee--and all the rest of it, waiter;
+all the rest of it." For the fiftieth time, he now reiterated
+those anxious words. For the fiftieth time, the impenetrable
+waiter had just returned his one pacifying answer, "All right,
+sir; you may leave it to me"--when the sound of leisurely
+footsteps was heard on the stairs; the door opened; and the
+long-expected son sauntered indolently into the room, with a neat
+little black leather bag in his hand.
+
+"Well done, old gentleman!" said Bashwood the younger, surveying
+his father's dress with a smile of sardonic encouragement.
+"You're ready to be married to Miss Gwilt at a moment's notice!"
+
+The father took the son's hand, and tried to echo the son's
+laugh.
+
+"You have such good spirits, Jemmy," he said, using the name in
+its familiar form, as he had been accustomed to use it in happier
+days. "You always had good spirits, my dear, from a child. Come
+and sit down; I've ordered you a nice breakfast. Everything of
+the best! everything of the best! What a relief it is to see you!
+Oh, dear, dear, what a relief it is to see you." He stopped and
+sat down at the table, his face flushed with the effort to
+control the impatience that was devouring him. "Tell me about
+her!" he burst out, giving up the effort with a sudden
+self-abandonment. "I shall die, Jemmy, if I wait for it any
+longer. Tell me! tell me! tell me!"
+
+"One thing at a time," said Bashwood the younger, perfectly
+unmoved by his father's impatience. "We'll try the breakfast
+first, and come to the lady afterward! Gently does it, old
+gentleman--gently does it!"
+
+He put his leather bag on a chair, and sat down opposite to his
+father, composed, and smiling, and humming a little tune.
+
+No ordinary observation, applying the ordinary rules of analysis,
+would have detected the character of Bashwood the younger in his
+face. His youthful look, aided by his light hair and his plump
+beardless cheeks, his easy manner and his ever-ready smile, his
+eyes which met unshrinkingly the eyes of every one whom he
+addressed, all combined to make the impression of him a favorable
+impression in the general mind. No eye for reading character, but
+such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand,
+could have penetrated the smoothly deceptive surface of this man,
+and have seen him for what he really was--the vile creature whom
+the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he
+sat--the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is
+steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on
+the increase. There he sat--the necessary Detective attendant on
+the progress of our national civilization; a man who was, in this
+instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product of the
+vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready on the
+merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under
+our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man
+who would have been useless to his employers if he could have
+felt a touch of human sympathy in his father's presence; and who
+would have deservedly forfeited his situation if, under any
+circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a
+sense of pity or a sense of shame.
+
+"Gently does it, old gentleman," he repeated, lifting the covers
+from the dishes, and looking under them one after the other all
+round the table. "Gently does it!"
+
+"Don't be angry with me, Jemmy," pleaded his father. "Try, if you
+can, to think how anxious I must be. I got your letter so long
+ago as yesterday morning. I have had to travel all the way from
+Thorpe Ambrose--I have had to get through the dreadful long
+evening and the dreadful long night--with your letter telling me
+that you had found out who she is, and telling me nothing more.
+Suspense is very hard to bear, Jemmy, when you come to my age.
+What was it prevented you, my dear, from coming to me when I got
+here yesterday evening?"
+
+"A little dinner at Richmond," said Bashwood the younger. "Give
+me some tea."
+
+Mr. Bashwood tried to comply with the request; but the hand with
+which he lifted the teapot trembled so unmanageably that the tea
+missed the cup and streamed out on the cloth. "I'm very sorry; I
+can't help trembling when I'm anxious," said the old man, as his
+son took the tea-pot out of his hand. "I'm afraid you bear me
+malice, Jemmy, for what happened when I was last in town. I own I
+was obstinate and unreasonable about going back to Thorpe
+Ambrose. I'm more sensible now. You were quite right in taking it
+all on yourself, as soon as I showed you the veiled lady when we
+saw her come out of the hotel; and you were quite right to send
+me back the same day to my business in the steward's office at
+the Great House." He watched the effect of these concessions on
+his son, and ventured doubtfully on another entreaty. "If you
+won't tell me anything else just yet," he said, faintly, "will
+you tell me how you found her out. Do, Jemmy, do!"
+
+Bashwood the younger looked up from his plate. "I'll tell you
+that," he said. "The reckoning up of Miss Gwilt has cost more
+money and taken more time than I expected; and the sooner we come
+to a settlement about it, the sooner we shall get to what you
+want to know."
+
+Without a word of expostulation, the father laid his dingy old
+pocket-book and his purse on the table before the son. Bashwood
+the younger looked into the purse; observed, with a contemptuous
+elevation of the eyebrows, that it held no more than a sovereign
+and some silver; and returned it intact. The pocket-book, on
+being opened next, proved to contain four five-pound notes.
+Bashwood the younger transferred three of the notes to his own
+keeping; and handed the pocket-book back to his father, with a
+bow expressive of mock gratitude and sarcastic respect.
+
+"A thousand thanks," he said. "Some of it is for the people at
+our office, and the balance is for myself. One of the few stupid
+things, my dear sir, that I have done in the course of my life
+was to write you word, when you first consulted me, that you
+might have my services gratis. As you see, I hasten to repair the
+error. An hour or two at odd times I was ready enough to give
+you. But this business has taken days, and has got in the way of
+other jobs. I told you I couldn't be out of pocket by you-- I put
+it in my letter, as plain as words could say it."
+
+"Yes, yes, Jemmy. I don't complain, my dear, I don't complain.
+Never mind the money--tell me how you found her out."
+
+"Besides," pursued Bashwood. the younger, proceeding impenetrably
+with his justification of himself, "I have given you the benefit
+of my experience; I've done it cheap. It would have cost double
+the money if another man had taken this in hand. Another man
+would have kept a watch on Mr. Armadale as well as Miss Gwilt. I
+have saved you that expense. You are certain that Mr. Armadale is
+bent on marrying her. Very good. In that case, while we have our
+eye on _her,_ we have, for all useful purposes, got our eye on
+_him._ Know where the lady is, and you know that the gentleman
+can't be far off."
+
+"Quite true, Jemmy. But how was it Miss Gwilt came to give you so
+much trouble?"
+
+"She's a devilish clever woman," said Bashwood the younger;
+"that's how it was. She gave us the slip at a milliner's shop. We
+made it all right with the milliner, and speculated on the chance
+of her coming back to try on a gown she had ordered. The
+cleverest women lose the use of their wits in nine cases out of
+ten where there's a new dress in the case, and even Miss Gwilt
+was rash enough to go back. That was all we wanted. One of the
+women from our office helped to try on her new gown, and put her
+in the right position to be seen by one of our men behind the
+door. He instantly suspected who she was, on the strength of what
+he had been told of her; for she's a famous woman in her way. Of
+course, we didn't trust to that. We traced her to her new
+address; and we got a man from Scotland Yard, who was certain to
+know her, if our own man's idea was the right one. The man from
+Scotland Yard turned milliner's lad for the occasion, and took
+her gown home. He saw her in the passage, and identified her in
+an instant. You're in luck, I can tell you. Miss Gwilt's a public
+character. If we had had a less notorious woman to deal with, she
+might have cost us weeks of inquiry, and you might have had to
+pay hundreds of pounds. A day did it in Miss Gwilt's case; and
+another day put the whole story of her life, in black and white,
+into my hand. There it is at the present moment, old gentleman,
+in my black bag."
+
+Bashwood the father made straight for the bag with eager eyes and
+outstretched hand. Bashwood the son took a little key out of his
+waistcoat pocket, winked, shook his head, and put the key back
+again.
+
+"I haven't done breakfast yet," he said. "Gently does it, my dear
+sir--gently does it."
+
+"I can't wait!" cried the old man, struggling vainly to preserve
+his self-control. "It's past nine! It's a fortnight to-day since
+she went to London with Mr. Armadale! She may be married to him
+in a fortnight! She may be married to him this morning! I can't
+wait! I can't wait!"
+
+"There's no knowing what you can do till you try," rejoined
+Bashwood the younger. "Try, and you'll find you can wait. What
+has become of your curiosity?" he went on, feeding the fire
+ingeniously with a stick at a time. "Why don't you ask me what I
+mean by calling Miss Gwilt a public character? Why don't you
+wonder how I came to lay my hand on the story of her life, in
+black and white? If you'll sit down again, I'll tell you. If you
+won't, I shall confine myself to my breakfast."
+
+Mr. Bashwood sighed heavily, and went back to his chair.
+
+"I wish you were not so fond of your joke, Jemmy," he said. "I
+wish, my dear, you were not quite so fond of your joke."
+
+"Joke?" repeated his son. "It would be serious enough in some
+people's eyes, I can tell you. Miss Gwilt has been tried for her
+life; and the papers in that black bag are the lawyer's
+instructions for the Defense. Do you call that a joke?"
+
+The father started to his feet, and looked straight across the
+table at the son with a smile of exultation that was terrible to
+see.
+
+"She's been tried for her life!" he burst out, with a deep gasp
+of satisfaction. "She's been tried for her life!" He broke into a
+low, prolonged laugh, and snapped his fingers exultingly.
+"Aha-ha-ha! Something to frighten Mr. Armadale in _that!_"
+
+Scoundrel as he was, the son was daunted by the explosion of
+pent-up passion which burst on him in those words.
+
+"Don't excite yourself," he said, with a sullen suppression of
+the mocking manner in which he had spoken thus far.
+
+Mr. Bashwood sat down again, and passed his handkerchief over his
+forehead. "No," he said, nodding and smiling at his son. "No,
+no--no excitement, as you say--I can wait now, Jemmy; I can wait
+now."
+
+He waited with immovable patience. At intervals, he nodded, and
+smiled, and whispered to himself, "Something to frighten Mr.
+Armadale in _that!_" But he made no further attempt, by word,
+look, or action, to hurry his son.
+
+Bashwood the younger finished his breakfast slowly, out of pure
+bravado; lit a cigar with the utmost deliberation; looked at his
+father, and, seeing him still as immovably patient as ever,
+opened the black bag at last, and spread the papers on the table.
+
+"How will you have it?" he asked. "Long or short? I have got her
+whole life here. The counsel who defended her at the trial was
+instructed to hammer hard at the sympathies of the jury: he went
+head over ears into the miseries of her past career, and shocked
+everybody in court in the most workman-like manner. Shall I take
+the same line? Do you want to know all about her, from the time
+when she was in short frocks and frilled trousers? or do you
+prefer getting on at once to her first appearance as a prisoner
+in the dock?"
+
+"I want to know all about her," said his father, eagerly. "The
+worst, and the best--the worst particularly. Don't spare my
+feelings, Jemmy--whatever you do, don't spare my feelings! Can't
+I look at the papers myself?"
+
+"No, you can't. They would be all Greek and Hebrew to you. Thank
+your stars that you have got a sharp son, who can take the pith
+out of these papers, and give it a smack of the right flavor in
+serving it up. There are not ten men in England who could tell
+you this woman's story as I can tell it. It's a gift, old
+gentleman, of the sort that is given to very few people--and it
+lodges here."
+
+He tapped his forehead smartly, and turned to the first page of
+the manuscript before him, with an unconcealed triumph at the
+prospect of exhibiting his own cleverness, which was the first
+expression of a genuine feeling of any sort that had escaped him
+yet.
+
+
+"Miss Gwilt's story begins," said Bashwood the younger, "in the
+market-place at Thorpe Ambrose. One day, something like a quarter
+of a century ago, a traveling quack doctor, who dealt in
+perfumery as well as medicines, came to the town with his cart,
+and exhibited, as a living example of the excellence of his
+washes and hair-oils and so on, a pretty little girl, with a
+beautiful complexion and wonderful hair. His name was Oldershaw.
+He had a wife, who helped him in the perfumery part of his
+business, and who carried it on by herself after his death. She
+has risen in the world of late years; and she is identical with
+that sly old lady who employed me professionally a short time
+since. As for the pretty little girl, you know who she was as
+well as I do. While the quack was haranguing the mob and showing
+them the child's hair, a young lady, driving through the
+marketplace, stopped her carriage to hear what it was all about,
+saw the little girl, and took a violent fancy to her on the spot.
+The young lady was the daughter of Mr. Blanchard, of Thorpe
+Ambrose. She went home, and interested her father in the fate of
+the innocent little victim of the quack doctor. The same evening,
+the Oldershaws were sent for to the great house and were
+questioned. They declared themselves to be her uncle and aunt--a
+lie, of course!--and they were quite willing to let her attend
+the village school, while they stayed at Thorpe Ambrose, when the
+proposal was made to them. The new arrangement was carried out
+the next day. And the day after that, the Oldershaws had
+disappeared, and had left the little girl on the squire's hands!
+She evidently hadn't answered as they expected in the capacity of
+an advertisement, and that was the way they took of providing
+ for her for life. There is the first act of the play for you!
+Clear enough, so far, isn't it?"
+
+"Clear enough, Jemmy, to clever people. But I'm old and slow. I
+don't understand one thing. Whose child was she?"
+
+"A very sensible question. Sorry to inform you that nobody can
+answer it--Miss Gwilt herself included. These Instructions that
+I'm refering to are founded, of course, on her own statements,
+sifted by her attorney. All she could remember, on being
+questioned, was that she was beaten and half starved, somewhere
+in the country, by a woman who took in children at nurse. The
+woman had a card with her, stating that her name was Lydia Gwilt,
+and got a yearly allowance for taking care of her (paid through a
+lawyer) till she was eight years old. At that time, the allowance
+stopped; the lawyer had no explanation to offer; nobody came to
+look after her; nobody wrote. The Oldershaws saw her, and thought
+she might answer to exhibit; and the woman parted with her for a
+trifle to the Oldershaws; and the Oldershaws parted with her for
+good and all to the Blanchards. That's the story of her birth,
+parentage, and education! She may be the daughter of a duke, or
+the daughter of a costermonger. The circumstances may be highly
+romantic, or utterly commonplace. Fancy anything you
+like--there's nothing to stop you. When you've had your fancy
+out, say the word, and I'll turn over the leaves and go on."
+
+"Please to go on, Jemmy--please to go on."
+
+"The next glimpse of Miss Gwilt," resumed Bashwood the younger,
+turning over the papers, "is a glimpse at a family mystery. The
+deserted child was in luck's way at last. She had taken the fancy
+of an amiable young lady with a rich father, and she was petted
+and made much of at the great house, in the character of Miss
+Blanchard's last new plaything. Not long afterward Mr. Blanchard
+and his daughter went abroad, and took the girl with them in the
+capacity of Miss Blanchard's little maid. When they came back,
+the daughter had married, and become a widow, in the interval;
+and the pretty little maid, instead of returning with them to
+Thorpe Ambrose, turns up suddenly, all alone, as a pupil at a
+school in France. There she was, at a first-rate establishment,
+with her maintenance and education secured until she married and
+settled in life, on this understanding--that she never returned
+to England. Those were all the particulars she could be prevailed
+on to give the lawyer who drew up these instructions. She
+declined to say what had happened abroad; she declined even,
+after all the years that had passed, to mention her mistress's
+married name. It's quite clear, of course, that she was in
+possession of some family secret; and that the Blanchards paid
+for her schooling on the Continent to keep her out of the way.
+And it's equally plain that she would never have kept her secret
+as she did if she had not seen her way to trading on it for her
+own advantage at some future time. A clever woman, as I've told
+you already! A devilish clever woman, who hasn't been knocked
+about in the world, and seen the ups and downs of life abroad and
+at home, for nothing."
+
+"Yes, yes, Jemmy; quite true. How long did she stop, please, at
+the school in France?"
+
+Bashwood the younger referred to the papers. "She stopped at the
+French school," he replied, "till she was seventeen. At that time
+something happened at the school which I find mildly described in
+these papers as 'something unpleasant.' The plain fact was that
+the music-master attached to the establishment fell in love with
+Miss Gwilt. He was a respectable middle-aged man, with a wife and
+family; and, finding the circumstances entirely hopeless, he took
+a pistol, and, rashly assuming that he had brains in his head,
+tried to blow them out. The doctor saved his life, but not his
+reason; he ended, where he had better have begun, in an asylum.
+Miss Gwilt's beauty having been at the bottom of the scandal, it
+was, of course, impossible--though she was proved to have been
+otherwise quite blameless in the matter--for her to remain at the
+school after what had happened. Her 'friends' (the Blanchards)
+were communicated with. And her friends transferred her to
+another school; at Brussels, this time.--What are you sighing
+about? What's wrong now?"
+
+"I can't help feeling a little for the poor music-master, Jemmy.
+Go on."
+
+"According to her own account of it, dad, Miss Gwilt seems to
+have felt for him too. She took a serious turn; and was
+'converted' (as they call it) by the lady who had charge of her
+in the interval before she went to Brussels. The priest at the
+Belgium school appears to have been a man of some discretion, and
+to have seen that the girl's sensibilities were getting into a
+dangerously excited state. Before he could quiet her down, he
+fell ill, and was succeeded by another priest, who was a fanatic.
+You will understand the sort of interest he took in the girl, and
+the way in which he worked on her feelings, when I tell you that
+she announced it as her decision, after having been nearly two
+years at the school, to end her days in a convent! You may well
+stare! Miss Gwilt, in the character of a Nun, is the sort of
+female phenomenon you don't often set eyes on."
+
+"Did she go into the convent?" asked Mr. Bashwood. "Did they let
+her go in, so friendless and so young, with nobody to advise her
+for the best?"
+
+"The Blanchards were consulted, as a matter of form," pursued
+Bashwood the younger. "_They_ had no objection to her shutting
+herself up in a convent, as you may well imagine. The pleasantest
+letter they ever had from her, I'll answer for it, was the letter
+in which she solemnly took leave of them in this world forever.
+The people at the convent were as careful as usual not to commit
+themselves. Their rules wouldn't allow her to take the veil till
+she had tried the life for a year first, and then, if she had any
+doubt, for another year after that. She tried the life for the
+first year, accordingly, and doubted. She tried it for the second
+year, and was wise enough, by that time, to give it up without
+further hesitation. Her position was rather an awkward one when
+she found herself at liberty again. The sisters at the convent
+had lost their interest in her; the mistress at the school
+declined to take her back as teacher, on the ground that she was
+too nice-looking for the place; the priest considered her to be
+possessed by the devil. There was nothing for it but to write to
+the Blanchards again, and ask them to start her in life as a
+teacher of music on her own account. She wrote to her former
+mistress accordingly. Her former mistress had evidently doubted
+the genuineness of the girl's resolution to be a nun, and had
+seized the opportunity offered by her entry into the convent to
+cut off all further communication between her ex-waiting-maid and
+herself. Miss Gwilt's letter was returned by the post-office. She
+caused inquiries to be made; and found that Mr. Blanchard was
+dead, and that his daughter had left the great house for some
+place of retirement unknown. The next thing she did, upon this,
+was to write to the heir in possession of the estate. The letter
+was answered by his solicitors, who were instructed to put the
+law in force at the first attempt she made to extort money from
+any member of the family at Thorpe Ambrose. The last chance was
+to get at the address of her mistress's place of retirement. The
+family bankers, to whom she wrote, wrote back to say that they
+were instructed not to give the lady's address to any one
+applying for it, without being previously empowered to do so by
+the lady herself. That last letter settled the question--Miss
+Gwilt could do nothing more. With money at her command, she might
+have gone to England and made the Blanchards think twice before
+they carried things with too high a hand. Not having a half-penny
+at command, she was helpless. Without money and without friends,
+you may wonder how she supported herself while the correspondence
+was going on. She supported herself by playing the piano-forte at
+a low concert-room in Brussels. The men laid siege to her, of
+course, in all directions; but they found her insensible as
+adamant. One of these rejected gentlemen was a Russian; and he
+was the means of making her acquainted with a countrywoman of
+his, whose name is unpronounceable by English lips. Let us give
+her her title, and call her the baroness. The two women liked
+each other at their first introduction; and a new scene opened in
+Miss Gwilt's life. She became reader and companion to the
+baroness. Everything was right, everything was smooth on the
+surface. Everything was rotten and everything was wrong under
+it."
+
+"In what way, Jemmy? Please to wait a little, and tell me in what
+way."
+
+"In this way. The baroness was fond of traveling, and she had a
+select set of friends about her who were quite of her way of
+thinking. They went from one city on the Continent to another,
+and were such charming people that they picked up acquaintances
+everywhere. The acquaintances were invited to the baroness's
+receptions, and card-tables were invariably a part of the
+baroness's furniture. Do you see it now? or must I tell you, in
+the strictest confidence, that cards were not considered sinful
+on these festive occasions, and that the luck, at the end of the
+evening, turned out to be almost invariably on the side of the
+baroness and her friends? Swindlers, all of them; and there isn't
+a doubt on my mind, whatever there may be on yours, that Miss
+Gwilt's manners and appearance made her a valuable member of the
+society in the capacity of a decoy. Her own statement is that she
+was innocent of all knowledge of what really went on; that she
+was quite ignorant of card-playing; that she hadn't such a thing
+as a respectable friend to turn to in the world; and that she
+honestly liked the baroness, for the simple reason that the
+baroness was a hearty good friend to her from first to last.
+Believe that or not, as you please. For five years she traveled
+about all over the Continent with these card-sharpers in high
+life, and she might have been among them at this moment, for
+anything I know to the contrary, if the baroness had not caught a
+Tartar at Naples, in the shape of a rich traveling Englishman,
+named Waldron. Aha! that name startles you, does it? You've read
+the Trial of the famous Mrs. Waldron, like the rest of the world?
+And you know who Miss Gwilt is now, without my telling you?"
+
+He paused, and looked at his father in sudden perplexity. Far
+from being overwhelmed by the discovery which had just burst on
+him, Mr. Bashwood, after the first natural movement of surprise,
+faced his son with a self-possession which was nothing short of
+extraordinary under the circumstances. There was a new brightness
+in his eyes, and a new color in his face. If it had been possible
+to conceive such a thing of a man in his position, he seemed to
+be absolutely encouraged instead of depressed by what he had just
+heard. "Go on, Jemmy," he said, quietly; "I am one of the few
+people who didn't read the trial; I only heard of it."
+
+Still wondering inwardly, Bashwood the younger recovered himself,
+and went on.
+
+"You always were, and you always will be, behind the age," he
+said. "When we come to the trial, I can tell you as much about it
+as you need know. In the meantime, we must go back to the
+baroness and Mr. Waldron. For a certain number of nights the
+Englishman let the card-sharpers have it all their own way; in
+other words, he paid for the privilege of making himself
+agreeable to Miss Gwilt. When he thought he had produced the
+necessary impression on her, he exposed the whole confederacy
+without mercy. The police interfered; the baroness found herself
+in prison; and Miss Gwilt was put between the two alternatives of
+accepting Mr. Waldron's protection or being thrown on the world
+again. She was amazingly virtuous, or amazingly clever, which you
+please. To Mr. Waldron's astonishment, she told him that she
+could face the prospect of being thrown on the world; and that he
+must address her honorably or leave her forever. The end of it
+was what the end always is, where the man is infatuated and the
+woman is determined. To the disgust of his family and friends,
+Mr. Waldron made a virtue of necessity, and married her."
+
+"How old was he?" asked Bashwood the elder, eagerly.
+
+Bashwood the younger burst out laughing. "He was about old
+enough, daddy, to be your son, and rich enough to have burst that
+precious pocket-book of yours with thousand-pound notes! Don't
+hang your head. It wasn't a happy marriage, though he _was_ so
+young and so rich. They lived abroad, and got on well enough at
+first. He made a new will, of course, as soon as he was married,
+and provided handsomely for his wife, under the tender pressure
+of the honey-moon. But women wear out, like other things, with
+time; and one fine morning Mr. Waldron woke up with a doubt in
+his mind whether he had not acted like a fool. He was an
+ill-tempered man; he was discontented with himself; and of course
+he made his wife feel it. Having begun by quarreling with her, he
+got on to suspecting her, and became savagely jealous of every
+male creature who entered the house. They had no incumbrances in
+the shape of children, and they moved from one place to another,
+just as his jealousy inclined him, till they moved back to
+England at last, after having been married close on four years.
+He had a lonely old house of his own among the Yorkshire moors,
+and there he shut his wife and himself up from every living
+creature, except his servants and his dogs. Only one result could
+come, of course, of treating a high-spirited young woman in that
+way. It may be her fate, or it may be chance; but, whenever a
+woman is desperate, there is sure to be a man handy to take
+advantage of it. The man in this case was rather a 'dark horse,'
+as they say on the turf. He was a certain Captain Manuel, a
+native of Cuba, and (according to his own account) an ex-officer
+in the Spanish navy. He had met Mr. Waldron's beautiful wife on
+the journey back to England; had contrived to speak to her in
+spite of her husband's jealousy; and had followed her to her
+place of imprisonment in Mr. Waldron's house on the moors. The
+captain is described as a clever, determined fellow--of the
+daring piratical sort--with the dash of mystery about him that
+women like--"
+
+"She's not the same as other women!" interposed Mr. Bashwood,
+suddenly interrupting his son. "Did she--?" His voice failed him,
+and he stopped without bringing the question to an end.
+
+"Did she like the captain?" suggested Bashwood the younger, with
+another laugh. "According to her own account of it, she adored
+him. At the same time her conduct (as represented by herself) was
+perfectly innocent. Considering how carefully her husband watched
+her, the statement (incredible as it appears) is probably true.
+For six weeks or so they confined themselves to corresponding
+privately, the Cuban captain (who spoke and wrote English
+perfectly) having contrived to make a go-between of one of the
+female servants in the Yorkshire house. How it might have ended
+we needn't trouble ourselves to inquire--Mr. Waldron himself
+brought matters to a crisis. Whether he got wind of the
+clandestine correspondence or not, doesn't appear. But this is
+certain, that he came home from a ride one day in a fiercer
+temper than usual; that his wife showed him a sample of that high
+spirit of hers which he had never yet been able to break; and
+that it ended in his striking her across the face with his
+riding-whip. Ungentlemanly conduct, I am afraid we must admit;
+but, to all outward appearance, the riding-whip produced the most
+astonishing results. From that moment the lady submitted as she
+had never submitted before. For a fortnight afterward he did what
+he liked, and she never thwarted him; he said what he liked, and
+she never uttered a word of protest. Some men might have
+suspected this sudden reformation of hiding something dangerous
+under the surface. Whether Mr. Waldron looked at it in that
+light, I can't tell you. All that is known is that, before the
+mark of the whip was off his wife's face, he fell ill, and that
+in two days afterward he was a dead man. What do you say to
+that?"
+
+"I say he deserved it!" answered Mr. Bashwood, striking his hand
+excitedly on the table, as his son paused and looked at him.
+
+"The
+ doctor who attended the dying man was not of your way of
+thinking," remarked Bashwood the younger, dryly. "He called in
+two other medical men, and they all three refused to certify the
+death. The usual legal investigation followed. The evidence of
+the doctors and the evidence of the servants pointed irresistibly
+in one and the same direction; and Mrs. Waldron was committed for
+trial, on the charge of murdering her husband by poison. A
+solicitor in first-rate criminal practice was sent for from
+London to get up the prisoner's defense, and these 'Instructions'
+took their form and shape accordingly.--What's the matter? What
+do you want now?"
+
+Suddenly rising from his chair, Mr. Bashwood stretched across the
+table, and tried to take the papers from his son. "I want to look
+at them," he burst out, eagerly. "I want to see what they say
+about the captain from Cuba. He was at the bottom of it,
+Jemmy--I'll swear he was at the bottom of it!"
+
+"Nobody doubted that who was in the secret of the case at the
+time," rejoined his son. "But nobody could prove it. Sit down
+again, dad, and compose yourself. There's nothing here about
+Captain Manuel but the lawyer's private suspicions of him, for
+the counsel to act on or not, at the counsel's discretion. From
+first to last she persisted in screening the captain. At the
+outset of the business she volunteered two statements to the
+lawyer--both of which he suspected to be false. In the first
+place she declared that she was innocent of the crime. He wasn't
+surprised, of course, so far; his clients were, as a general
+rule, in the habit of deceiving him in that way. In the second
+place, while admitting her private correspondence with the Cuban
+captain, she declared that the letters on both sides related
+solely to a proposed elopement, to which her husband's barbarous
+treatment had induced her to consent. The lawyer naturally asked
+to see the letters. 'He has burned all my letters, and I have
+burned all his,' was the only answer he got. It was quite
+possible that Captain Manuel might have burned _her_ letters when
+he heard there was a coroner's inquest in the house. But it was
+in her solicitor's experience (as it is in my experience too)
+that, when a woman is fond of a man, in ninety-nine cases out of
+a hundred, risk or no risk, she keeps his letters. Having his
+suspicions roused in this way, the lawyer privately made some
+inquiries about the foreign captain, and found that he was as
+short of money as a foreign captain could be. At the same time,
+he put some questions to his client about her expectations from
+her deceased husband. She answered, in high indignation, that a
+will had been found among her husband's papers, privately
+executed only a few days before his death, and leaving her no
+more, out of all his immense fortune, than five thousand pounds.
+'Was there an older will, then,' says the lawyer, 'which the new
+will revoked?' Yes, there was; a will that he had given into her
+own possession--a will made when they were first married.
+'Leaving his widow well provided for?' Leaving her just ten times
+as much as the second will left her. 'Had she ever mentioned that
+first will, now revoked, to Captain Manuel?' She saw the trap set
+for her, and said, 'No, never!' without an instant's hesitation.
+That reply confirmed the lawyer's suspicions. He tried to
+frighten her by declaring that her life might pay the forfeit of
+her deceiving him in this matter. With the usual obstinacy of
+women, she remained just as immovable as ever. The captain, on
+his side, behaved in the most exemplary manner. He confessed to
+planning the elopement; he declared that he had burned all the
+lady's letters as they reached him, out of regard for her
+reputation; he remained in the neighborhood; and he volunteered
+to attend before the magistrates. Nothing was discovered that
+could legally connect him with the crime, or that could put him
+into court on the day of the trial, in any other capacity than
+the capacity of a witness. I don't believe myself that there's
+any moral doubt (as they call it) that Manuel knew of the will
+which left her mistress of fifty thousand pounds; and that he was
+ready and willing, in virtue of that circumstance, to marry her
+on Mr. Waldron's death. If anybody tempted her to effect her own
+release from her husband by making herself a widow, the captain
+must have been the man. And unless she contrived, guarded and
+watched as she was, to get the poison for herself, the poison
+must have come to her in one of the captain's letters."
+
+"I don't believe she used it, if it did come to her!" exclaimed
+Mr. Bashwood. "I believe it was the captain himself who poisoned
+her husband!"
+
+Bashwood the younger, without noticing the interruption, folded
+up the Instructions for the Defense, which had now served their
+purpose, put them back in his bag, and produced a printed
+pamphlet in their place.
+
+"Here is one of the published Reports of the Trial," he said,
+"which you can read at your leisure, if you like. We needn't
+waste time now by going into details. I have told you already how
+cleverly her counsel paved his way for treating the charge of
+murder as the crowning calamity of the many that had already
+fallen on an innocent woman. The two legal points relied on for
+the defense (after this preliminary flourish) were: First, that
+there was no evidence to connect her with the possession of
+poison; and, secondly, that the medical witnesses, while
+positively declaring that her husband had died by poison,
+differed in their conclusions as to the particular drug that had
+killed him. Both good points, and both well worked; but the
+evidence on the other side bore down everything before it. The
+prisoner was proved to have had no less than three excellent
+reasons for killing her husband. He had treated her with almost
+unexampled barbarity; he had left her in a will (unrevoked so far
+as she knew) mistress of a fortune on his death; and she was, by
+her own confession, contemplating an elopement with another man.
+Having set forth these motives, the prosecution next showed by
+evidence, which was never once shaken on any single point, that
+the one person in the house who could by any human possibility
+have administered the poison was the prisoner at the bar. What
+could the judge and jury do, with such evidence before them as
+this? The verdict was Guilty, as a matter of course; and the
+judge declared that he agreed with it. The female part of the
+audience was in hysterics; and the male part was not much better.
+The judge sobbed, and the bar shuddered. She was sentenced to
+death in such a scene as had never been previously witnessed in
+an English court of justice. And she is alive and hearty at the
+present moment; free to do any mischief she pleases, and to
+poison, at her own entire convenience, any man, woman, or child
+that happens to stand in her way. A most interesting woman! Keep
+on good terms with her, my dear sir, whatever you do, for the Law
+has said to her in the plainest possible English, 'My charming
+friend, I have no terrors for _you!_' "
+
+"How was she pardoned?" asked Mr. Bashwood, breathlessly. "They
+told me at the time, but I have forgotten. Was it the Home
+Secretary? If it was, I respect the Home Secretary! I say the
+Home Secretary was deserving of his place."
+
+"Quite right, old gentleman!" rejoined Bashwood the younger. "The
+Home Secretary was the obedient humble servant of an enlightened
+Free Press, and he _was_ deserving of his place. Is it possible
+you don't know how she cheated the gallows? If you don't, I must
+tell you. On the evening of the trial, two or three of the young
+buccaneers of literature went down to two or three newspaper
+offices, and wrote two or three heart-rending leading articles on
+the subject of the proceedings in court. The next morning the
+public caught light like tinder; and the prisoner was tried over
+again, before an amateur court of justice, in the columns of the
+newspapers. All the people who had no personal experience
+whatever on the subject seized their pens, and rushed (by kind
+permission of the editor) into print. Doctors who had _not_
+attended the sick man, and who had _not_ been present at the
+examination
+ of the body, declared by dozens that he had died a natural
+death. Barristers without business, who had _not_ heard the
+evidence, attacked the jury who had heard it, and judged the
+judge, who had sat on the bench before some of them were born.
+The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the
+doctors, and the young buccaneers who had set the thing going.
+Here was the law that they all paid to protect them actually
+doing its duty in dreadful earnest! Shocking! shocking! The
+British Public rose to protest as one man against the working of
+its own machinery; and the Home Secretary, in a state of
+distraction, went to the judge. The judge held firm. He had said
+it was the right verdict at the time, and he said so still. 'But
+suppose,' says the Home Secretary, 'that the prosecution had
+tried some other way of proving her guilty at the trial than the
+way they did try, what would you and the jury have done then?' Of
+course it was quite impossible for the judge to say. This
+comforted the Home Secretary, to begin with. And, when he got the
+judge's consent, after that, to having the conflict of medical
+evidence submitted to one great doctor; and when the one great
+doctor took the merciful view, after expressly stating, in the
+first instance, that he knew nothing practically of the merits of
+the case, the Home Secretary was perfectly satisfied. The
+prisoner's death-warrant went into the waste-paper basket; the
+verdict of the law was reversed by general acclamation; and the
+verdict of the newspapers carried the day. But the best of it is
+to come. You know what happened when the people found themselves
+with the pet object of their sympathy suddenly cast loose on
+their hands? A general impression prevailed directly that she was
+not quite innocent enough, after all, to be let out of prison
+then and there! Punish her a little--that was the state of the
+popular feeling--punish her a little, Mr. Home Secretary, on
+general moral grounds. A small course of gentle legal medicine,
+if you love us, and then we shall feel perfectly easy on the
+subject to the end of our days."
+
+"Don't joke about it!" cried his father. "Don't, don't, don't,
+Jemmy! Did they try her again? They couldn't! They dursn't!
+Nobody can be tried twice over for the same offense."
+
+"Pooh! pooh! she could be tried a second time for a second
+offense," retorted Bashwood the younger-- "and tried she was.
+Luckily for the pacification of the public mind, she had rushed
+headlong into redressing her own grievances (as women will), when
+she discovered that her husband had cut her down from a legacy of
+fifty thousand pounds to a legacy of five thousand by a stroke of
+his pen. The day before the inquest a locked drawer in Mr.
+Waldron's dressing-room table, which contained some valuable
+jewelry, was discovered to have been opened and emptied; and when
+the prisoner was committed by the magistrates, the precious
+stones were found torn out of their settings and sewed up in her
+stays. The lady considered it a case of justifiable
+self-compensation. The law declared it to be a robbery committed
+on the executors of the dead man. The lighter offense--which had
+been passed over when such a charge as murder was brought against
+her--was just the thing to revive, to save appearances in the
+eyes of the public. They had stopped the course of justice, in
+the case of the prisoner, at one trial; and now all they wanted
+was to set the course of justice going again, in the case of the
+prisoner, at another! She was arraigned for the robbery, after
+having been pardoned for the murder. And, what is more, if her
+beauty and her misfortunes hadn't made a strong impression on her
+lawyer. she would not only have had to stand another trial, but
+would have had even the five thousand pounds, to which she was
+entitled by the second will, taken away from her, as a felon, by
+the Crown."
+
+"I respect her lawyer! I admire her lawyer!" exclaimed Mr.
+Bashwood. "I should like to take his hand, and tell him so."
+
+"He wouldn't thank you, if you did," remarked Bashwood the
+younger. "He is under a comfortable impression that nobody knows
+how he saved Mrs. Waldron's legacy for her but himself."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Jemmy," interposed his father. "But don't
+call her Mrs. Waldron. Speak of her, please, by her name when she
+was innocent, and young, and a girl at school. Would you mind,
+for my sake, calling her Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"Not I! It makes no difference to me what name I give her. Bother
+your sentiment! let's go on with the facts. This is what the
+lawyer did before the second trial came off. He told her she
+would be found guilty _again,_ to a dead certainty. 'And this
+time,' he said, 'the public will let the law take its course.
+Have you got an old friend whom you can trust?' She hadn't such a
+thing as an old friend in the world. 'Very well, then,' says the
+lawyer, you must trust me. Sign this paper; and you will have
+executed a fictitious sale of all your property to myself. When
+the right time comes, I shall first carefully settle with your
+husband's executors; and I shall then reconvey the money to you,
+securing it properly (in case you ever marry again) in your own
+possession. The Crown, in other transactions of this kind,
+frequently waives its right of disputing the validity of the
+sale; and, if the Crown is no harder on you than on other people,
+when you come out of prison you will have your five thousand
+pounds to begin the world with again.' Neat of the lawyer, when
+she was going to be tried for robbing the executors, to put her
+up to a way of robbing the Crown, wasn't it? Ha! ha! what a world
+it is!"
+
+The last effort of the son's sarcasm passed unheeded by the
+father. "In prison!" he said to himself. "Oh me, after all that
+misery, in prison again!"
+
+"Yes," said Bashwood the younger, rising and stretching himself,
+"that's how it ended. The verdict was Guilty; and the sentence
+was imprisonment for two years. She served her time; and came
+out, as well as I can reckon it, about three years since. If you
+want to know what she did when she recovered her liberty, and how
+she went on afterward, I may be able to tell you something about
+it--say, on another occasion, when you have got an extra note or
+two in your pocket-book. For the present, all you need know, you
+do know. There isn't the shadow of a doubt that this fascinating
+lady has the double slur on her of having been found guilty of
+murder, and of having served her term of imprisonment for theft.
+There's your money's worth for your money--with the whole of my
+wonderful knack at stating a case clearly, thrown in for nothing.
+If you have any gratitude in you, you ought to do something
+handsome, one of these days, for your son. But for me, I'll tell
+you what you would have done, old gentleman. If you could have
+had your own way, you would have married Miss Gwilt."
+
+Mr. Bashwood rose to his feet, and looked his son steadily in the
+face.
+
+"If I could have my own way," he said, "I would marry her now."
+
+Bashwood the younger started back a step. "After all I have told
+you?" he asked, in the blankest astonishment.
+
+"After all you have told me."
+
+"With the chance of being poisoned, the first time you happened
+to offend her?"
+
+"With the chance of being poisoned," answered Mr. Bashwood, "in
+four-and-twenty hours."
+
+The Spy of the Private Inquiry Office dropped back into his
+chair, cowed by his father's words and his father's looks.
+
+"Mad!" he said to himself. "Stark mad, by jingo!"
+
+Mr. Bashwood looked at his watch, and hurriedly took his hat from
+a side-table.
+
+"I should like to hear the rest of it," he said. "I should like
+to hear every word you have to tell me about her, to the very
+last. But the time, the dreadful, galloping time, is getting on.
+For all I know, they may be on their way to be married at this
+very moment."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Bashwood the younger, getting
+between his father and the door.
+
+"I am going to the hotel," said the old man, trying to pass him.
+"I am going to see Mr. Armadale."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To tell him everything you have told me." He paused after making
+that reply. The terrible smile of triumph which had once already
+appeared on his face overspre ad it again. "Mr. Armadale is
+young; Mr. Armadale has all his life before him," he whispered,
+cunningly, with his trembling fingers clutching his son's arm.
+"What doesn't frighten _me_ will frighten _him!_"
+
+"Wait a minute," said Bashwood the younger. "Are you as certain
+as ever that Mr. Armadale is the man?"
+
+"What man?"
+
+"The man who is going to marry her."
+
+"Yes! yes! yes! Let me go, Jemmy--let me go."
+
+The spy set his back against the door, and considered for a
+moment. Mr. Armadale was rich--Mr. Armadale (if _he_ was not
+stark mad too) might be made to put the right money-value on
+information that saved him from the disgrace of marrying Miss
+Gwilt. "It may be a hundred pounds in my pocket if I work it
+myself," thought Bashwood the younger. "And it won't be a
+half-penny if I leave it to my father." He took up his hat and
+his leather bag. "Can you carry it all in your own addled old
+head, daddy?" he asked, with his easiest impudence of manner.
+"Not you! I'll go with you and help you. What do you think of
+that?"
+
+The father threw his arms in an ecstasy round the son's neck. "I
+can't help it, Jemmy," he said, in broken tones. "You are so good
+to me. Take the other note, my dear--I'll manage without it--take
+the other note."
+
+The son threw open the door with a flourish; and magnanimously
+turned his back on the father's offered pocket-book. "Hang it,
+old gentleman, I'm not quite so mercenary as _that!_" he said,
+with an appearance of the deepest feeling. "Put up your
+pocket-book, and let's be off.--If I took my respected parent's
+last five-pound note," he thought to himself, as he led the way
+downstairs, "how do I know he mightn't cry halves when he sees
+the color of Mr. Armadale's money?--Come along, dad!" he resumed.
+"We'll take a cab and catch the happy bridegroom before he starts
+for the church!"
+
+They hailed a cab in the street, and started for the hotel which
+had been the residence of Midwinter and Allan during their stay
+in London. The instant the door of the vehicle had closed, Mr.
+Bashwood returned to the subject of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"Tell me the rest," he said, taking his son's hand, and patting
+it tenderly. "Let's go on talking about her all the way to the
+hotel. Help me through the time, Jemmy--help me through the
+time."
+
+Bashwood the younger was in high spirits at the prospect of
+seeing the color of Mr. Armadale's money. He trifled with his
+father's anxiety to the very last.
+
+"Let's see if you remember what I've told you already," he began.
+"There's a character in the story that's dropped out of it
+without being accounted for. Come! can you tell me who it is?"
+
+He had reckoned on finding his father unable to answer the
+question. But Mr. Bashwood's memory, for anything that related to
+Miss Gwilt, was as clear and ready as his son's. "The foreign
+scoundrel who tempted her, and let her screen him at the risk of
+her own life," he said, without an instant's hesitation. "Don't
+speak of him, Jemmy--don't speak of him again!"
+
+"I _must_ speak of him," retorted the other. "You want to know
+what became of Miss Gwilt when she got out of prison, don't you?
+Very good--I'm in a position to tell you. She became Mrs. Manuel.
+It's no use staring at me, old gentleman. I know it officially.
+At the latter part of last year, a foreign lady came to our
+place, with evidence to prove that she had been lawfully married
+to Captain Manuel, at a former period of his career, when he had
+visited England for the first time. She had only lately
+discovered that he had been in this country again; and she had
+reason to believe that he had married another woman in Scotland.
+Our people were employed to make the necessary inquiries.
+Comparison of dates showed that the Scotch marriage--if it was a
+marriage at all, and not a sham--had taken place just about the
+time when Miss Gwilt was a free woman again. And a little further
+investigation showed us that the second Mrs. Manuel was no other
+than the heroine of the famous criminal trial--whom we didn't
+know then, but whom we do know now, to be identical with your
+fascinating friend, Miss Gwilt."
+
+Mr. Bashwood's head sank on his breast. He clasped his trembling
+hands fast in each other, and waited in silence to hear the rest.
+
+"Cheer up!" pursued his son. "She was no more the captain's wife
+than you are; and what is more, the captain himself is out of
+your way now. One foggy day in December last he gave us the slip;
+and was off to the continent, nobody knew where. He had spent the
+whole of the second Mrs. Manuel's five thousand pounds, in the
+time that had elapsed (between two and three years) since she had
+come out of prison; and the wonder was, where he had got the
+money to pay his traveling expenses. It turned out that he had
+got it from the second Mrs. Manuel herself. She had filled his
+empty pockets; and there she was, waiting confidently in a
+miserable London lodging, to hear from him and join him as soon
+as he was safely settled in foreign parts! Where had _she_ got
+the money, you may ask naturally enough? Nobody could tell at the
+time. My own notion is, now, that her former mistress must have
+been still living, and that she must have turned her knowledge of
+the Blanchards' family secret to profitable account at last. This
+is mere guess-work, of course; but there's a circumstance that
+makes it likely guess-work to my mind. She had an elderly female
+friend to apply to at the time, who was just the woman to help
+her in ferreting out her mistress's address. Can you guess the
+name of the elderly female friend? Not you! Mrs. Oldershaw, of
+course!"
+
+Mr. Bashwood suddenly looked up. "Why should she go back," he
+asked, "to the woman who had deserted her when she was a child?"
+
+"I can't say," rejoined his son, "unless she went back in the
+interests of her own magnificent head of hair. The
+prison-scissors, I needn't tell you, had made short work of it
+with Miss Gwilt's love-locks, in every sense of the word; and
+Mrs. Oldershaw, I beg to add, is the most eminent woman in
+England, as restorer-general of the dilapidated heads and faces
+of the female sex. Put two and two together; and perhaps you'll
+agree with me, in this case, that they make four."
+
+"Yes, yes; two and two make four," repeated his father,
+impatiently. "But I want to know something else. Did she hear
+from him again? Did he send for her after he had gone away to
+foreign parts?"
+
+"The captain? Why, what on earth can you be thinking of? Hadn't
+he spent every farthing of her money? and wasn't he loose on the
+Continent out of her reach? She waited to hear from him. I dare
+say, for she persisted in believing in him. But I'll lay you any
+wager you like, she never saw the sight of his handwriting again.
+We did our best at the office to open her eyes; we told her
+plainly that he had a first wife living, and that she hadn't the
+shadow of a claim on him. She wouldn't believe us, though we met
+her with the evidence. Obstinate, devilish obstinate. I dare say
+she waited for months together before she gave up the last hope
+of ever seeing him again."
+
+Mr. Bashwood looked aside quickly out of the cab window. "Where
+could she turn for refuge next?" he said, not to his son, but to
+himself. "What, in Heaven's name, could she do?"
+
+"Judging by my experience of women," remarked Bashwood the
+younger, overhearing him, "I should say she probably tried to
+drown herself. But that's only guess-work again: it's all
+guess-work at this part of her story. You catch me at the end of
+my evidence, dad, when you come to Miss Gwilt's proceedings in
+the spring and summer of the present year. She might, or she
+might not, have been desperate enough to attempt suicide; and she
+might, or she might not, have been at the bottom of those
+inquiries that I made for Mrs. Oldershaw. I dare say you'll see
+her this morning; and perhaps, if you use your influence, you may
+he able to make her finish her own story herself."
+
+Mr. Bashwood, still looking out of the cab window, suddenly laid
+his hand on his son's arm.
+
+"Hush! hush!" he exclaimed, in violent agitation. "We have got
+there at last. Oh, Jemmy, feel how my heart beats! Here is the
+hotel."
+
+"Bother your heart," said Bashwood the younger. "Wait here while
+I ma ke the inquiries."
+
+"I'll come with you!" cried his father. "I can't wait! I tell
+you, I can't wait!"
+
+They went into the hotel together, and asked for "Mr. Armadale."
+
+The answer, after some little hesitation and delay, was that Mr.
+Armadale had gone away six days since. A second waiter added that
+Mr. Armadale's friend--Mr. Midwinter--had only left that morning.
+Where had Mr. Armadale gone? Somewhere into the country. Where
+had Mr. Midwinter gone? Nobody knew.
+
+Mr. Bashwood looked at his son in speechless and helpless dismay.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" said Bashwood the younger, pushing his
+father back roughly into the cab. "He's safe enough. We shall
+find him at Miss Gwilt's."
+
+The old man took his son's hand and kissed it.	"Thank you, my
+dear," he said, gratefully. "Thank you for comforting me."
+
+The cab was driven next to the second lodging which Miss Gwilt
+had occupied, in the neighborhood of Tottenham Court Road.
+
+"Stop here," said the spy, getting out, and shutting his father
+into the cab. "I mean to manage this part of the business
+myself."
+
+He knocked at the house door. "I have got a note for Miss Gwilt,"
+he said, walking into the passage, the moment the door was
+opened.
+
+"She's gone," answered the servant. "She went away last night."
+
+Bashwood the younger wasted no more words with the servant. He
+insisted on seeing the mistress. The mistress confirmed the
+announcement of Miss Gwilt's departure on the previous evening.
+Where had she gone to? The woman couldn't say. How had she left?
+On foot. At what hour? Between nine and ten. What had she done
+with her luggage? She had no luggage. Had a gentleman been to see
+her on the previous day? Not a soul, gentle or simple, had come
+to the house to see Miss Gwilt.
+
+The father's face, pale and wild, was looking out of the cab
+window as the son descended the house steps. "Isn't she there,
+Jemmy?" he asked, faintly--"isn't she there?"
+
+"Hold your tongue," cried the spy, with the native coarseness of
+his nature rising to the surface at last. "I'm not at the end of
+my inquiries yet."
+
+He crossed the road, and entered a coffee-shop situated exactly
+opposite the house he had just left.
+
+In the box nearest the window two men were sitting talking
+together anxiously.
+
+"Which of you was on duty yesterday evening, between nine and ten
+o'clock?" asked Bashwood the younger, suddenly joining them, and
+putting his question in a quick, peremptory whisper.
+
+"I was, sir," said one of the men, unwillingly.
+
+"Did you lose sight of the house?--Yes! I see you did."
+
+"Only for a minute, sir. An infernal blackguard of a soldier came
+in--"
+
+"That will do," said Bashwood the younger. "I know what the
+soldier did, and who sent him to do it. She has given us the slip
+again. You are the greatest ass living. Consider yourself
+dismissed." With those words, and with an oath to emphasize them,
+he left the coffee-shop and returned to the cab.
+
+"She's gone!" cried his father. "Oh, Jemmy, Jemmy, I see it in
+your face!" He fell back into his own corner of the cab, with a
+faint, wailing cry. "They're married," he moaned to himself; his
+hands falling helplessly on his knees; his hat falling unregarded
+from his head. "Stop them!" he exclaimed, suddenly rousing
+himself, and seizing his son in a frenzy by the collar of the
+coat.
+
+"Go back to the hotel," shouted Bashwood the younger to the
+cabman. "Hold your noise!" he added, turning fiercely on his
+father. "I want to think."
+
+The varnish of smoothness was all off him by this time. His
+temper was roused. His pride--even such a man has his pride!--was
+wounded to the quick. Twice had he matched his wits against a
+woman's; and twice the woman had baffled him.
+
+He got out, on reaching the hotel for the second time, and
+privately tried the servants with the offer of money. The result
+of the experiment satisfied him that they had, in this instance,
+really and truly no information to sell. After a moment's
+reflection, he stopped, before leaving the hotel, to ask the way
+to the parish church. "The chance may be worth trying," he
+thought to himself, as he gave the address to the driver.
+"Faster!" he called out, looking first at his watch, and then at
+his father. "The minutes are precious this morning; and the old
+one is beginning to give in."
+
+It was true. Still capable of hearing and of understanding, Mr.
+Bashwood was past speaking by this time. He clung with both hands
+to his son's grudging arm, and let his head fall helplessly on
+his son's averted shoulder.
+
+The parish church stood back from the street, protected by gates
+and railings, and surrounded by a space of open ground. Shaking
+off his father's hold, Bashwood the younger made straight for the
+vestry. The clerk, putting away the books, and the clerk's
+assistant, hanging up a surplice, were the only persons in the
+room when he entered it and asked leave to look at the marriage
+register for the day.
+
+The clerk gravely opened the book, and stood aside from the desk
+on which it lay.
+
+The day's register comprised three marriages solemnized that
+morning; and the first two signatures on the page were "Allan
+Armadale" and "Lydia Gwilt!"
+
+Even the spy--ignorant as he was of the truth, unsuspicious as he
+was of the terrible future consequences to which the act of that
+morning might lead--even the spy started, when his eye first fell
+on the page. It was done! Come what might of it, it was done now.
+There, in black and white, was the registered evidence of the
+marriage, which was at once a truth in itself, and a lie in the
+conclusion to which it led! There--through the fatal similarity
+in the names--there, in Midwinter's own signature, was the proof
+to persuade everybody that, not Midwinter, but Allan, was the
+husband of Miss Gwilt!
+
+Bashwood the younger closed the book, and returned it to the
+clerk. He descended the vestry steps, with his hands thrust
+doggedly into his pockets, and with a serious shock inflicted on
+his professional self-esteem.
+
+The beadle met him under the church wall. He considered for a
+moment whether it was worth while to spend a shilling in
+questioning the man, and decided in the affirmative. If they
+could be traced and overtaken, there might be a chance of seeing
+the color of Mr. Armadale's money even yet.
+
+"How long is it," he asked, "since the first couple married here
+this morning left the church?"
+
+"About an hour," said the beadle.
+
+"How did they go away?"
+
+The beadle deferred answering that second question until he had
+first pocketed his fee.
+
+"You won't trace them from here, sir," he said, when he had got
+his shilling. "They went away on foot."
+
+"And that is all you know about it?"
+
+"That, sir, is all I know about it."
+
+Left by himself, even the Detective of the Private Inquiry Office
+paused for a moment before he returned to his father at the gate.
+He was roused from his hesitation by the sudden appearance,
+within the church inclosure, of the driver of the cab.
+
+"I'm afraid the old gentleman is going to be taken ill, sir,"
+said the man.
+
+Bashwood the younger frowned angrily, and walked back to the cab.
+As he opened the door and looked in, his father leaned forward
+and confronted him, with lips that moved speechlessly, and with a
+white stillness over all the rest of his face.
+
+"She's done us," said the spy. "They were married here this
+morning."
+
+The old man's body swayed for a moment from one side to the
+other. The instant after, his eyes closed and his head fell
+forward toward the front seat of the cab. "Drive to the
+hospital!" cried his son. "He's in a fit. This is what comes of
+putting myself out of my way to please my father," he muttered,
+sullenly raising Mr. Bashwood's head, and loosening his cravat.
+"A nice morning's work. Upon my soul, a nice morning's work!"
+
+The hospital was near, and the house surgeon was at his post.
+
+"Will he come out of it?" asked Bashwood the younger, roughly.
+
+"Who are _you?_" asked the surgeon, sharply, on his side.
+
+"I am his son."
+
+"I shouldn't have thought it," rejoined the surgeon, taking the
+restoratives that were handed to him by the nurse, and turning
+from the son to the father with an air of relief which he was at
+no pains to conceal. "Yes," he added, after a minute or two; "
+your father will come out of it this time."
+
+"When can he be moved away from here?"
+
+"He can be moved from the hospital in an hour or two."
+
+The spy laid a card on the table. "I'll come back for him or send
+for him," he said. "I suppose I can go now, if I leave my name
+and address?" With those words, he put on his hat, and walked
+out.
+
+"He's a brute!" said the nurse.
+
+"No," said the surgeon, quietly. "He's a man."
+
+                              * * * * * * *
+
+Between nine and ten o'clock that night, Mr. Bashwood awoke in
+his bed at the inn in the Borough. He had slept for some hours
+since he had been brought back from the hospital; and his mind
+and body were now slowly recovering together.
+
+A light was burning on the bedside table, and a letter lay on it,
+waiting for him till he was awake. It was in his son's
+handwriting, and it contained these words:
+
+
+"MY DEAR DAD--Having seen you safe out of the hospital, and back
+at your hotel, I think I may fairly claim to have done my duty by
+you, and may consider myself free to look after my own affairs.
+Business will prevent me from seeing you to-night; and I don't
+think it at all likely I shall be in your neighborhood to-morrow
+morning. My advice to you is to go back to Thorpe Ambrose, and to
+stick to your employment in the steward's office. Wherever Mr.
+Armadale may be, he must, sooner or later, write to you on
+business. I wash my hands of the whole matter, mind, so far as I
+am concerned, from this time forth. But if _you_ like to go on
+with it, my professional opinion is (though you couldn't hinder
+his marriage), you may part him from his wife.
+
+"Pray take care of yourself.
+
+"Your affectionate son,
+
+"JAMES BASHWOOD."
+
+The letter dropped from the old man's feeble hands. "I wish Jemmy
+could have come to see me to-night," he thought. "But it's very
+kind of him to advise me, all the same."
+
+He turned wearily on the pillow, and read the letter a second
+time. "Yes," he said, "there's nothing left for me but to go
+back. I'm too poor and too old to hunt after them all by myself."
+He closed his eyes: the tears trickled slowly over his wrinkled
+cheeks. "I've been a trouble to Jemmy," he murmured, faintly;
+"I've been a sad trouble, I'm afraid, to poor Jemmy!" In a minute
+more his weakness overpowered him, and he fell asleep again.
+
+The clock of the neighboring church struck. It was ten. As the
+bell tolled the hour, the tidal train--with Midwinter and his
+wife among the passengers--was speeding nearer and nearer to
+Paris. As the bell tolled the hour, the watch on board Allan's
+outward-bound yacht had sighted the light-house off the Land's
+End, and had set the course of the vessel for Ushant and
+Finisterre.
+
+THE END OF THE THIRD BOOK.
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
+
+"NAPLES, October 10th.--It is two months to-day since I declared
+that I had closed my Diary, never to open it again.
+
+"Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to this
+secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am
+more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever,
+though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me. My
+misery is a woman's misery, and it _will_ speak--here, rather
+than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one
+else to hear me.
+
+"How happy I was in the first days that followed our marriage,
+and how happy I made _him!_ Only two months have passed, and that
+time is a by-gone time already! I try to think of anything I
+might have said or done wrongly, on my side--of anything he might
+have said or done wrongly, on his; and I can remember nothing
+unworthy of my husband, nothing unworthy of myself. I cannot even
+lay my finger on the day when the cloud first rose between us.
+
+"I could bear it, if I loved him less dearly than I do. I could
+conquer the misery of our estrangement, if he only showed the
+change in him as brutally as other men would show it.
+
+"But this never has happened--never will happen. It is not in his
+nature to inflict suffering on others. Not a hard word, not a
+hard look, escapes him. It is only at night, when I hear him
+sighing in his sleep, and sometimes when I see him dreaming in
+the morning hours, that I know how hopelessly I am losing the
+love he once felt for me. He hides, or tries to hide, it in the
+day, for my sake. He is all gentleness, all kindness; but his
+heart is not on his lips when he kisses me now; his hand tells me
+nothing when it touches mine. Day after day the hours that he
+gives to his hateful writing grow longer and longer; day after
+day he becomes more and more silent in the hours that he gives to
+Me.
+
+"And, with all this, there is nothing that I can complain
+of--nothing marked enough to justify me in noticing it. His
+disappointment shrinks from all open confession; his resignation
+collects itself by such fine degrees that even my watchfulness
+fails to see the growth of it. Fifty times a day I feel the
+longing in me to throw my arms round his neck, and say: 'For
+God's sake, do anything to me, rather than treat me like this!'
+and fifty times a day the words are forced back into my heart by
+the cruel considerateness of his conduct; which gives me no
+excuse for speaking them. I thought I had suffered the sharpest
+pain that I could feel when my first husband laid his whip across
+my face. I thought I knew the worst that despair could do on the
+day when I knew that the other villain, the meaner villain still,
+had cast me off. Live and learn. There is sharper pain than I
+felt under Waldron's whip; there is bitterer despair than the
+despair I knew when Manuel deserted me.
+
+"Am I too old for him? Surely not yet! Have I lost my beauty? Not
+a man passes me in the street but his eyes tell me I am as
+handsome as ever.
+
+"Ah, no! no! the secret lies deeper than _that!_ I have thought
+and thought about it till a horrible fancy has taken possession
+of me. He has been noble and good in his past life, and I have
+been wicked and disgraced. Who can tell what a gap that dreadful
+difference may make between us, unknown to him and unknown to me?
+It is folly, it is madness; but, when I lie awake by him in the
+darkness, I ask myself whether any unconscious disclosure of the
+truth escapes me in the close intimacy that now unites us? Is
+there an unutterable Something left by the horror of my past
+life, which clings invisibly to me still? And is he feeling the
+influence of it, sensibly, and yet incomprehensibly to himself?
+Oh me! is there no purifying power in such love as mine? Are
+there plague-spots of past wickedness on my heart which no
+after-repentance can wash out?
+
+"Who can tell? There is something wrong in our married life--I
+can only come back to that. There is some adverse influence that
+neither he nor I can trace which is parting us further and
+further from each other day by day. Well! I suppose I shall be
+hardened in time, and learn to bear it.
+
+"An open carriage has just driven by my window, with a nicely
+dressed lady in it. She had her husband by her side, and her
+children on the seat opposite. At the moment when I saw her she
+was laughing and talking in high spirits--a sparkling,
+light-hearted, happy woman. Ah, my lady, when you were a few
+years younger, if you had been left to yourself, and thrown on
+the world like me--
+
+
+"October 11th.--The eleventh day of the month was the day (two
+months since) when we were married. He said nothing about it to
+me when we woke, nor I to him. But I thought I would make it the
+occasion, at breakfast-time, of trying to win him back.
+
+"I don't think I ever took such pains with my toilet before. I
+don't think I ever looked better than I looked when I went
+downstairs this morning. He had breakfasted by himself, and I
+found a little slip of paper on the table with an apology written
+on it. The post to England, he said, went out that day, and his
+letter to the newspaper must be finished. In his place I would
+have let fifty posts go out rather than breakfast without him. I
+went into his room. There he was, immersed body and soul in his
+hateful writing! 'Can't you give me a little time this morning?'
+I asked. He got up with a start. 'Certainly, if you wish it.' He
+never even looked at me as he s aid the words. The very sound of
+his voice told me that all his interest was centered in the pen
+that he had just laid down. 'I see you are occupied,' I said; 'I
+don't wish it.' Before I had closed the door on him he was back
+at his desk. I have often heard that the wives of authors have
+been for the most part unhappy women. And now I know why.
+
+"I suppose, as I said yesterday, I shall learn to bear it. (What
+_stuff,_ by-the-by, I seem to have written yesterday! How ashamed
+I should be if anybody saw it but myself!) I hope the trumpery
+newspaper he writes for won't succeed! I hope his rubbishing
+letter will be well cut up by some other newspaper as soon as it
+gets into print!
+
+"What am I to do with myself all the morning? I can't go out,
+it's raining. If I open the piano, I shall disturb the
+industrious journalist who is scribbling in the next room. Oh,
+dear, it was lonely enough in my lodging in Thorpe Ambrose, but
+how much lonelier it is here! Shall I read? No; books don't
+interest me; I hate the whole tribe of authors. I think I shall
+look back through these pages, and live my life over again when I
+was plotting and planning, and finding a new excitement to occupy
+me in every new hour of the day.
+
+"He might have looked at me, though he _was_ so busy with his
+writing.--He might have said, 'How nicely you are dressed this
+morning!' He might have remembered--never mind what! All he
+remembers is the newspaper.
+
+
+"Twelve o'clock.--I have been reading and thinking; and, thanks
+to my Diary, I have got through an hour.
+
+"What a time it was--what a life it was, at Thorpe Ambrose! I
+wonder I kept my senses. It makes my heart beat, it makes my face
+flush, only to read about it now!
+
+"The rain still falls, and the journalist still scribbles. I
+don't want to think the thoughts of that past time over again.
+And yet, what else can I do?
+
+"Supposing--I only say supposing--I felt now, as I felt when I
+traveled to London with Armadale; and when I saw my way to his
+life as plainly as I saw the man himself all through the journey.
+. . . ?
+
+"I'll go and look out of the window. I'll go and count the people
+as they pass by.
+
+"A funeral has gone by, with the penitents in their black hoods,
+and the wax torches sputtering in the wet, and the little bell
+ringing, and the priests droning their monotonous chant. A
+pleasant sight to meet me at the window! I shall go back to my
+Diary.
+
+"Supposing I was not the altered woman I am--I only say,
+supposing--how would the Grand Risk that I once thought of
+running look now? I have married Midwinter in the name that is
+really his own. And by doing that I have taken the first of those
+three steps which were once to lead me, through Armadale's life,
+to the fortune and the station of Armadale's widow. No matter how
+innocent my intentions might have been on the wedding-day--and
+they _were_ innocent--this is one of the unalterable results of
+the marriage. Well, having taken the first step, then, whether I
+would or no, how--supposing I meant to take the second step,
+which I don't--how would present circumstances stand toward me?
+Would they warn me to draw back, I wonder? or would they
+encourage me to go on?
+
+"It will interest me to calculate the chances; and I can easily
+tear the leaf out, and destroy it, if the prospect looks too
+encouraging.
+
+"We are living here (for economy's sake) far away from the
+expensive English quarter, in a suburb of the city, on the
+Portici side. We have made no traveling acquaintances among our
+own country people. Our poverty is against us; Midwinter's
+shyness is against us; and (with the women) my personal
+appearance is against us. The men from whom my husband gets his
+information for the newspaper meet him at the cafe, and never
+come here. I discourage his bringing any strangers to see me;
+for, though years have passed since I was last at Naples, I
+cannot be sure that some of the many people I once knew in this
+place may not be living still. The moral of all this is (as the
+children's storybooks say), that not a single witness has come to
+this house who could declare, if any after-inquiry took place in
+England, that Midwinter and I had been living here as man and
+wife. So much for present circumstances as they affect Me.
+
+"Armadale next. Has any unforeseen accident led him to
+communicate with Thorpe Ambrose? Has he broken the conditions
+which the major imposed on him, and asserted himself in the
+character of Miss Milroy's promised husband since I saw him last?
+
+"Nothing of the sort has taken place. No unforeseen accident has
+altered his position--his tempting position--toward myself. I
+know all that has happened to him since he left England, through
+the letters which he writes to Midwinter, and which Midwinter
+shows to me.
+
+"He has been wrecked, to begin with. His trumpery little yacht
+has actually tried to drown him, after all, and has failed! It
+happened (as Midwinter warned him it might happen with so small a
+vessel) in a sudden storm. They were blown ashore on the coast of
+Portugal. The yacht went to pieces, but the lives, and papers,
+and so on, were saved. The men have been sent back to Bristol,
+with recommendations from their master which have already got
+them employment on board an outward-bound ship. And the master
+himself is on his way here, after stopping first at Lisbon, and
+next at Gibraltar, and trying ineffectually in both places to
+supply himself with another vessel. His third attempt is to be
+made at Naples, where there is an English yacht 'laid up,' as
+they call it, to be had for sale or hire. He has had no occasion
+to write home since the wreck; for he took away from Coutts's the
+whole of the large sum of money lodged there for him, in circular
+notes. And he has felt no inclination to go back to England
+himself; for, with Mr. Brock dead, Miss Milroy at school, and
+Midwinter here, he has not a living creature in whom he is
+interested to welcome him if he returned. To see us, and to see
+the new yacht, are the only two present objects he has in view.
+Midwinter has been expecting him for a week past, and he may walk
+into this very room in which I am writing, at this very moment,
+for all I know to the contrary.
+
+"Tempting circumstances, these--with all the wrongs I have
+suffered at his mother's hands and at his, still alive in my
+memory; with Miss Milroy confidently waiting to take her place at
+the head of his household; with my dream of living happy and
+innocent in Midwinter's love dispelled forever, and with nothing
+left in its place to help me against myself. I wish it wasn't
+raining; I wish I could go out.
+
+"Perhaps something may happen to prevent Armadale from coming to
+Naples? When he last wrote, he was waiting at Gibraltar for an
+English steamer in the Mediterranean trade to bring him on here.
+He may get tired of waiting before the steamer comes, or he may
+hear of a yacht at some other place than this. A little bird
+whispers in my ear that it may possibly be the wisest thing he
+ever did in his life if he breaks his engagement to join us at
+Naples.
+
+"Shall I tear out the leaf on which all these shocking things
+have been written? No. My Diary is so nicely bound--it would be
+positive barbarity to tear out a leaf. Let me occupy myself
+harmlessly with something else. What shall it be? My
+dressing-case--I will put my dressing-case tidy, and polish up
+the few little things in it which my misfortunes have still left
+in my possession.
+
+"I have shut up the dressing-case again. The first thing I found
+in it was Armadale's shabby present to me on my marriage--the
+rubbishing little ruby ring. That irritated me, to begin with.
+The second thing that turned up was my bottle of Drops. I caught
+myself measuring the doses with my eye, and calculating how many
+of them would be enough to take a living creature over the
+border-land between sleep and death. Why I should have locked the
+dressing-case in a fright, before I had quite completed my
+calculation, I don't know; but I did lock it. And here I am back
+again at my Diary, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to write
+about. Oh, the weary day! the weary day! Will nothing happen to
+excite me a little in this horrible place?
+
+
+"October 12th.--Midwinter 's all-important letter to the
+newspaper was dispatched by the post last night. I was foolish
+enough to suppose that I might be honored by having some of his
+spare attention bestowed on me to-day. Nothing of the sort! He
+had a restless night, after all his writing, and got up with his
+head aching, and his spirits miserably depressed. When he is in
+this state, his favorite remedy is to return to his old vagabond
+habits, and go roaming away by himself nobody knows where. He
+went through the form this morning (knowing I had no riding
+habit) of offering to hire a little broken-kneed brute of a pony
+for me, in case I wished to accompany him! I preferred remaining
+at home. I will have a handsome horse and a handsome habit, or I
+won't ride at all. He went away, without attempting to persuade
+me to change my mind. I wouldn't have changed it, of course; but
+he might have tried to persuade me all the same.
+
+"I can open the piano in his absence--that is one comfort. And I
+am in a fine humor for playing--that is another. There is a
+sonata of Beethoven's (I forget the number), which always
+suggests to me the agony of lost spirits in a place of torment.
+Come, my fingers and thumbs, and take me among the lost spirits
+this morning!
+
+
+"October 13th.--Our windows look out on the sea. At noon to-day
+we saw a steamer coming in, with the English flag flying.
+Midwinter has gone to the port, on the chance that this may be
+the vessel from Gibraltar, with Armadale on board.
+
+"Two o'clock.--It is the vessel from Gibraltar. Armadale has
+added one more to the long list of his blunders: he has kept his
+engagement to join us at Naples.
+
+"How will it end _now?_
+
+"Who knows?
+
+
+"October 16th.--Two days missed out of my Diary! I can hardly
+tell why, unless it is that Armadale irritates me beyond all
+endurance. The mere sight of him takes me back to Thorpe Ambrose.
+I fancy I must have been afraid of what I might write about him,
+in the course of the last two days, if I indulged myself in the
+dangerous luxury of opening these pages.
+
+"This morning I am afraid of nothing, and I take up my pen again
+accordingly.
+
+"Is there any limit, I wonder, to the brutish stupidity of some
+men? I thought I had discovered Armadale's limit when I was his
+neighbor in Norfolk; but my later experience at Naples shows me
+that I was wrong. He is perpetually in and out of this house
+(crossing over to us in a boat from the hotel at Santa Lucia,
+where he sleeps); and he has exactly two subjects of
+conversation--the yacht for sale in the harbor here, and Miss
+Milroy. Yes! he selects ME as the _confidante_ of his devoted
+attachment to the major's daughter! 'It's so nice to talk to a
+woman about it!' That is all the apology he has thought it
+necessary to make for appealing to my sympathies--_my_
+sympathies!--on the subject of 'his darling Neelie,' fifty times
+a day. He is evidently persuaded (if he thinks about it at all)
+that I have forgotten, as completely as he has forgotten, all
+that once passed between us when I was first at Thorpe Ambrose.
+Such an utter want of the commonest delicacy and the commonest
+tact, in a creature who is, to all appearance, possessed of a
+skin, and not a hide, and who does, unless my ears deceive me,
+talk, and not bray, is really quite incredible when one comes to
+think of it. But it is, for all that, quite true. He asked me--he
+actually asked me, last night--how many hundreds a year the wife
+of a rich man could spend on her dress. 'Don't put it too low,'
+the idiot added, with his intolerable grin. 'Neelie shall be one
+of the best-dressed women in England when I have married her.'
+And this to me, after having had him at my feet, and then losing
+him again through Miss Milroy! This to me, with an alpaca gown
+on, and a husband whose income must be helped by a newspaper!
+
+"I had better not dwell on it any longer. I had better think and
+write of something else.
+
+"The yacht. As a relief from hearing about Miss Milroy, I declare
+the yacht in the harbor is quite an interesting subject to me!
+She (the men call a vessel 'She'; and I suppose, if the women
+took an interest in such things, _they_ would call a vessel
+'He')--she is a beautiful model; and her 'top-sides' (whatever
+they may be) are especially distinguished by being built of
+mahogany. But, with these merits, she has the defect, on the
+other hand, of being old--which is a sad drawback--and the crew
+and the sailing-master have been 'paid off,' and sent home to
+England--which is additionally distressing. Still, if a new crew
+and a new sailing-master can be picked up here, such a beautiful
+creature (with all her drawbacks), is not to be despised. It
+might answer to hire her for a cruise, and to see how she
+behaves. (If she is of _my_ mind, her behavior will rather
+astonish her new master!) The cruise will determine what faults
+she has, and what repairs, through the unlucky circumstance of
+her age, she really stands in need of. And then it will be time
+to settle whether to buy her outright or not. Such is Armadale's
+conversation when he is not talking of 'his darling Neelie.' And
+Midwinter, who can steal no time from his newspaper work for his
+wife, can steal hours for his friend, and can offer them
+unreservedly to my irresistible rival, the new yacht.
+
+"I shall write no more to-day. If so lady-like a person as I am
+could feel a tigerish tingling all over her to the very tips of
+her fingers, I should suspect myself of being in that condition
+at the present moment. But, with _my_ manners and
+accomplishments, the thing is, of course, out of the question. We
+all know that a lady has no passions.
+
+
+"October 17th.--A letter for Midwinter this morning from the
+slave-owners--I mean the newspaper people in London--which has
+set him at work again harder than ever. A visit at luncheon-time
+and another visit at dinner-time from Armadale. Conversation at
+luncheon about the yacht. Conversation at dinner about Miss
+Milroy. I have been honored, in regard to that young lady, by an
+invitation to go with Armadale to-morrow to the Toledo, and help
+him to buy some presents for the beloved object. I didn't fly out
+at him--I only made an excuse. Can words express the astonishment
+I feel at my own patience? No words can express it.
+
+
+"October 18th.--Armadale came to breakfast this morning, by way
+of catching Midwinter before he shuts himself up over his work.
+
+"Conversation the same as yesterday's conversation at lunch.
+Armadale has made his bargain with the agent for hiring the
+yacht. The agent (compassionating his total ignorance of the
+language) has helped him to find an interpreter, but can't help
+him to find a crew. The interpreter is civil and willing, but
+doesn't understand the sea. Midwinter's assistance is
+indispensable; and Midwinter is requested (and consents!) to work
+harder than ever, so as to make time for helping his friend. When
+the crew is found, the merits and defects of the vessel are to be
+tried by a cruise to Sicily, with Midwinter on board to give his
+opinion. Lastly (in case she should feel lonely), the ladies'
+cabin is most obligingly placed at the disposal of Midwinter's
+wife. All this was settled at the breakfast-table; and it ended
+with one of Armadale's neatly-turned compliments, addressed to
+myself: 'I mean to take Neelie sailing with me, when we are
+married. And you have such good taste, you will be able to tell
+me everything the ladies' cabin wants between that time and
+this.'
+
+"If some women bring such men as this into the world, ought other
+women to allow them to live? It is a matter of opinion. _I_ think
+not.
+
+"What maddens me is to see, as I do see plainly, that Midwinter
+finds in Armadale's company, and in Armadale's new yacht, a
+refuge from me. He is always in better spirits when Armadale is
+here. He forgets me in Armadale almost as completely as he
+forgets me in his work. And I bear it! What a pattern wife, what
+an excellent Christian I am!
+
+
+"October 19th.--Nothing new. Yesterday over again.
+
+
+"October 20th.--One piece of news. Midwinter is suffering from
+nervous headache; and is  working in spite of it, to make time for
+his holiday with his friend.
+
+
+"October 21st.--Midwinter is worse. Angry and wild and unappr
+oachable, after two bad nights, and two uninterrupted days at his
+desk. Under any other circumstances he would take the warning and
+leave off. But nothing warns him now. He is still working as hard
+as ever, for Armadale's sake. How much longer will my patience
+last?
+
+
+"October 22d.--Signs, last night, that Midwinter is taxing his
+brains beyond what his brains will bear. When he did fall asleep,
+he was frightfully restless; groaning and talking and grinding
+his teeth. From some of the words I heard, he seemed at one time
+to be dreaming of his life when he was a boy, roaming the country
+with the dancing dogs. At another time he was back again with
+Armadale, imprisoned all night on the wrecked ship. Toward the
+early morning hours he grew quieter. I fell asleep; and, waking
+after a short interval, found myself alone. My first glance round
+showed me a light burning in Midwinter's dressing-room. I rose
+softly, and went to look at him.
+
+"He was seated in the great, ugly, old-fashioned chair, which I
+ordered to be removed into the dressing-room out of the way when
+we first came here. His head lay back, and one of his hands hung
+listlessly over the arm of the chair. The other hand was on his
+lap. I stole a little nearer, and saw that exhaustion had
+overpowered him while he was either reading or writing, for there
+were books, pens, ink, and paper on the table before him. What
+had he got up to do secretly, at that hour of the morning? I
+looked closer at the papers on the table. They were all neatly
+folded (as he usually keeps them), with one exception; and that
+exception, lying open on the rest, was Mr. Brock's letter.
+
+"I looked round at him again, after making this discovery, and
+then noticed for the first time another written paper, lying
+under the hand that rested on his lap. There was no moving it
+away without the risk of waking him. Part of the open manuscript,
+however, was not covered by his hand. I looked at it to see what
+he had secretly stolen away to read, besides Mr. Brock's letter;
+and made out enough to tell me that it was the Narrative of
+Armadale's Dream.
+
+"That second discovery sent me back at once to my bed--with
+something serious to think of.
+
+"Traveling through France, on our way to this place, Midwinter's
+shyness was conquered for once, by a very pleasant man--an Irish
+doctor--whom we met in the railway carriage, and who quite
+insisted on being friendly and sociable with us all through the
+day's journey. Finding that Midwinter was devoting himself to
+literary pursuits, our traveling companion warned him not to pass
+too many hours together at his desk. 'Your face tells me more
+than you think,' the doctor said: 'If you are ever tempted to
+overwork your brain, you will feel it sooner than most men. When
+you find your nerves playing you strange tricks, don't neglect
+the warning--drop your pen.'
+
+"After my last night's discovery in the dressing-room, it looks
+as if Midwinter's nerves were beginning already to justify the
+doctor's opinion of them. If one of the tricks they are playing
+him is the trick of tormenting him again with his old
+superstitious terrors, there will be a change in our lives here
+before long. I shall wait curiously to see whether the conviction
+that we two are destined to bring fatal danger to Armadale takes
+possession of Midwinter's mind once more. If it does, I know what
+will happen. He will not stir a step toward helping his friend to
+find a crew for the yacht; and he will certainly refuse to sail
+with Armadale, or to let me sail with him, on the trial cruise.
+
+
+"October 23d.--Mr. Brock's letter has, apparently, not lost its
+influence yet. Midwinter is working again to-day, and is as
+anxious as ever for the holiday-time that he is to pass with his
+friend.
+
+"Two o'clock.--Armadale here as usual; eager to know when
+Midwinter will be at his service. No definite answer to be given
+to the question yet, seeing that it all depends on Midwinter's
+capacity to continue at his desk. Armadale sat down disappointed;
+he yawned, and put his great clumsy hands in his pockets. I took
+up a book. The brute didn't understand that I wanted to be left
+alone; he began again on the unendurable subject of Miss Milroy,
+and of all the fine things she was to have when he married her.
+Her own riding-horse; her own pony-carriage; her own beautiful
+little sitting-room upstairs at the great house, and so on. All
+that I might have had once Miss Milroy is to have now--_if I let
+her._
+
+
+"Six o'clock.--More of the everlasting Armadale! Half an hour
+since, Midwinter came in from his writing, giddy and exhausted. I
+had been pining all day for a little music, and I knew they were
+giving 'Norma' at the theater here. It struck me that an hour or
+two at the opera might do Midwinter good, as well as me; and I
+said: 'Why not take a box at the San Carlo to-night?' He
+answered, in a dull, uninterested manner, that he was not rich
+enough to take a box. Armadale was present, and flourished his
+well-filled purse in his usual insufferable way. '_I'm_ rich
+enough, old boy, and it comes to the same thing.' With those
+words he took up his hat, and trampled out on his great
+elephant's feet to get the box. I looked after him from the
+window as he went down the street. 'Your widow, with her twelve
+hundred a year,' I thought to myself, 'might take a box at the
+San Carlo whenever she pleased, without being beholden to
+anybody.' The empty-headed wretch whistled as he went his way to
+the theater, and tossed his loose silver magnificently to every
+beggar who ran after him.
+
+                              * * * * *
+
+"Midnight.--I am alone again at last. Have I nerve enough to
+write the history of this terrible evening, just as it has
+passed? I have nerve enough, at any rate, to turn to a new leaf,
+and try.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE DIARY CONTINUED.
+
+
+"WE went to the San Carlo. Armadale's stupidity showed itself,
+even in such a simple matter as taking a box. He had confounded
+an opera with a play, and had chosen a box close to the stage,
+with the idea that one's chief object at a musical performance is
+to see the faces of the singers as plainly as possible!
+Fortunately for our ears, Bellini's lovely melodies are, for the
+most part, tenderly and delicately accompanied--or the orchestra
+might have deafened us.
+
+"I sat back in the box at first, well out of sight; for it was
+impossible to be sure that some of my old friends of former days
+at Naples might not be in the theater. But the sweet music
+gradually tempted me out of my seclusion. I was so charmed and
+interested that I leaned forward without knowing it, and looked
+at the stage.
+
+"I was made aware of my own imprudence by a discovery which, for
+the moment, literally chilled my blood. One of the singers, among
+the chorus of Druids, was looking at me while he sang with the
+rest. His head was disguised in the long white hair, and the
+lower part of his face was completely covered with the flowing
+white beard proper to the character. But the eyes with which he
+looked at me were the eyes of the one man on earth whom I have
+most reason to dread ever seeing again--Manuel!
+
+"If it had not been for my smelling-bottle, I believe I should
+have lost my senses. As it was, I drew back again into the
+shadow. Even Armadale noticed the sudden change in me: he, as
+well as Midwinter, asked if I was ill. I said I felt the heat,
+but hoped I should be better presently; and then leaned back in
+the box, and tried to rally my courage. I succeeded in recovering
+self-possession enough to be able to look again at the stage
+(without showing myself) the next time the chorus appeared. There
+was the man again! But to my infinite relief he never looked
+toward our box a second time. This welcome indifference, on his
+part, helped to satisfy me that I had seen an extraordinary
+accidental resemblance, and nothing more. I still hold to this
+conclusion, after having had leisure to think; but my mind would
+be more completely at ease than it is if I had seen the rest of
+the man's face without the stage disguises that hid it from all
+investigation.
+
+"When the curtain fell on the first act, there was a tiresome
+ballet to be performed (according to the absurd Italian cust om),
+before the opera went on. Though I had got over my first fright,
+I had been far too seriously startled to feel comfortable in the
+theater. I dreaded all sorts of impossible accidents; and when
+Midwinter and Armadale put the question to me, I told them I was
+not well enough to stay through the rest of the performance.
+
+"At the door of the theater Armadale proposed to say good-night.
+But Midwinter--evidently dreading the evening with _me_--asked
+him to come back to supper, if I had no objection. I said the
+necessary words, and we all three returned together to this
+house.
+
+"Ten minutes' quiet in my own room (assisted by a little dose of
+eau-de-cologne and water) restored me to myself. I joined the men
+at the supper-table. They received my apologies for taking them
+away from the opera, with the complimentary assurance that I had
+not cost either of them the slightest sacrifice of his own
+pleasure. Midwinter declared that he was too completely worn out
+to care for anything but the two great blessings, unattainable at
+the theater, of quiet and fresh air. Armadale said--with an
+Englishman's exasperating pride in his own stupidity wherever a
+matter of art is concerned--that he couldn't make head or tail of
+the performance. The principal disappointment, he was good enough
+to add, was mine, for I evidently understood foreign music, and
+enjoyed it. Ladies generally did. His darling little Neelie--
+
+"I was in no humor to be persecuted with his 'Darling Neelie'
+after what I had gone through at the theater. It might have been
+the irritated state of my nerves, or it might have been the
+eau-de-cologne flying to my head, but the bare mention of the
+girl seemed to set me in a flame. I tried to turn Armadale's
+attention in the direction of the supper-table. He was much
+obliged, but he had no appetite for more. I offered him wine
+next, the wine of the country, which is all that our poverty
+allows us to place on the table. He was much obliged again. The
+foreign wine was very little more to his taste than the foreign
+music; but he would take some because I asked him; and he would
+drink my health in the old-fashioned way, with his best wishes
+for the happy time when we should all meet again at Thorpe
+Ambrose, and when there would be a mistress to welcome me at the
+great house.
+
+"Was he mad to persist in this way? No; his face answered for
+him. He was under the impression that he was making himself
+particularly agreeable to me.
+
+"I looked at Midwinter. He might have seen some reason for
+interfering to change the conversation, if he had looked at me in
+return. But he sat silent in his chair, irritable and overworked,
+with his eyes on the ground, thinking.
+
+"I got up and went to the window. Still impenetrable to a sense
+of his own clumsiness, Armadale followed me. If I had been strong
+enough to toss him out of the window into the sea, I should
+certainly have done it at that moment. Not being strong enough, I
+looked steadily at the view over the bay, and gave him a hint,
+the broadest and rudest I could think of, to go.
+
+" 'A lovely night for a walk,' I said, 'if you are tempted to
+walk back to the hotel.'
+
+"I doubt if he heard me. At any rate, I produced no sort of
+effect on him. He stood staring sentimentally at the moonlight;
+and--there is really no other word to express it--_blew_ a sigh.
+I felt a presentiment of what was coming, unless I stopped his
+mouth by speaking first.
+
+" 'With all your fondness for England,' I said, 'you must own
+that we have no such moonlight as that at home.'
+
+"He looked at me vacantly, and blew another sigh.
+
+" 'I wonder whether it is fine to-night in England as it is
+here?' he said. 'I wonder whether my dear little girl at home is
+looking at the moonlight, and thinking of Me?'
+
+"I could endure it no longer. I flew out at him at last.
+
+" 'Good heavens, Mr. Armadale!' I exclaimed, 'is there only one
+subject worth mentioning, in the narrow little world you live in?
+I'm sick to death of Miss Milroy. Do pray talk of something
+else?'
+
+"His great, broad, stupid face colored up to the roots of his
+hideous yellow hair. 'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, with a
+kind of sulky surprise. 'I didn't suppose--' He stopped
+confusedly, and looked from me to Midwinter. I understood what
+the look meant. 'I didn't suppose she could be jealous of Miss
+Milroy after marrying _you!_' That is what he would have said to
+Midwinter, if I had left them alone together in the room!
+
+"As it was, Midwinter had heard us. Before I could speak
+again--before Armadale could add another word--he finished his
+friend's uncompleted sentence, in a tone that I now heard, and
+with a look that I now saw, for the first time.
+
+" 'You didn't suppose, Allan,' he said, 'that a lady's temper
+could be so easily provoked.'
+
+"The first bitter word of irony, the first hard look of contempt,
+I had ever had from him! And Armadale the cause of it!
+
+"My anger suddenly left me. Something came in its place which
+steadied me in an instant, and took me silently out of the room.
+
+"I sat down alone in the bedroom. I had a few minutes of thought
+with myself, which I don't choose to put into words, even in
+these secret pages. I got up, and unlocked--never mind what. I
+went round to Midwinter's side of the bed, and took--no matter
+what I took. The last thing I did before I left the room was to
+look at my watch. It was half-past ten, Armadale's usual time for
+leaving us. I went back at once and joined the two men again.
+
+"I approached Armadale good-humoredly, and said to him:
+
+
+"No! On second thoughts. I won't put down what I said to him, or
+what I did afterward. I'm sick of Armadale! he turns up at every
+second word I write. I shall pass over what happened in the
+course of the next hour--the hour between half-past ten and
+half-past eleven--and take up my story again at the time when
+Armadale had left us. Can I tell what took place, as soon as our
+visitor's back was turned, between Midwinter and me in our own
+room? Why not pass over what happened, in that case as well as in
+the other? Why agitate myself by writing it down? I don't know!
+Why do I keep a diary at all? Why did the clever thief the other
+day (in the English newspaper) keep the very thing to convict him
+in the shape of a record of everything he stole? Why are we not
+perfectly reasonable in all that we do? Why am I not always on my
+guard and never inconsistent with myself, like a wicked character
+in a novel? Why? why? why?
+
+"I don't care why! I must write down what happened between
+Midwinter and me to-night, _because_ I must. There's a reason
+that nobody can answer--myself included.
+
+                              * * * * * * *
+
+"It was half-past eleven. Armadale had gone. I had put on my
+dressing-gown, and had just sat down to arrange my hair for the
+night, when I was surprised by a knock at the door, and Midwinter
+came in.
+
+"He was frightfully pale. His eyes looked at me with a terrible
+despair in them. He never answered when I expressed my surprise
+at his coming in so much sooner than usual; he wouldn't even tell
+me, when I asked the question, if he was ill. Pointing
+peremptorily to the chair from which I had risen on his entering
+the room, he told me to sit down again; and then, after a moment,
+added these words: 'I have something serious to say to you.'
+
+"I thought of what I had done--or, no, of what I had tried to
+do--in that interval between half-past ten and half-past eleven,
+which I have left unnoticed in my diary--and the deadly sickness
+of terror, which I never felt at the time, came upon me now. I
+sat down again, as I had been told, without speaking to
+Midwinter, and without looking at him.
+
+"He took a turn up and down the room, and then came and stood
+over me.
+
+" 'If Allan comes here to-morrow,' he began, 'and if you see
+him--'
+
+"His voice faltered, and he said no more. There was some dreadful
+grief at his heart that was trying to master him. But there are
+times when his will is a will of iron. He took another turn in
+the room, and crushed it down. He came back, and stood over me
+again.
+
+" 'When Allan comes here to-morrow,' he resumed, 'let him come
+into my room, if he wants to see me. I shall tell him that I find
+it impossi ble to finish the work I now have on hand as soon as I
+had hoped, and that he must, therefore, arrange to find a crew
+for the yacht without any assistance on my part. If he comes, in
+his disappointment, to appeal to you, give him no hope of my
+being free in time to help him if he waits. Encourage him to take
+the best assistance he can get from strangers, and to set about
+manning the yacht without any further delay. The more occupation
+he has to keep him away from this house, and the less you
+encourage him to stay here if he does come, the better I shall be
+pleased. Don't forget that, and don't forget one last direction
+which I have now to give you. When the vessel is ready for sea,
+and when Allan invites us to sail with him, it is my wish that
+you should positively decline to go. He will try to make you
+change your mind; for I shall, of course, decline, on my side, to
+leave you in this strange house, and in this foreign country, by
+yourself. No matter what he says, let nothing persuade you to
+alter your decision. Refuse, positively and finally! Refuse, I
+insist on it, to set your foot on the new yacht!'
+
+"He ended quietly and firmly, with no faltering in his voice, and
+no signs of hesitation or relenting in his face. The sense of
+surprise which I might otherwise have felt at the strange words
+he had addressed to me was lost in the sense of relief that they
+brought to my mind. The dread of _those other words_ that I had
+expected to hear from him left me as suddenly as it had come. I
+could look at him, I could speak to him once more.
+
+" 'You may depend,' I answered, 'on my doing exactly what you
+order me to do. Must I obey you blindly? Or may I know your
+reason for the extraordinary directions you have just given to
+me?'
+
+"His, face darkened, and he sat down on the other side of my
+dressing-table, with a heavy, hopeless sigh.
+
+" 'You may know the reason,' he said, 'if you wish it.' He waited
+a little, and considered. 'You have a right to know the reason,'
+he resumed, 'for you yourself are concerned in it.' He waited a
+little again, and again went on. 'I can only explain the strange
+request I have just made to you in one way,' be said. 'I must ask
+you to recall what happened in the next room, before Allan left
+us to-night.'
+
+"He looked at me with a strange mixture of expressions in his
+face. At one moment I thought he felt pity for me. At another, it
+seemed more like horror of me. I began to feel frightened again;
+I waited for his next words in silence.
+
+" 'I know that I have been working too hard lately,' he went on,
+'and that my nerves are sadly shaken. It is possible, in the
+state I am in now, that I may have unconsciously misinterpreted,
+or distorted, the circumstances that really took place. You will
+do me a favor if you will test my recollection of what has
+happened by your own. If my fancy has exaggerated anything, if my
+memory is playing me false anywhere, I entreat you to stop me,
+and tell me of it.'
+
+"I commanded myself sufficiently to ask what the circumstances
+were to which he referred, and in what way I was personally
+concerned in them.
+
+" 'You were personally concerned in them in this way,' he
+answered. 'The circumstances to which I refer began with your
+speaking to Allan about Miss Milroy, in what I thought a very
+inconsiderate and very impatient manner. I am afraid I spoke just
+as petulantly on my side, and I beg your pardon for what I said
+to you in the irritation of the moment. You left the room. After
+a short absence, you came back again, and made a perfectly proper
+apology to Allan, which he received with his usual kindness and
+sweetness of temper. While this went on, you and he were both
+standing by the supper-table; and Allan resumed some conversation
+which had already passed between you about the Neapolitan wine.
+He said he thought he should learn to like it in time, and he
+asked leave to take another glass of the wine we had on the
+table. Am I right so far?'
+
+"The words almost died on my lips; but I forced them out, and
+answered him that he was right so far.
+
+" 'You took the flask out of Allan's hand,' he proceeded. 'You
+said to him, good-humoredly, "You know you don't really like the
+wine, Mr. Armadale. Let me make you something which may be more
+to your taste. I have a recipe of my own for lemonade. Will you
+favor me by trying it?" In those words, you made your proposal to
+him, and he accepted it. Did he also ask leave to look on, and
+learn how the lemonade was made? and did you tell him that he
+would only confuse you, and that you would give him the recipe in
+writing, if he wanted it?'
+
+"This time the words did really die on my lips. I could only bow
+my head, and answer 'Yes' mutely in that way. Midwinter went on.
+
+" 'Allan laughed, and went to the window to look out at the Bay,
+and I went with him. After a while Allan remarked, jocosely, that
+the mere sound of the liquids you were pouring out made him
+thirsty. When he said this, I turned round from the window. I
+approached you, and said the lemonade took a long time to make.
+You touched me, as I was walking away again, and handed me the
+tumbler filled to the brim. At the same time, Allan turned round
+from the window; and I, in my turn, handed the tumbler to
+_him._--Is there any mistake so far?'
+
+"The quick throbbing of my heart almost choked me. I could just
+shake my head--I could do no more.
+
+" 'I saw Allan raise the tumbler to his lips.--Did _you_ see it?
+I saw his face turn white in an instant.--Did _you?_ I saw the
+glass fall from his hand on the floor. I saw him stagger, and
+caught him before he fell. Are these things true? For God's sake,
+search your memory, and tell me--are these things true?'
+
+"The throbbing at my heart seemed, for one breathless instant, to
+stop. The next moment something fiery, something maddening, flew
+through me. I started to my feet, with my temper in a flame,
+reckless of all consequences, desperate enough to say anything.
+
+" 'Your questions are an insult! Your looks are an insult!' I
+burst out. '_Do you think I tried to poison him?_'
+
+"The words rushed out of my lips in spite of me. They were the
+last words under heaven that any woman, in such a situation as
+mine, ought to have spoken. And yet I spoke them!
+
+"He rose in alarm and gave me my smelling-bottle. 'Hush! hush!'
+he said. 'You, too, are overwrought--you, too, are overexcited by
+all that has happened to-night. You are talking wildly and
+shockingly. Good God! how can you have so utterly misunderstood
+me? Compose yourself--pray, compose yourself.'
+
+"He might as well have told a wild animal to compose herself.
+Having been mad enough to say the words, I was mad enough next to
+return to the subject of the lemonade, in spite of his entreaties
+to me to be silent.
+
+" 'I told you what I had put in the glass, the moment Mr.
+Armadale fainted,' I went on; insisting furiously on defending
+myself, when no attack was made on me. 'I told you I had taken
+the flask of brandy which you kept at your bedside, and mixed
+some of it with the lemonade. How could I know that he had a
+nervous horror of the smell and taste of brandy? Didn't he say to
+me himself, when he came to his senses, It's my fault; I ought to
+have warned you to put no brandy in it? Didn't he remind you
+afterward of the time when you and he were in the Isle of Man
+together, and when the doctor there innocently made the same
+mistake with him that I made to-night?'
+
+["I laid a great stress on my innocence--and with some reason
+too. Whatever else I may be, I pride myself on not being a
+hypocrite. I _was_ innocent--so far as the brandy was concerned.
+I had put it into the lemonade, in pure ignorance of Armadale's
+nervous peculiarity, to disguise the taste of--never mind what!
+Another of the things I pride myself on is that I never wander
+from my subject. What Midwinter said next is what I ought to be
+writing about now.]
+
+"He looked at me for a moment, as if he thought I had taken leave
+of my senses. Then he came round to my side of the table and
+stood over me again.
+
+" 'If nothing else will satisfy you that you are entirely
+misinterpreting my motives,' he said, 'and that I haven't an idea
+of blaming _you_ in the matter--read this.'
+
+" He took a paper from the breast-pocket of his coat, and spread
+it open under my eyes. It was the Narrative of Armadale's Dream.
+
+"In an instant the whole weight on my mind was lifted off it. I
+felt mistress of myself again--I understood him at last.
+
+" 'Do you know what this is?' he asked. 'Do you remember what I
+said to you at Thorpe Ambrose about Allan's Dream? I told you
+then that two out of the three Visions had already come true. I
+tell you now that the third Vision has been fulfilled in this
+house to-night.'
+
+"He turned over the leaves of the manuscript, and pointed to the
+lines that he wished me to read.
+
+"I read these, or nearly read these words, from the Narrative of
+the Dream, as Midwinter had taken it down from Armadale's own
+lips:
+
+
+" 'The darkness opened for the third time, and showed me the
+Shadow of the Man and the Shadow of the Woman together. The
+Man-Shade was the nearest; the Woman-Shadow stood back. From
+where she slood, I heard a sound like the pouring out of a liquid
+softly. I saw her touch the Shadow of the Man with one hand, and
+give him a glass with the other. He took the glass and handed it
+to me. At the moment when I put it to my lips, a deadly faintness
+overcame me. When I recovered my senses again, the Shadows had
+vanished, and the Vision was at an end.'
+
+"For the moment, I was as completely staggered by this
+extraordinary coincidence as Midwinter himself.
+
+"He put one hand on the open narrative and laid the other heavily
+on my arm.
+
+" '_Now_ do you understand my motive in coming here?' he asked.
+'_Now_ do you see that the last hope I had to cling to was the
+hope that your memory of the night's events might prove my memory
+to be wrong? _Now_ do you know why I won't help Allan? Why I
+won't sail with him? Why I am plotting and lying, and making you
+plot and lie too, to keep my best and dearest friend out of the
+house?'
+
+" 'Have you forgotten Mr. Brock's letter?' I asked.
+
+"He struck his hand passionately on the open manuscript. 'If Mr.
+Brook had lived to see what we have seen to-night he would have
+felt what I feel, he would have said what I say!' His voice sank
+mysteriously, and his great black eyes glittered at me as he made
+that answer. 'Thrice the Shadows of the Vision warned Allan in
+his sleep,' he went on; 'and thrice those Shadows have been
+embodied in the after-time by You and by Me! You, and no other,
+stood in the Woman's place at the pool. I, and no other, stood in
+the Man's place at the window. And you and I together, when the
+last Vision showed the Shadows together, stand in the Man's place
+and the Woman's place still! For Ê_this,_ the miserable day
+dawned when you and I first met. For _this,_ your influence drew
+me to you, when my better angel warned me to fly the sight of
+your face. There is a curse on our lives! there is a fatality in
+our footsteps! Allan's future depends on his separation from us
+at once and forever. Drive him from the place we live in, and the
+air we breathe. Force him among strangers--the worst and
+wickedest of them will be more harmless, to him than we are! Let
+his yacht sail, though he goes on his knees to ask us, without
+You and without Me; and let him know how I loved him in another
+world than this, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the
+weary are at rest!'
+
+"His grief conquered him; his voice broke into a sob when he
+spoke those last words. He took the Narrative of the Dream from
+the table, and left me as abruptly as he had come in.
+
+"As I heard his door locked between us, my mind went back to what
+he had said to me about myself. In remembering 'the miserable
+day' when we first saw each other, and 'the better angel' that
+had warned him to 'fly the sight of my face,' I forgot all else.
+It doesn't matter what I felt--I wouldn't own it, even if I had a
+friend to speak to. Who cares for the misery of such a woman as I
+am? who believes in it? Besides, he spoke under the influence of
+a mad superstition that has got possession of him again. There is
+every excuse for _him_--there is no excuse for _me._ If I can't
+help being fond of him through it all, I must take the
+consequences and suffer. I deserve to suffer; I deserve neither
+love nor pity from anybody.--Good heavens, what a fool I am! And
+how unnatural all this would be, if it was written in a book!
+
+"It has struck one. I can hear Midwinter still, pacing to and fro
+in his room.
+
+"He is thinking, I suppose? Well! I can think too. What am I to
+do next? I shall wait and see. Events take odd turns sometimes;
+and events may justify the fatalism of the amiable man in the
+next room, who curses the day when he first saw my face. He may
+live to curse it for other reasons than he has now. If I am the
+Woman pointed at in the Dream, there will be another temptation
+put in my way before long; and there will be no brandy in
+Armadale's lemonade if I mix it for him a second time.
+
+
+"October 24th.--Barely twelve hours have passed since I wrote my
+yesterday's entry; and that other temptation has come, tried,
+amid conquered me already!
+
+"This time there was no alternative. Instant exposure and ruin
+stared me in the face: I had no choice but to yield in my own
+defense. In plainer words still, it was no accidental resemblance
+that startled me at the theater last night. The chorus-singer at
+the opera was Manuel himself!
+
+"Not ten minutes after Midwinter had left the sitting-room for
+his study, the woman of the house came in with a dirty little
+three-cornered note in her hand. One look at the writing on the
+address was enough. He had recognized me in the box; and the
+ballet between the acts of the opera had given him time to trace
+me home. I drew that plain conclusion in the moment that elapsed
+before I opened the letter. It informed me, in two lines, that he
+was waiting in a by-street leading to the beach; and that, if I
+failed to make my appearance in ten minutes, he should interpret
+my absence as my invitation to him to call at the house.
+
+"What I went through yesterday must have hardened me, I suppose.
+At any rate, after reading the letter, I felt more like the woman
+I once was than I have felt for months past. I put on my bonnet
+and went downstairs, and left the house as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+"He was waiting for me at the entrance to the street.
+
+"In the instant when we stood face to face, all my wretched life
+with him came back to me. I thought of my trust that he had
+betrayed; I thought of the cruel mockery of a marriage that he
+had practiced on me, when he knew that he had a wife living; I
+thought of the time when I had felt despair enough at his
+desertion of me to attempt my own life. When I recalled all this,
+and when the comparison between Midwinter and the mean, miserable
+villain whom I had once believed in forced itself into my mind, I
+knew for the first time what a woman feels when every atom of
+respect for herself has left her. If he had personally insulted
+me at that moment, I believe I should have submitted to it.
+
+"But he had no idea of insulting me, in the more brutal meaning
+of the word. He had me at his mercy, and his way of making me
+feel it was to behave with an elaborate mockery of penitence and
+respect. I let him speak as he pleased, without interrupting him,
+without looking at him a second time, without even allowing my
+dress to touch him, as we walked together toward the quieter part
+of the beach. I had noticed the wretched state of his clothes,
+and the greedy glitter in his eyes, in my first look at him. And
+I knew it would end--as it did end--in a demand on me for money.
+
+"Yes! After taking from me the last farthing I possessed of my
+own, and the last farthing I could extort for him from my old
+mistress, he turned on me as we stood by the margin of the sea,
+and asked if I could reconcile it to my conscience to let him be
+wearing such a coat as he then had on his back, and earning his
+miserable living as a chorus-singer at the opera!
+
+"My disgust, rather than my indignation, roused me into speaking
+to him at last.
+
+" 'You want money,' I said. 'Suppose I am too poor to give  it to
+you?'
+
+" 'In that case,' he replied, 'I shall be forced to remember that
+you are a treasure in yourself. And I shall be under the p ainful
+necessity of pressing my claim to you on the attention of one of
+those two gentlemen whom I saw with you at the opera--the
+gentleman, of course, who is now honored by your preference, and
+who lives provisionally in the light of your smiles.'
+
+"I made him no answer, for I had no answer to give. Disputing his
+right to claim me from anybody would have been a mere waste of
+words. He knew as well as I did that he had not the shadow of a
+claim on me. But the mere attempt to raise it would, as he was
+well aware, lead necessarily to the exposure of my whole past
+life.
+
+"Still keeping silence, I looked out over the sea. I don't know
+why, except that I instinctively looked anywhere rather than look
+at _him._
+
+"A little sailing-boat was approaching the shore. The man
+steering was hidden from me by the sail; but the boat was so near
+that I thought I recognized the flag on the mast. I looked at my
+watch. Yes! It was Armadale coming over from Santa Lucia at his
+usual time, to visit us in his usual way.
+
+"Before I had put my watch back in my belt, the means of
+extricating myself from the frightful position I was placed in
+showed themselves to me as plainly as I see them now.
+
+"I turned and led the way to the higher part of the beach, where
+some fishing-boats were drawn up which completely screened us
+from the view of any one landing on the shore below. Seeing
+probably that I had a purpose of some kind, Manuel followed me
+without uttering a word. As soon as we were safely under the
+shelter of the boats, I forced myself, in my own defense, to look
+at him again.
+
+" 'What should you say,' I asked, 'if I was rich instead of poor?
+What should you say if I could afford to give you a hundred
+pounds?'
+
+"He started. I saw plainly that he had not expected so much as
+half the sum I had mentioned. It is needless to add that his
+tongue lied, while his face spoke the truth, and that when he
+replied to me the answer was, 'Nothing like enough.'
+
+" 'Suppose,' I went on, without taking any notice of what he had
+said, 'that I could show you a way of helping yourself to twice
+as much --three times as much--five times as much as a hundred
+pounds, are you bold enough to put out your hand and take it?'
+
+"The greedy glitter came into his eyes once more. His voice
+dropped low, in breathless expectation of my next words.
+
+" 'Who is the person?' he asked. 'And what is the risk?'
+
+"I answered him at once, in the plainest terms. I threw Armadale
+to him, as I might have thrown a piece of meat to a wild beast
+who was pursuing me.
+
+" 'The person is a rich young Englishman,' I said. 'He has just
+hired the yacht called the _Dorothea,_ in the harbor here; and he
+stands in need of a sailing-master and a crew. You were once an
+officer in the Spanish navy--you speak English and Italian
+perfectly--you are thoroughly well acquainted with Naples and all
+that belongs to it. The rich young Englishman is ignorant of the
+language, and the interpreter who assists him knows nothing of
+the sea. He is at his wits' end for want of useful help in this
+strange place; he has no more knowledge of the world than that
+child who is digging holes with a stick there in the sand; and he
+carries all his money with him in circular notes. So much for the
+person. As for the risk, estimate it for yourself.'
+
+"The greedy glitter in his eyes grew brighter and brighter with
+every word I said. He was plainly ready to face the risk before I
+had done speaking.
+
+" 'When can I see the Englishman?' he asked, eagerly.
+
+"I moved to the seaward end of the fishing-boat, and saw that
+Armadale was at that moment disembarking on the shore.
+
+" 'You can see him now,' I answered, and pointed to the place.
+
+"After a long look at Armadale walking carelessly up the slope of
+the beach, Manuel drew back again under the shelter of the boat.
+He waited a moment, considering something carefully with himself,
+and put another question to me, in a whisper this time.
+
+" 'When the vessel is manned,' he said, 'and the Englishman sails
+from Naples, how many friends sail with him?'
+
+" 'He has but two friends here,' I replied; 'that other gentleman
+whom you saw with me at the opera, and myself. He will invite us
+both to sail with him; and when the time comes, we shall both
+refuse.'
+
+" 'Do you answer for that?'
+
+" 'I answer for it positively.'
+
+"He walked a few steps away, and stood with his face hidden from
+me, thinking again. All I could see was that he took off his hat
+and passed his handkerchief over his forehead. All I could hear
+was that he talked to himself excitedly in his own language.
+
+"There was a change in him when he came back. His face had turned
+to a livid yellow, and his eyes looked at me with a hideous
+distrust.
+
+" 'One last question,' he said, and suddenly came closer to me,
+suddenly spoke with a marked emphasis on his next words: '_What
+is your interest in this?_'
+
+"I started back from him. The question reminded me that I _had_
+an interest in the matter, which was entirely unconnected with
+the interest of keeping Manuel and Midwinter apart. Thus far I
+had only remembered that Midwinter's fatalism had smoothed the
+way for me, by abandoning Armadale beforehand to any stranger who
+might come forward to help him. Thus far the sole object I had
+kept in view was to protect myself, by the sacrifice of Armadale,
+from the exposure that threatened me. I tell no lies to my Diary.
+I don't affect to have felt a moment's consideration for the
+interests of Armadale's purse or the safety of Armadale's life. I
+hated him too savagely to care what pitfalls my tongue might be
+the means of opening under his feet. But I certainly did not see
+(until that last question was put to me) that, in serving his own
+designs, Manuel might--if he dared go all lengths for the
+money--be serving my designs too. The one overpowering anxiety to
+protect myself from exposure before Midwinter had (I suppose)
+filled all my mind, to the exclusion of everything else.
+
+"Finding that I made no reply for the moment, Manuel reiterated
+his question, putting it in a new form.
+
+" 'You have cast your Englishman at me,' he said, 'like the sop
+to Cerberus. Would you have been quite so ready to do that if you
+had not had a motive of your own? I repeat my question. You have
+an interest in this--what is it?'
+
+" 'I have two interests,' I answered. 'The interest of forcing
+you to respect my position here, and the interest of ridding
+myself of the sight of you at once and forever!' I spoke with a
+boldness he had not yet heard from me. The sense that I was
+making the villain an instrument in my hands, and forcing him to
+help my purpose blindly, while he was helping his own, roused my
+spirits, and made me feel like myself again.
+
+"He laughed. 'Strong language, on certain occasions, is a lady's
+privilege,' he said. 'You may, or may not, rid yourself of the
+sight of me, at once and forever. We will leave that question to
+be settled in the future. But your other interest in this matter
+puzzles me. You have told me all I need know about the Englishman
+and his yacht, and you have made no conditions before you opened
+your lips. Pray, how are you to force me, as you say, to respect
+your position here?'
+
+" 'I will tell you how,' I rejoined. 'You shall hear my
+conditions first. I insist on your leaving me in five minutes
+more. I insist on your never again coming near the house where I
+live; and I forbid your attempting to communicate in any way
+either with me or with that other gentleman whom you saw with me
+at the theater--'
+
+" 'And suppose I say no?' he interposed. 'In that case, what will
+you do?'
+
+" 'In that case,' I answered, 'I shall say two words in private
+to the rich young Englishman, and you will find yourself back
+again among the chorus at the opera.'
+
+" 'You are a bold woman to take it for granted that I have my
+designs on the Englishman already, and that I am certain to
+succeed in them. How do you know--?'
+
+" 'I know _you,_' I said. 'And that is enough.'
+
+"There was a moment's silence between us. He looked at me, and I
+looked at him. We understood each other.
+
+"He was the first to speak. The villainous smile died out of his
+face, and his voice dropped again distrustfully to its lowest
+tones.
+
+" 'I accept your terms,' he said. 'As long as your lips are
+closed, my lips shall be closed too--except in the event of my
+finding that you have deceived me; in which case the bargain is
+at an end, and you will see me again. I shall present myself to
+the Englishman to-morrow, with the necessary credentials to
+establish me in his confidence. Tell me his name?'
+
+"I told it.
+
+" 'Give me his address?'
+
+"I gave it, and turned to leave him. Before I had stepped out of
+the shelter of the boats, I heard him behind me again.
+
+" 'One last word,' he said. 'Accidents sometimes happen at sea.
+Have you interest enough in the Englishman--if an accident
+happens in his case--to wish to know what has become of him?'
+
+"I stopped, and considered on my side. I had plainly failed to
+persuade him that I had no secret to serve in placing Armadale's
+money and (as a probable consequence) Armadale's life at his
+mercy. And it was now equally clear that he was cunningly
+attempting to associate himself with my private objects (whatever
+they might be) by opening a means of communication between us in
+the future. There could be no hesitation about how to answer him
+under such circumstances as these. If the 'accident' at which he
+hinted did really happen to Armadale, I stood in no need of
+Manuel's intervention to give me the intelligence of it. An easy
+search through the obituary columns of the English papers would
+tell me the news--with the great additional advantage that the
+papers might be relied on, in such a matter as this, to tell the
+truth. I formally thanked Manuel, and declined to accept his
+proposal. 'Having no interest in the Englishman,' I said, 'I have
+no wish whatever to know what becomes of him.'
+
+"He looked at me for a moment with steady attention, and with an
+interest in me which he had not shown yet.
+
+" 'What the game you are playing may be,' he rejoined, speaking
+slowly and significantly, 'I don't pretend to know. But I venture
+on a prophecy, nevertheless--_you will win it!_ If we ever meet
+again, remember I said that.' He took off his hat, and bowed to
+me gravely. 'Go your way, madam. And leave me to go mine!'
+
+"With those words, he released me from the sight of him. I waited
+a minute alone, to recover myself in the air, and then returned
+to the house.
+
+"The first object that met my eyes, on entering the sitting-room,
+was--Armadale himself!
+
+"He was waiting on the chance of seeing me, to beg that I would
+exert my influence with his friend. I made the needful inquiry as
+to what he meant, and found that Midwinter had spoken as he had
+warned me he would speak when he and Armadale next met. He had
+announced that he was unable to finish his work for the newspaper
+as soon as he had hoped; and he had advised Armadale to find a
+crew for the yacht without waiting for any assistance on his
+part.
+
+"All that it was necessary for me to do, on hearing this, was to
+perform the promise I had made to Midwinter, when he gave me my
+directions how to act in the matter. Armadale's vexation on
+finding me resolved not to interfere expressed itself in the form
+of all others that is most personally offensive to me. He
+declined to believe my reiterated assurances that I possessed no
+influence to exert in his favor. 'If I was married to Neelie,' he
+said, 'she could do anything she liked with me; and I am sure,
+when you choose, you can do anything you like with Midwinter.' If
+the infatuated fool had actually tried to stifle the last faint
+struggles of remorse and pity left stirring in my heart, he could
+have said nothing more fatally to the purpose than this! I gave
+him a look which effectually silenced him, so far as I was
+concerned. He went out of the room grumbling and growling to
+himself. 'It's all very well to talk about manning the yacht. I
+don't speak a word of their gibberish here; and the interpreter
+thinks a fisherman and a sailor means the same thing. Hang me if
+I know what to do with the vessel, now I have got her!'
+
+"He will probably know by to-morrow. And if he only comes here as
+usual, I shall know too!
+
+
+"October 25th.--Ten at night.--Manuel has got him!
+
+"He has just left us, after staying here more than an hour, and
+talking the whole time of nothing but his own wonderful luck in
+finding the very help he wanted, at the time when he needed it
+most.
+
+"At noon to-day he was on the Mole, it seems, with his
+interpreter, trying vainly to make himself understood by the
+vagabond population of the water-side. Just as he was giving it
+up in despair, a stranger standing by (Manuel had followed him, I
+suppose, to the Mole from his hotel) kindly interfered to put
+things right. He said, 'I speak your language and their language,
+sir. I know Naples well; and I have been professionally
+accustomed to the sea. Can I help you?' The inevitable result
+followed. Armadale shifted all his difficulties on to the
+shoulders of the polite stranger, in his usual helpless, headlong
+way. His new friend, however, insisted, in the most honorable
+manner, on complying with the customary formalities before he
+would consent to take the matter into his own hands. He begged
+leave to wait on Mr. Armadale, with his testimonials to character
+and capacity. The same afternoon he had come by appointment to
+the hotel, with all his papers, and with 'the saddest story' of
+his sufferings and privations as 'a political refugee' that
+Armadale had ever heard. The interview was decisive. Manuel left
+the hotel, commissioned to find a crew for the yacht, and to fill
+the post of sailing-master on the trial cruise.
+
+"I watched Midwinter anxiously, while Armadale was telling us
+these particulars, and afterward, when he produced the new
+sailing-master's testimonials, which he had brought with him for
+his friend to see.
+
+"For the moment, Midwinter's superstitious misgivings seemed to
+be all lost in his natural anxiety for his friend. He examined
+the stranger' s papers--after having told me that the sooner
+Armadale was in the hands of strangers the better!--with the
+closest scrutiny and the most business-like distrust. It is
+needless to say that the credentials were as perfectly regular
+and satisfactory as credentials could be. When Midwinter handed
+them back, his color rose: he seemed to feel the inconsistency of
+his conduct, and to observe for the first time that I was present
+noticing it. 'There is nothing to object to in the testimonials,
+Allan: I am glad you have got the help you want at last.' That
+was all he said at parting. As soon as Armadale's back was
+turned, I saw no more of him. He has locked himself up again for
+the night, in his own room.
+
+"There is now--so far as I am concerned--but one anxiety left.
+When the yacht is ready for sea, and when I decline to occupy the
+lady's cabin, will Midwinter hold to his resolution, and refuse
+to sail without me?
+
+
+"October 26th.--Warnings already of the coming ordeal. A letter
+from Armadale to Midwinter, which Midwinter has just sent in to
+me. Here it is:
+
+" 'DEAR MID--I am too busy to come to-day. Get on with your work,
+for Heaven's sake! The new sailing-master is a man of ten
+thousand. He has got an Englishman whom he knows to serve as mate
+on board already; and he is positively certain of getting the
+crew together in three or four days' time. I am dying for a whiff
+of the sea, and so are you, or you are no sailor. The rigging is
+set up, the stores are coming on board, and we shall bend the
+sails to-morrow or next day. I never was in such spirits in my
+life. Remember me to your wife, and tell her she will be doing me
+a favor if she will come at once, and order everything she wants
+in the lady's cabin. Yours affectionately, A. A.'
+
+"Under this was written, in Midwinter's hand: 'Remember what I
+told you. Write (it will break it to him more gently in that
+way), and beg him to accept your apologies, and to excuse you
+from sailing on the trial cruise.'
+
+"I have written without a moment's loss of time. The sooner
+Manuel knows (which he is certain to do through Armadale) that
+the promise not to sail in the yacht is performed already, so far
+as I am concerned, the safer I shall feel.
+
+
+"October 27th.--A letter from Armadale, in answer to mine. He is
+full of ceremonio us regrets at the loss of my company on the
+cruise; and he politely hopes that Midwinter may yet induce me to
+alter my mind. Wait a little, till he finds that Midwinter won't
+sail with him either! . . . .
+
+"October 30th.--Nothing new to record until to-day. To-day the
+change in our lives here has come at last!
+
+"Armadale presented himself this morning, in his noisiest high
+spirits, to announce that the yacht was ready for sea, and to ask
+when Midwinter would be able to go on board. I told him to make
+the inquiry himself in Midwinter's room. He left me, with a last
+request that I would consider my refusal to sail with him. I
+answered by a last apology for persisting in my resolution, and
+then took a chair alone at the window to wait the event of the
+interview in the next room.
+
+"My whole future depended now on what passed between Midwinter
+and his friend! Everything had gone smoothly up to this time. The
+one danger to dread was the danger of Midwinter's resolution, or
+rather of Midwinter's fatalism, giving way at the last moment. If
+he allowed himself to be persuaded into accompanying Armadale on
+the cruise, Manuel's exasperation against me would hesitate at
+nothing--he would remember that I had answered to him for
+Armadale's sailing from Naples alone; and he would be capable of
+exposing my whole past life to Midwinter before the vessel left
+the port. As I thought of this, and as the slow minutes followed
+each other, and nothing reached my ears but the hum of voices in
+the next room, my suspense became almost unendurable. It was vain
+to try and fix my attention on what was going on in the street. I
+sat looking mechanically out of the window, and seeing nothing.
+
+"Suddenly--I can't say in how long or how short a time--the hum
+of voices ceased; the door opened; and Armadale showed himself on
+the threshold, alone.
+
+" 'I wish you good-by,' he said, roughly. 'And I hope, when I am
+married, my wife may never cause Midwinter the disappointment
+that Midwinter's wife has caused _me!_'
+
+"He gave me an angry look, and made me an angry bow, and, turning
+sharply, left the room.
+
+"I saw the people in the street again! I saw the calm sea, and
+the masts of the shipping in the harbor where the yacht lay! I
+could think, I could breathe freely once more! The words that
+saved me from Manuel--the words that might be Armadale's sentence
+of death--had been spoken. The yacht was to sail without
+Midwinter, as well as without Me!
+
+"My first feeling of exultation was almost maddening. But it was
+the feeling of a moment only. My heart sank in me again when I
+thought of Midwinter alone in the next room.
+
+"I went out into the passage to listen, and heard nothing. I
+tapped gently at his door, and got no answer. I opened the door
+and looked in. He was sitting at the table, with his face hidden
+in his hands. I looked at him in silence, and saw the glistening
+of the tears as they trickled through his fingers.
+
+" 'Leave me,' he said, without moving his hands. 'I must get over
+it by myself.'
+
+"I went back into the sitting-room. Who can understand women? we
+don't even understand ourselves. His sending me away from him in
+that manner cut me to the heart. I don't believe the most
+harmless and most gentle woman living could have felt it more
+acutely than I felt it. And this, after what I have been doing!
+this, after what I was thinking of, the moment before I went into
+his room! Who can account for it? Nobody--I least of all!
+
+"Half an hour later his door opened, and I heard him hurrying
+down the stairs. I ran on without waiting to think, and asked if
+I might go with him. He neither stopped nor answered. I went back
+to the window, and saw him pass, walking rapidly away, with his
+back turned on Naples and the sea.
+
+"I can understand now that he might not have heard me. At the
+time I thought him inexcusably and brutally unkind to me. I put
+on my bonnet, in a frenzy of rage with him; I sent out for a
+carriage, and told the man to take me where he liked. He took me,
+as he took other strangers, to the Museum to see the statues and
+the pictures. I flounced from room to room, with my face in a
+flame, and the people all staring at me. I came to myself again,
+I don't know how. I returned to the carriage, and made the man
+drive me back in a violent hurry, I don't know why. I tossed off
+my cloak and bonnet, and sat down once more at the window. The
+sight of the sea cooled me. I forgot Midwinter, and thought of
+Armadale and his yacht. There wasn't a breath of wind; there
+wasn't a cloud in the sky; the wide waters of the Bay were as
+smooth as the surface of a glass.
+
+"The sun sank; the short twilight came and went. I had some tea,
+and sat at the table thinking and dreaming over it. When I roused
+myself and went back to the window, the moon was up; but the
+quiet sea was as quiet as ever.
+
+"I was still looking out, when I saw Midwinter in the street
+below, coming back. I was composed enough by this time to
+remember his habits, and to guess that he had been trying to
+relieve the oppression on his mind by one of his long solitary
+walks. When I heard him go into his own room, I was too prudent
+to disturb him again: I waited his pleasure where I was.
+
+"Before long I heard his window opened, and I saw him, from my
+window, step into the balcony, and, after a look at the sea, hold
+up his hand to the air. I was too stupid, for the moment, to
+remember that he had once been a sailor, and to know what this
+meant. I waited, and wondered what would happen next.
+
+"He went in again; and, after an interval, came out once more,
+and held up his hand as before to the air. This time he waited,
+leaning on the balcony rail, and looking out steadily, with all
+his attention absorbed by the sea.
+
+"For a long, long time he never moved. Then, on a sudden, I saw
+him start. The next moment he sank on his knees, with his clasped
+hands resting on the balcony rail. 'God Almighty bless and keep
+you, Allan!' he said, fervently. 'Good-by, forever!'
+
+"I looked out to the sea. A soft, steady breeze was blowing, and
+the rippled surface of the water was sparkling in the quiet
+moonlight. I looked again, and there passed slowly, between me
+and the track of the moon, a long black vessel with tall,
+shadowy, ghostlike sails, gliding smooth and noiseless through
+the water, like a snake.
+
+"The wind had come fair with the night; and Armadale's yacht had
+sailed on the trial cruise.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DIARY BROKEN OFF.
+
+"London, November 19th.--I am alone again in the Great City;
+alone, for the first time since our marriage. Nearly a week since
+I started on my homeward journey, leaving Midwinter behind me at
+Turin.
+
+"The days have been so full of events since the month began, and
+I have been so harassed, in mind and body both, for the greater
+part of the time, that my Diary has been wretchedly neglected. A
+few notes, written in such hurry and confusion that I can hardly
+understand them myself, are all that I possess to remind me of
+what has happened since the night when Armadale's yacht left
+Naples. Let me try if I can set this right without more loss or
+time; let me try if I can recall the circumstances in their order
+as they have followed each other from the beginning of the month.
+
+
+"On the 3d of November--being then still at Naples--Midwinter
+received a hurried letter from Armadale, date 'Messina.' 'The
+weather,' he said, 'had been lovely, and the yacht had made one
+of the quickest passages on record. The crew were rather a rough
+set to look at; but Captain Manuel and his English mate' (the
+latter described as 'the best of good fellows') 'managed them
+admirably.' After this prosperous beginning, Armadale had
+arranged, as a matter of course, to prolong the cruise; and, at
+the sailing-master's suggestion, he had decided to visit some of
+the ports in the Adriatic, which the captain had described as
+full of character, and well worth seeing.
+
+"A postscript followed, explaining that Armadale had written in a
+hurry to catch the steamer to Naples, and that he had opened his
+letter again, before sending it off, to add something that he had
+forgotten. On the day before the yacht sailed, he had been at the
+banker's to get 'a few hundreds in gold, ' and he believed he had
+left his cigar-case there. It was an old friend of his, and he
+begged that Midwinter would oblige him by endeavoring to recover
+it, and keeping it for him till they met again.
+
+"That was the substance of the letter.
+
+"I thought over it carefully when Midwinter had left me alone
+again, after reading it. My idea was then (and is still) that
+Manuel had not persuaded Armadale to cruise in a sea like the
+Adriatic, so much less frequented by ships than the
+Mediterranean, for nothing. The terms, too, in which the trifling
+loss of the cigar-case was mentioned struck me as being equally
+suggestive of what was coming. I concluded that Armadale's
+circular notes had not been transformed into those 'few hundreds
+in gold' through any forethought or business knowledge of his
+own. Manuel's influence, I suspected, had been exerted in this
+matter also, and once more not without reason. At intervals
+through the wakeful night these considerations came back again
+and again to me; and time after time they pointed obstinately (so
+far as my next movements were concerned) in one and the same
+way--the way back to England.
+
+"How to get there, and especially how to get there unaccompanied
+by Midwinter, was more than I had wit enough to discover that
+night. I tried and tried to meet the difficulty, and fell asleep
+exhausted toward the morning without having met it.
+
+"Some hours later, as soon as I was dressed, Midwinter came in,
+with news received by that morning's post from his employers in
+London. The proprietors of the newspaper had received from the
+editor so favorable a report of his correspondence from Naples
+that they had determined on advancing him to a place of greater
+responsibility and greater emolument at Turin. His instructions
+were inclosed in the letter, and he was requested to lose no time
+in leaving Naples for his new post.
+
+"On hearing this, I relieved his mind, before he could put the
+question, of all anxiety about my willingness to remove. Turin
+had the great attraction, in my eyes, of being on the road to
+England. I assured him at once that I was ready to travel as soon
+as he pleased.
+
+"He thanked me for suiting myself to his plans, with more of his
+old gentleness and kindness than I had seen in him for some time
+past. The good news from Armadale on the previous day seemed to
+have roused him a little from the dull despair in which he had
+been sunk since the sailing of the yacht. And now the prospect of
+advancement in his profession, and, more than that, the prospect
+of leaving the fatal place in which the Third Vision of the Dream
+had come true, had (as he owned himself) additionally cheered and
+relieved him. He asked, before he went away to make the
+arrangements for our journey, whether I expected to hear from my
+'family' in England, and whether he should give instructions for
+the forwarding of my letters with his own to the _poste restante_
+at Turin. I instantly thanked him, and accepted the offer. His
+proposal had suggested to me, the moment he made it, that my
+fictitious 'family circumstances' might be turned to good account
+once more, as a reason for unexpectedly summoning me from Italy
+to England.
+
+"On the ninth of the month we were installed at Turin.
+
+"On the thirteenth, Midwinter--being then very busy--asked if I
+would save him a loss of time by applying for any letters which
+might have followed us from Naples. I had been waiting for the
+opportunity he now offered me; and I determined to snatch at it
+without allowing myself time to hesitate. There were no letters
+at the _poste restante_ for either of us. But when he put the
+question on my return, I told him that there had been a letter
+for me, with alarming news from 'home.' My 'mother' was
+dangerously ill, and I was entreated to lose no time in hurrying
+back to England to see her.
+
+"It seems quite unaccountable--now that I am away from him--but
+it is none the less true, that I could not, even yet, tell him a
+downright premeditated falsehood, without a sense of shrinking
+and shame, which other people would think, and which I think
+myself, utterly inconsistent with such a character as mine.
+Inconsistent or not, I felt it. And what is stranger--perhaps I
+ought to say madder--still, if he had persisted in his first
+resolution to accompany me himself to England rather than allow
+me to travel alone, I firmly believe I should have turned my back
+on temptation for the second time, and have lulled myself to rest
+once more in the old dream of living out my life happy and
+harmless in my husband's love.
+
+"Am I deceiving myself in this? It doesn't matter--I dare say I
+am. Never mind what _might_ have happened. What _did_ happen is
+the only thing of any importance now.
+
+"It ended in Midwinter's letting me persuade him that I was old
+enough to take care of myself on the journey to England, and that
+he owed it to the newspaper people, who had trusted their
+interests in his hands, not to leave Turin just as he was
+established there. He didn't suffer at taking leave of me as he
+suffered when he saw the last of his friend. I saw that, and set
+down the anxiety he expressed that I should write to him at its
+proper value. I have quite got over my weakness for him at last.
+No man who really loved me would have put what he owed to a peck
+of newspaper people before what he owed to his wife. I hate him
+for letting me convince him! I believe he was glad to get rid of
+me. I believe he has seen some woman whom he likes at Turin.
+Well, let him follow his new fancy, if he pleases! I shall be the
+widow of Mr. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose before long; and what
+will his likes or dislikes matter to me then?
+
+"The events on the journey were not worth mentioning, and my
+arrival in London stands recorded already on the top of the new
+page.
+
+"As for to-day, the one thing of any importance that I have done
+since I got to the cheap and quiet hotel at which I am now
+staying, has been to send for the landlord, and ask him to help
+me to a sight of the back numbers of _The Times_ newspaper. He
+has politely offered to accompany me himself to-morrow morning to
+some place in the City where all the papers are kept, as he calls
+it, in file. Till to-morrow, then, I must control my impatience
+for news of Armadale as well as I can. And so good-night to the
+pretty reflection of myself that appears in these pages!
+
+
+"November 20th.--Not a word of news yet, either in the obituary
+column or in any other part of the paper. I looked carefully
+through each number in succession, dating from the day when
+Armadale's letter was written at Messina to this present 20th of
+the month, and I am certain, whatever may have happened, that
+nothing is known in England as yet. Patience! The newspaper is to
+meet me at the breakfast-table every morning till further notice;
+and any day now may show me what I most want to see.
+
+
+"November 21st.--No news again. I wrote to Midwinter to-day, to
+keep up appearances.
+
+"When the letter was done, I fell into wretchedly low spirits--I
+can't imagine why--and felt such a longing for a little company
+that, in despair of knowing where else to go, I actually went to
+Pimlico, on the chance that Mother Oldershaw might have returned
+to her old quarters.
+
+"There were changes since I had seen the place during my former
+stay in London. Doctor Downward's side of the house was still
+empty. But the shop was being brightened up for the occupation of
+a milliner and dress-maker. The people, when I went in to make
+inquiries, were all strangers to me. They showed, however, no
+hesitation in giving me Mrs. Oldershaw's address when I asked for
+it--from which I infer that the little 'difficulty' which forced
+her to be in hiding in August last is at an end, so far as she is
+concerned. As for the doctor, the people at the shop either were,
+or pretended to be, quite unable to tell me what had become of
+him.
+
+"I don't know whether it was the sight of the place at Pimlico
+that sickened me, or whether it was my own perversity, or what.
+But now that I had got Mrs. Oldershaw's address, I felt as if she
+was the very last person in the world that I wanted to see. I
+took a cab, and told the man to drive to the street she lived in,
+ and then told him to drive back to the hotel. I hardly know what
+is the matter with me--unless it is that I am getting more
+impatient every hour for information about Armadale. When will
+the future look a little less dark, I wonder? To-morrow is
+Saturday. Will to-morrow's newspaper lift the veil?
+
+
+"November 22d.--Saturday's newspaper _has_ lifted the veil! Words
+are vain to express the panic of astonishment in which I write. I
+never once anticipated it; I can't believe it or realize it, now
+it has happened. The winds and waves themselves have turned my
+accomplices! The yacht has foundered at sea, and every soul on
+board has perished!
+
+"Here is the account cut out of this morning's newspaper:
+
+
+" 'DISASTER AT SEA.--Intelligence has reached the Royal Yacht
+Squadron and the insurers which leaves no reasonable doubt, we
+regret to say, of the total loss, on the fifth of the present
+month, of the yacht _Dorothea,_ with every soul on board. The
+particulars are as follows: At daylight, on the morning of the
+sixth, the Italian brig _Speranza,_ bound from Venice to Marsala
+for orders, encountered some floating objects off Cape
+Spartivento (at the southernmost extremity of Italy) which
+attracted the curiosity of the people of the brig. The previous
+day had been marked by one of the most severe of the sudden and
+violent storms, peculiar to these southern seas, which has been
+remembered for years. The _Speranza_ herself having been in
+danger while the gale lasted, the captain and crew concluded that
+they were on the traces of a wreck, and a boat was lowered for
+the purpose of examining the objects in the water. A hen-coop,
+some broken spars, and fragments of shattered plank were the
+first evidences discovered of the terrible disaster that had
+happened. Some of the lighter articles of cabin furniture,
+wrenched and shattered, were found next. And, lastly, a memento
+of melancholy interest turned up, in the shape of a lifebuoy,
+with a corked bottle attached to it. These latter objects, with
+the relics of cabin furniture, were brought on board the
+_Speranza._ On the buoy the name of the vessel was painted, as
+follows: "_Dorothea, R. Y. S._" (meaning Royal Yacht Squadron).
+The bottle, on being uncorked, contained a sheet of note-paper,
+on which the following lines were hurriedly traced in pencil:
+"Off Cape Spartivento; two days out from Messina. Nov. 5th, 4
+P.M." (being the hour at which the log of the Italian brig showed
+the storm to have been at its height). "Both our boats are stove
+in by the sea. The rudder is gone, and we have sprung a leak
+astern which is more than we can stop. The Lord help us all--we
+are sinking. (Signed) John Mitchenden, Mate." On reaching
+Marsala, the captain of the brig made his report to the British
+consul, and left the objects discovered in that gentleman's
+charge. Inquiry at Messina showed that the ill-fated vessel had
+arrived there from Naples. At the latter port it was ascertained
+that the _Dorothea_ had been hired from the owner's agent by an
+English gentleman, Mr. Armadale, of Thorpe Ambrose, Norfolk.
+Whether Mr. Armadale had any friends on board with him has not
+been clearly discovered. But there is unhappily no doubt that the
+ill-fated gentleman himself sailed in the yacht from Naples, and
+that he was also on board of the vessel when she left Messina.'
+
+
+"Such is the story of the wreck, as the newspaper tells it in the
+plainest and fewest words. My head is in a whirl; my confusion is
+so great that I think of fifty different things in trying to
+think of one. I must wait--a day more or less is of no
+consequence now--I must wait till I can face my new position,
+without feeling bewildered by it.
+
+
+"November 23d.--Eight in the morning.--I rose an hour ago, and
+saw my way clearly to the first step that I must take under
+present circumstances.
+
+"It is of the utmost importance to me to know what is doing at
+Thorpe Ambrose; and it would be the height of rashness, while I
+am quite in the dark in this matter, to venture there myself. The
+only other alternative is to write to somebody on the spot for
+news; and the only person I can write to is--Bashwood.
+
+"I have just finished the letter. It is headed 'private and
+confidential,' and signed 'Lydia Armadale.' There is nothing in
+it to compromise me, if the old fool is mortally offended by my
+treatment of him, and if he spitefully shows my letter to other
+people. But I don't believe he will do this. A man at his age
+forgives a woman anything, if the woman only encourages him. I
+have requested him, as a personal favor, to keep our
+correspondence for the present strictly private. I have hinted
+that my married life with my deceased husband has not been a
+happy one; and that I feel the injudiciousness of having married
+a _young_ man. In the postscript I go further still, and venture
+boldly on these comforting words: 'I can explain, dear Mr.
+Bashwood, what may have seemed fake and deceitful in my conduct
+toward you when you give me a personal opportunity.' If he was on
+the right side of sixty, I should feel doubtful of results. But
+he is on the wrong side of sixty, and I believe he will give me
+my personal opportunity.
+
+
+"Ten o'clock.--I have been looking over the copy of my marriage
+certificate, with which I took care to provide myself on the
+wedding-day; and I have discovered, to my inexpressible dismay,
+an obstacle to my appearance in the character of Armadale's widow
+which I now see for the first time.
+
+"The description of Midwinter (under his own name) which the
+certificate presents answers in every important particular to
+what would have been the description of Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose, if I had really married him. 'Name and Surname'--Allan
+Armadale. 'Age'--twenty-one, instead of twenty-two, which might
+easily pass for a mistake. 'Condition'--Bachelor. 'Rank or
+profession'--Gentleman. 'Residence at the time of
+Marriage'--Frant's Hotel, Darley Street. 'Father's Name and
+Surname'--Allan Armadale. 'Rank or Profession of
+Father'--Gentleman. Every particular (except the year's
+difference in their two ages) which answers for the one answers
+for the other. But suppose, when I produce my copy of the
+certificate, that some meddlesome lawyer insists on looking at
+the original register? Midwinter's writing is as different as
+possible from the writing of his dead friend. The hand in which
+he has written 'Allan Armadale' in the book has not a chance of
+passing for the hand in which Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose was
+accustomed to sign his name.
+
+"Can I move safely in the matter, with such a pitfall as I see
+here open under my feet? How can I tell? Where can I find an
+experienced person to inform me? I must shut up my diary and
+think.
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--My prospects have changed again since I made my
+last entry. I have received a warning to be careful in the future
+which I shall not neglect; and I have (I believe) succeeded in
+providing myself with the advice and assistance of which I stand
+in need.
+
+"After vainly trying to think of some better person to apply to
+in the difficulty which embarrassed me, I made a virtue of
+necessity, and set forth to surprise Mrs. Oldershaw by a visit
+from her darling Lydia! It is almost needless to add that I
+determined to sound her carefully, and not to let any secret of
+importance out of my own possession.
+
+"A sour and solemn old maid-servant admitted me into the house.
+When I asked for her mistress, I was reminded with the bitterest
+emphasis that I had committed the impropriety of calling on a
+Sunday. Mrs. Oldershaw was at home, solely in consequence of
+being too unwell to go to church! The servant thought it very
+unlikely that she would see me. I thought it highly probable, on
+the contrary, that she would honor me with an interview in her
+own interests, if I sent in my name as 'Miss Gwilt'--and the
+event proved that I was right. After being kept waiting some
+minutes I was shown into the drawing-room.
+
+"There sat Mother Jezebel, with the air of a woman resting on the
+high-road to heaven, dressed in a slate-colored gown, with gray
+mittens on her hands, a severely simple cap on her head, and a
+volume of sermons on her lap. She turned up the whites of her
+eyes dev outly at the sight of me, and the first words she said
+were--'Oh, Lydia! Lydia! why are you not at church?'
+
+"If I had been less anxious, the sudden presentation of Mrs.
+Oldershaw in an entirely new character might have amused me. But
+I was in no humor for laughing, and (my notes of hand being all
+paid) I was under no obligation to restrain my natural freedom of
+speech. 'Stuff and nonsense!' I said. 'Put your Sunday face in
+your pocket. I have got some news for you, since I last wrote
+from Thorpe Ambrose.'
+
+"The instant I mentioned 'Thorpe Ambrose,' the whites of the old
+hypocrite's eyes showed themselves again, and she flatly refused
+to hear a word more from me on the subject of my proceedings in
+Norfolk. I insisted; but it was quite useless. Mother Oldershaw
+only shook her head and groaned, and informed me that her
+connection with the pomps and vanities of the world was at an end
+forever. 'I have been born again, Lydia,' said the brazen old
+wretch, wiping her eyes. 'Nothing will induce me to return to the
+subject of that wicked speculation of yours on the folly of a
+rich young man.'
+
+"After hearing this, I should have left her on the spot, but for
+one consideration which delayed me a moment longer.
+
+"It was easy to see, by this time, that the circumstances
+(whatever they might have been) which had obliged Mother
+Oldershaw to keep in hiding, on the occasion of my former visit
+to London, had been sufficiently serious to force her into giving
+up, or appearing to give up, her old business. And it was hardly
+less plain that she had found it to her advantage--everybody in
+England finds it to their advantage in some way to cover the
+outer side of her character carefully with a smooth varnish of
+Cant. This was, however, no business of mine; and I should have
+made these reflections outside instead of inside the house, if my
+interests had not been involved in putting the sincerity of
+Mother Oldershaw's reformation to the test--so far as it affected
+her past connection with myself. At the time when she had fitted
+me out for our enterprise, I remembered signing a certain
+business document which gave her a handsome pecuniary interest in
+my success, if I became Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose. The
+chance of turning this mischievous morsel of paper to good
+account, in the capacity of a touchstone, was too tempting to be
+resisted. I asked my devout friend's permission to say one last
+word before I left the house.
+
+" 'As you have no further interest in my wicked speculation at
+Thorpe Ambrose,' I said, 'perhaps you will give me back the
+written paper that I signed, when you were not quite such an
+exemplary person as you are now?'
+
+"The shameless old hypocrite instantly shut her eyes and
+shuddered.
+
+" 'Does that mean Yes, or No'?' I asked.
+
+" 'On moral and religious grounds, Lydia,' said Mrs. Oldershaw,
+'it means No.'
+
+" 'On wicked and worldly grounds,' I rejoined, 'I beg to thank
+you for showing me your hand.'
+
+"There could, indeed, be no doubt now about the object she really
+had in view. She would run no more risks and lend no more money;
+she would leave me to win or lose single-handed. If I lost, she
+would not be compromised. If I won, she would produce the paper I
+had signed, and profit by it without remorse. In my present
+situation, it was mere waste of time and words to prolong the
+matter by any useless recrimination on my side. I put the warning
+away privately in my memory for future use, and got up to go.
+
+"At the moment when I left my chair there was a sharp double
+knock at the street door. Mrs. Oldershaw evidently recognized it.
+She rose in a violent hurry, and rang the bell. 'I am too unwell
+to see anybody,' she said, when the servant appeared. 'Wait a
+moment, if you please,' she added, turning sharply on me, when
+the woman had left us to answer the door.
+
+"It was small, very small, spitefulness on my part, I know; but
+the satisfaction of thwarting Mother Jezebel, even in a trifle,
+was not to be resisted. 'I can't wait,' I said; 'you reminded me
+just now that I ought to be at church.' Before she could answer I
+was out of the room.
+
+"As I put my foot on the first stair the street door was opened,
+and a man's voice inquired whether Mrs. Oldershaw was at home.
+
+"I instantly recognized the voice. Doctor Downward!
+
+"The doctor repeated the servant's message in a tone which
+betrayed unmistakable irritation at finding himself admitted no
+further than the door.
+
+" 'Your mistress is not well enough to see visitors? Give her
+that card,' said the doctor, 'and say I expect her, the next time
+I call, to be well enough to see _me._'
+
+"If his voice had not told me plainly that he felt in no friendly
+mood toward Mrs. Oldershaw, I dare say I should have let him go
+without claiming his acquaintance; but, as things were, I felt an
+impulse to speak to him or to anybody who had a grudge against
+Mother Jezebel. There was more of my small spitefulness in this,
+I suppose. Anyway, I slipped downstairs; and, following the
+doctor out quietly, overtook him in the street.
+
+"I had recognized his voice, and I recognized his back as I
+walked behind him. But when I called him by his name, and when he
+turned round with a start and confronted me, I followed his
+example, and started on my side. The doctor's face was
+transformed into the face of a perfect stranger! His baldness had
+hidden itself under an artfully grizzled wig. He had allowed his
+whiskers to grow, and had dyed them to match his new head of
+hair. Hideous circular spectacles bestrode his nose in place of
+the neat double eyeglass that he used to carry in his hand; and a
+black neckerchief, surmounted by immense shirt-collars, appeared
+as the unworthy successor of the clerical white cravat of former
+times. Nothing remained of the man I once knew but the
+comfortable plumpness of his figure, and the confidential
+courtesy and smoothness of his manner and his voice.
+
+" 'Charmed to see you again,' said the doctor, looking about him
+a little anxiously, and producing his card-case in a very
+precipitate manner. 'But, my dear Miss Gwilt, permit me to
+rectify a slight mistake on your part. Doctor Downward of Pimlico
+is dead and buried; and you will infinitely oblige me if you will
+never, on any consideration, mention him again!'
+
+"I took the card he offered me, and discovered that I was now
+supposed to be speaking to 'Doctor Le Doux, of the Sanitarium,
+Fairweather Vale, Hampstead!'
+
+" 'You seem to have found it necessary,' I said, 'to change a
+great many things since I last saw you? Your name, your
+residence, your personal appearance--?'
+
+" 'And my branch of practice,' interposed the doctor. 'I have
+purchased of the original possessor (a person of feeble
+enterprise and no resources) a name, a diploma, and a partially
+completed sanitarium for the reception of nervous invalids. We
+are open already to the inspection of a few privileged
+friends--come and see us. Are you walking my way? Pray take my
+arm, and tell me to what happy chance I am indebted for the
+pleasure of seeing you again?'
+
+"I told him the circumstances exactly as they had happened, and I
+added (with a view to making sure of his relations with his
+former ally at Pimlico) that I had been greatly surprised to hear
+Mrs. Oldershaw's door shut on such an old friend as himself.
+Cautious as he was, the doctor's manner of receiving my remark
+satisfied me at once that my suspicions of an estrangement were
+well founded. His smile vanished, and he settled his hideous
+spectacles irritably on the bridge of his nose.
+
+" 'Pardon me if I leave you to draw your own conclusions,' he
+said. 'The subject of Mrs. Oldershaw is, I regret to say, far
+from agreeable to me under existing circumstances--a business
+difficulty connected with our late partnership at Pimlico,
+entirely without interest for a young and brilliant woman like
+yourself. Tell me your news! Have you left your situation at
+Thorpe Ambrose? Are you residing in London? Is there anything,
+professional or otherwise, that I can do for you?'
+
+"That last question was a more important one than he supposed.
+Before I answered it, I felt the necessity of parting company
+with him and of getting a little time to think.
+
+" 'You have kindl y asked me, doctor, to pay you a visit,' I
+said. 'In your quiet house at Hampstead, I may possibly have
+something to say to you which I can't say in this noisy street.
+When are you at home at the Sanitarium? Should I find you there
+later in the day?'
+
+"The doctor assured me that he was then on his way back, and
+begged that I would name my own hour. I said, 'Toward the
+afternoon;' and, pleading an engagement, hailed the first omnibus
+that passed us. 'Don't forget the address,' said the doctor, as
+he handed me in. 'I have got your card,' I answered, and so we
+parted.
+
+"I returned to the hotel, and went up into my room, and thought
+over it very anxiously.
+
+"The serious obstacle of the signature on the marriage register
+still stood in my way as unmanageably as ever. All hope of
+getting assistance from Mrs. Oldershaw was at an end. I could
+only regard her henceforth as an enemy hidden in the dark--the
+enemy, beyond all doubt now, who had had me followed and watched
+when I was last in London. To what other counselor could I turn
+for the advice which my unlucky ignorance of law and business
+obliged me to seek from some one more experienced than myself?
+Could I go to the lawyer whom I consulted when I was about to
+marry Midwinter in my maiden name? Impossible! To say nothing of
+his cold reception of me when I had last seen him, the advice I
+wanted this time related (disguise the facts as I might) to the
+commission of a Fraud--a fraud of the sort that no prosperous
+lawyer would consent to assist if he had a character to lose. Was
+there any other competent person I could think of? There was one,
+and one only--the doctor who had died at Pimlico, and had revived
+again at Hampstead.
+
+"I knew him to be entirely without scruples; to have the business
+experience that I wanted myself; and to be as cunning, as clever,
+and as far-seeing a man as could be found in all London. Beyond
+this, I had made two important discoveries in connection with him
+that morning. In the first place, he was on bad terms with Mrs.
+Oldershaw, which would protect me from all danger of the two
+leaguing together against me if I trusted him. In the second
+place, circumstances still obliged him to keep his identity
+carefully disguised, which gave me a hold over him in no respect
+inferior to any hold that _I_ might give him over _me._ In every
+way he was the right man, the only man, for my purpose; and yet I
+hesitated at going to him--hesitated for a full hour and more,
+without knowing why!
+
+"It was two o'clock before I finally decided on paying the doctor
+a visit. Having, after this, occupied nearly another hour in
+determining to a hair-breadth how far I should take him into my
+confidence, I sent for a cab at last, and set off toward three in
+the afternoon for Hampstead.
+
+
+"I found the Sanitarium with some little difficulty.
+
+"Fairweather Vale proved to be a new neighborhood, situated below
+the high ground of Hampstead, on the southern side. The day was
+overcast, and the place looked very dreary. We approached it by a
+new road running between trees, which might once have been the
+park avenue of a country house. At the end we came upon a
+wilderness of open ground, with half-finished villas dotted
+about, and a hideous litter of boards, wheelbarrows, and building
+materials of all sorts scattered in every direction. At one
+corner of this scene of desolation, stood a great overgrown
+dismal house, plastered with drab-colored stucco, and surrounded
+by a naked, unfinished garden, without a shrub or a flower in it,
+frightful to behold. On the open iron gate that led into this
+inclosure was a new brass plate, with 'Sanitarium' inscribed on
+it in great black letters. The bell, when the cabman rang it,
+pealed through the empty house like a knell; and the pallid,
+withered old man-servant in black who answered the door looked as
+if he had stepped up out of his grave to perform that service. He
+let out on me a smell of damp plaster and new varnish; and he let
+in with me a chilling draft of the damp November air. I didn't
+notice it at the time, but, writing of it now, I remember that I
+shivered as I crossed the threshold.
+
+"I gave my name to the servant as 'Mrs. Armadale,' and was shown
+into the waiting-room. The very fire itself was dying of damp in
+the grate. The only books on the table were the doctor's Works,
+in sober drab covers; and the only object that ornamented the
+walls was the foreign Diploma (handsomely framed and glazed), of
+which the doctor had possessed himself by purchase, along with
+the foreign name.
+
+"After a moment or two, the proprietor of the Sanitarium came in,
+and held up his hands in cheerful astonishment at the sight of
+me.
+
+" 'I hadn't an idea who "Mrs. Armadale" was!' he said. 'My dear
+lady, have _you_ changed your name too? How sly of you not to
+tell me when we met this morning! Come into my private
+snuggery--I can't think of keeping an old and dear friend like
+you in the patients' waiting-room.'
+
+"The doctor's private snuggery was at the back of the house,
+looking out on fields and trees, doomed but not yet destroyed by
+the builder. Horrible objects in brass and leather and glass,
+twisted and turned as if they were sentient things writhing in
+agonies of pain, filled up one end of the room. A great book-case
+with glass doors extended over the whole of the opposite wall,
+and exhibited on its shelves long rows of glass jars, in which
+shapeless dead creatures of a dull white color floated in yellow
+liquid. Above the fireplace hung a collection of photographic
+portraits of men and women, inclosed in two large frames hanging
+side by side with a space between them. The left-hand frame
+illustrated the effects of nervous suffering as seen in the face;
+the right-hand frame exhibited the ravages of insanity from the
+same point of view; while the space between was occupied by an
+elegantly illuminated scroll, bearing inscribed on it the
+time-honored motto, 'Prevention is better than Cure.'
+
+" 'Here I am, with my galvanic apparatus, and my preserved
+specimens, and all the rest of it,' said the doctor, placing me
+in a chair by the fireside. 'And there is my System mutely
+addressing you just above your head, under a form of exposition
+which I venture to describe as frankness itself. This is no
+mad-house, my dear lady. Let other men treat insanity, if they
+like--_I_ stop it! No patients in the house as yet. But we live
+in an age when nervous derangement (parent of insanity) is
+steadily on the increase; and in due time the sufferers will
+come. I can wait as Harvey waited, as Jenner waited. And now do
+put your feet up on the fender, and tell me about yourself. You
+are married, of course? And what a pretty name! Accept my best
+and most heart-felt congratulations. You have the two greatest
+blessings that can fall to a woman's lot; the two capital H's, as
+I call them--Husband and Home.'
+
+"I interrupted the genial flow of the doctor's congratulations at
+the first opportunity.
+
+" 'I am married; but the circumstances are by no means of the
+ordinary kind,' I said, seriously. My present position includes
+none of the blessings that are usually supposed to fall to a
+woman's lot. I am already in a situation of very serious
+difficulty; and before long I may be in a situation of very
+serious danger as well.'
+
+"The doctor drew his chair a little nearer to me, and fell at
+once into his old professional manner and his old confidential
+tone.
+
+" 'If you wish to consult me,' he said, softly, 'you know that I
+have kept some dangerous secrets in my time, and you also know
+that I possess two valuable qualities as an adviser. I am not
+easily shocked; and I can be implicitly trusted.'
+
+"I hesitated even now, at the eleventh hour, sitting alone with
+him in his own room. It was so strange to me to be trusting to
+anybody but myself! And yet, how could I help trusting another
+person in a difficulty which turned on a matter of law?
+
+" 'Just as you please, you know,' added the doctor. 'I never
+invite confidences. I merely receive them.'
+
+"There was no help for it; I had come there not to hesitate, but
+to speak. I risked it, and spoke.
+
+" 'The matter on which I wish to consult you,' I said, 'is not
+(as you seem to thin k) within your experience as a professional
+man. But I believe you may be of assistance to me, if I trust
+myself to your larger experience as a man of the world. I warn
+you beforehand that I shall certainly surprise, and possibly
+alarm, you before I have done.'
+
+"With that preface I entered on my story, telling him what I had
+settled to tell him, and no more.
+
+"I made no secret, at the outset, of my intention to personate
+Armadale's widow; and I mentioned without reserve (knowing that
+the doctor could go to the office and examine the will for
+himself) the handsome income that would be settled on me in the
+event of my success. Some of the circumstances that followed next
+in succession I thought it desirable to alter or conceal. I
+showed him the newspaper account of the loss of the yacht, but I
+said nothing about events at Naples. I informed him of the exact
+similarity of the two names; leaving him to imagine that it was
+accidental. I told him, as an important element in the matter,
+that my husband had kept his real name a profound secret from
+everybody but myself; but (to prevent any communication between
+them) I carefully concealed from the doctor what the assumed name
+under which Midwinter had lived all his life really was. I
+acknowledged that I had left my husband behind me on the
+Continent; but when the doctor put the question, I allowed him to
+conclude--I couldn't, with all my resolution, tell him
+positively!--that Midwinter knew of the contemplated Fraud, and
+that he was staying away purposely, so as not to compromise me by
+his presence. This difficulty smoothed over--or, as I feel it
+now, this baseness committed--I reverted to myself, and came back
+again to the truth. One after another I mentioned all the
+circumstances connected with my private marriage, and with the
+movements of Armadale and Midwinter, which rendered any discovery
+of the false personation (through the evidence of other people) a
+downright impossibility. 'So much,' I said, in conclusion, 'for
+the object in view. The next thing is to tell you plainly of a
+very serious obstacle that stands in my way.'
+
+"The doctor, who had listened thus far without interrupting me,
+begged permission here to say a few words on his side before I
+went on.
+
+"The 'few words' proved to be all questions--clever, searching,
+suspicious questions--which I was, however, able to answer with
+little or no reserve, for they related, in almost every instance,
+to the circumstances under which I had been married, and to the
+chances for and against my lawful husband if he chose to assert
+his claim to me at any future time.
+
+"My replies informed the doctor, in the first place, that I had
+so managed matters at Thorpe Ambrose as to produce a general
+impression that Armadale intended to marry me; in the second
+place, that my husband's early life had not been of a kind to
+exhibit him favorably in the eyes of the world; in the third
+place, that we had been married, without any witnesses present
+who knew us, at a large parish church in which two other couples
+had been married the same morning, to say nothing of the dozens
+on dozens of other couples (confusing all remembrance of us in
+the minds of the officiating people) who had been married since.
+When I had put the doctor in possession of these facts--and when
+he had further ascertained that Midwinter and I had gone abroad
+among strangers immediately after leaving the church; and that
+the men employed on board the yacht in which Armadale had sailed
+from Somersetshire (before my marriage) were now away in ships
+voyaging to the other end of the world--his confidence in my
+prospects showed itself plainly in his face. 'So far as I can
+see,' he said, 'your husband's claim to you (after you have
+stepped into the place of the dead Mr. Armadale's widow) would
+rest on nothing but his own bare assertion. And _that_ I think
+you may safely set at defiance. Excuse my apparent distrust of
+the gentleman. But there might be a misunderstanding between you
+in the future, and it is highly desirable to ascertain beforehand
+exactly what he could or could not do under those circumstances.
+And now that we have done with the main obstacle that _I_ see in
+the way of your success, let us by all means come to the obstacle
+that _you_ see next!'
+
+"I was willing enough to come to it. The tone in which he spoke
+of Midwinter, though I myself was responsible for it, jarred on
+me horribly, and roused for the moment some of the old folly of
+feeling which I fancied I had laid asleep forever. I rushed at
+the chance of changing the subject, and mentioned the discrepancy
+in the register between the hand in which Midwinter had signed
+the name of Allan Armadale, and the hand in which Armadale of
+Thorpe Ambrose had been accustomed to write his name, with an
+eagerness which it quite diverted the doctor to see.
+
+" 'Is _that_ all?' he asked, to my infinite surprise and relief,
+when I had done. 'My dear lady, pray set your mind at ease! If
+the late Mr. Armadale's lawyers want a proof of your marriage,
+they won't go to the church-register for it, I can promise you!'
+
+" 'What!' I exclaimed, in astonishment. 'Do you mean to say that
+the entry in the register is not a proof of my marriage?'
+
+" 'It is a proof,' said the doctor, 'that you have been married
+to somebody. But it is no proof that you have been married to Mr.
+Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose. Jack Nokes or Tom Styles (excuse the
+homeliness of the illustration!) might have got the license, and
+gone to the church to be married to you under Mr. Armadale's
+name; and the register (how could it do otherwise?) must in that
+case have innocently assisted the deception. I see I surprise
+you. My dear madam, when you opened this interesting business you
+surprised _me_--I may own it now--by laying so much stress on the
+curious similarity between the two names. You might have entered
+on the very daring and romantic enterprise in which you are now
+engaged, without necessarily marrying your present husband. Any
+other man would have done just as well, provided he was willing
+to take Mr. Armadale's name for the purpose.'
+
+"I felt my temper going at this. 'Any other man would _not_ have
+done just as well,' I rejoined, instantly. 'But for the
+similarity of the names, I should never have thought of the
+enterprise at all.'
+
+"The doctor admitted that he had spoken too hastily. 'That
+personal view of the subject had, I confess, escaped me,' he
+said. 'However, let us get back to the matter in hand. In the
+course of what I may term an adventurous medical life, I have
+been brought more than once into contact with the gentlemen of
+the law, and have had opportunities of observing their
+proceedings in cases of, let us say, Domestic Jurisprudence. I am
+quite sure I am correct in informing you that the proof which
+will be required by Mr. Armadale's representatives will be the
+evidence of a witness present at the marriage who can speak to
+the identity of the bride and bridegroom from his own personal
+knowledge.'
+
+" 'But I have already told you,' I said, 'that there was no such
+person present.'
+
+" 'Precisely,' rejoined the doctor. 'In that case, what you now
+want, before you can safely stir a step in the matter, is--if you
+will pardon me the expression--a ready-made witness, possessed of
+rare moral and personal resources, who can be trusted to assume
+the necessary character, and to make the necessary Declaration
+before a magistrate. Do you know of any such person?' asked the
+doctor, throwing himself back in his chair, and looking at me
+with the utmost innocence.
+
+" 'I only know You,' I said.
+
+"The doctor laughed softly. 'So like a woman!' he remarked, with
+the most exasperating good humor. 'The moment she sees her
+object, she dashes at it headlong the nearest way. Oh, the sex!
+the sex!'
+
+" 'Never mind the sex!' I broke out, impatiently. 'I want a
+serious answer--Yes or No?'
+
+"The doctor rose, and waved his hand with great gravity and
+dignity all round the room. 'You see this vast establishment,' he
+began; 'you can possibly estimate to some extent the immense
+stake I have in its prosperity and success. Your excellent
+natural sense will tell you that the Principal of this Sanitarium
+must
+ be a man of the most unblemished character--'
+
+" 'Why waste so many words,' I said, 'when one word will do? You
+mean No!'
+
+"The Principal of the Sanitarium suddenly relapsed into the
+character of my confidential friend.
+
+" 'My dear lady,' he said, 'it isn't Yes, and it isn't No, at a
+moment's notice. Give me till to-morrow afternoon. By that time I
+engage to be ready to do one of two things--either to withdraw
+myself from this business at once, or to go into it with you
+heart and soul. Do you agree to that? Very good; we may drop the
+subject, then, till to-morrow. Where can I call on you when I
+have decided what to do?'
+
+"There was no objection to my trusting him with my address at the
+hotel. I had taken care to present myself there as 'Mrs.
+Armadale'; and I had given Midwinter an address at the
+neighboring post-office to write to when he answered my letters.
+We settled the hour at which the doctor was to call on me; and,
+that matter arranged, I rose to go, resisting all offers of
+refreshment, and all proposals to show me over the house. His
+smooth persistence in keeping up appearances after we had
+thoroughly understood each other disgusted me. I got away from
+him as soon as I could, and came back to my diary and my own
+room.
+
+"We shall see how it ends to-morrow. My own idea is that my
+confidential friend will say Yes.
+
+
+"November 24th.--The doctor has said Yes, as I supposed; but on
+terms which I never anticipated. The condition on which I have
+secured his services amounts to nothing less than the payment to
+him, on my stepping into the place of Armadale's widow, of half
+my first year's income--in other words, six hundred pounds!
+
+"I protested against this extortionate demand in every way I
+could think of. All to no purpose. The doctor met me with the
+most engaging frankness. Nothing, he said, but the accidental
+embarrassment of his position at the present time would have
+induced him to mix himself up in the matter at all. He would
+honestly confess that he had exhausted his own resources, and the
+resources of other persons whom he described as his 'backers,' in
+the purchase and completion of the Sanitarium. Under those
+circumstances, six hundred pounds in prospect was an object to
+him. For that sum he would run the serious risk of advising and
+assisting me. Not a farthing less would tempt him; and there he
+left it, with his best and friendliest wishes, in my hands!
+
+"It ended in the only way in which it could end. I had no choice
+but to accept the terms, and to let the doctor settle things on
+the spot as he pleased. The arrangement once made between us, I
+must do him the justice to say that he showed no disposition to
+let the grass grow under his feet. He called briskly for pen, ink
+and paper, and suggested opening the campaign at Thorpe Ambrose
+by to-night's post.
+
+"We agreed on a form of letter which I wrote, and which he copied
+on the spot. I entered into no particulars at starting. I simply
+asserted that I was the widow of the deceased Mr. Armadale; that
+I had been privately married to him; that I had returned to
+England on his sailing in the yacht from Naples; and that I
+begged to inclose a copy of my marriage certificate, as a matter
+of form with which I presumed it was customary to comply. The
+letter was addressed to 'The Representatives of the late Allan
+Armadale, Esq., Thorpe Ambrose, Norfolk.' And the doctor himself
+carried it away, and put it in the post.
+
+"I am not so excited and so impatient for results as I expected
+to be, now that the first step is taken. The thought of Midwinter
+haunts me like a ghost. I have been writing to him again--as
+before, to keep up appearances. It will be my last letter, I
+think. My courage feels shaken, my spirits get depressed, when my
+thoughts go back to Turin. I am no more capable of facing the
+consideration of Midwinter at this moment than I was in the
+by-gone time, The day of reckoning with him, once distant and
+doubtful, is a day that may come to me now, I know not how soon.
+And here I am, trusting myself blindly to the chapter of
+Accidents still!
+
+
+"November 25th.--At two o'clock to-day the doctor called again by
+appointment. He has been to his lawyers (of course without taking
+them into our confidence) to put the case simply of proving my
+marriage. The result confirms what he has already told me. The
+pivot on which the whole matter will turn, if my claim is
+disputed, will be the question of identity; and it may be
+necessary for the witness to make his Declaration in the
+magistrate's presence before the week is out.
+
+"In this position of affairs, the doctor thinks it important that
+we should be within easy reach of each other, and proposes to
+find a quiet lodging for me in his neighborhood. I am quite
+willing to go anywhere; for, among the other strange fancies that
+have got possession of me, I have an idea that I shall feel more
+completely lost to Midwinter if I move out of the neighborhood in
+which his letters are addressed to me. I was awake and thinking
+of him again last night This morning I have finally decided to
+write to him no more.
+
+"After staying half an hour, the doctor left me, having first
+inquired whether I would like to accompany him to Hampstead to
+look for lodgings. I informed him that I had some business of my
+own which would keep me in London. He inquired what the business
+was. 'You will see,' I said, 'to-morrow or next day.'
+
+"I had a moment's nervous trembling when I was by myself again.
+My business in London, besides being a serious business in a
+woman's eyes, took my mind back to Midwinter in spite of me. The
+prospect of removing to my new lodging had reminded me of the
+necessity of dressing in my new character. The time had come now
+for getting _my widow's weeds._
+
+"My first proceeding, after putting my bonnet on, was to provide
+myself with money. I got what I wanted to fit me out for the
+character of Armadale's widow by nothing less than the sale of
+Armadale's own present to me on my marriage--the ruby ring! It
+proved to be a more valuable jewel than I had supposed. I am
+likely to be spared all money anxieties for some time to come.
+
+"On leaving the jeweler's, I went to the great mourning shop in
+Regent Street. In four-and-twenty hours (if I can give them no
+more) they have engaged to dress me in my widow's costume from
+head to foot. I had another feverish moment when I left the shop;
+and, by way of further excitement on this agitating day, I found
+a surprise in store for me on my return to the hotel. An elderly
+gentleman was announced to be waiting to see me. I opened my
+sitting-room door, and there was old Bashwood!
+
+"He had got my letter that morning, and had started for London by
+the next train to answer it in person. I had expected a great
+deal from him, but I had certainly not expected _that._ It
+flattered me. For the moment, I declare it flattered me!
+
+"I pass over the wretched old creature's raptures and reproaches,
+and groans and tears, and weary long prosings about the lonely
+months he had passed at Thorpe Ambrose, brooding over my
+desertion of him. He was quite eloquent at times; but I don't
+want his eloquence here. It is needless to say that I put myself
+right with him, and consulted his feelings before I asked him for
+his news. What a blessing a woman's vanity is sometimes! I almost
+forgot my risks and responsibilities in my anxieties to be
+charming. For a minute or two I felt a warm little flutter of
+triumph. And it was a triumph--even with an old man! In a quarter
+of an hour I had him smirking and smiling, hanging on my lightest
+words in an ecstasy, and answering all the questions I put to him
+like a good little child.
+
+"Here is his account of affairs at Thorpe Ambrose, as I gently
+extracted it from him bit by bit:
+
+"In the first place, the news of Armadale's death has reached
+Miss Milroy. It has so completely overwhelmed her that her father
+has been compelled to remove her from the school. She is back at
+the cottage, and the doctor is in daily attendance. Do I pity
+her? Yes! I pity her exactly as much as she once pitied me!
+
+"In the next place, the state of affairs at the great house,
+which I expected to find some difficulty in comprehending, tu rns
+out to be quite intelligible, and certainly not discouraging so
+far. Only yesterday, the lawyers on both sides came to an
+understanding. Mr. Darch (the family solicitor of the Blanchards,
+and Armadale's bitter enemy in past times) represents the
+interests of Miss Blanchard, who (in the absence of any male
+heir) is next heir to the estate, and who has, it appears, been
+in London for some time past. Mr. Smart, of Norwich (originally
+employed to overlook Bashwood), represents the deceased Armadale.
+And this is what the two lawyers have settled between them.
+
+"Mr. Darch, acting for Miss Blanchard, has claimed the possession
+of the estate, and the right of receiving the rents at the
+Christmas audit, in her name. Mr. Smart, on his side, has
+admitted that there is great weight in the family solicitor's
+application. He cannot see his way, as things are now, to
+contesting the question of Armadale's death, and he will consent
+to offer no resistance to the application, if Mr. Darch will
+consent, on his side, to assume the responsibility of taking
+possession in Miss Blanchard's name. This Mr. Darch has already
+done; and the estate is now virtually in Miss Blanchard's
+possession.
+
+"One result of this course of proceeding will be (as Bashwood
+thinks) to put Mr. Darch in the position of the person who really
+decides on my claim to the widow's place and the widow's money.
+The income being charged on the estate, it must come out of Miss
+Blanchard's pocket; and the question of paying it would appear,
+therefore, to be a question for Miss Blanchard's lawyer.
+To-morrow will probably decide whether this view is the right
+one, for my letter to Armadale's representatives will have been
+delivered at the great house this morning.
+
+"So much for what old Bashwood had to tell me. Having recovered
+my influence over him, and possessed myself of all his
+information so far, the next thing to consider was the right use
+to turn him to in the future. He was entirely at my disposal, for
+his place at the steward's office has been already taken by Miss
+Blanchard's man of business, and he pleaded hard to be allowed to
+stay and serve my interests in London. There would not have been
+the least danger in letting him stay, for I had, as a matter of
+course, left him undisturbed in his conviction that I really am
+the widow of Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose. But with the doctor's
+resources at my command, I wanted no assistance of any sort in
+London; and it occurred to me that I might make Bashwood more
+useful by sending him back to Norfolk to watch events there in my
+interests.
+
+"He looked sorely disappointed (having had an eye evidently to
+paying his court to me in my widowed condition!) when I told him
+of the conclusion at which I had arrived. But a few words of
+persuasion, and a modest hint that he might cherish hopes in the
+future if he served me obediently in the present, did wonders in
+reconciling him to the necessity of meeting my wishes. He asked
+helplessly for 'instructions' when it was time for him to leave
+me and travel back by the evening train. I could give him none,
+for I had no idea as yet of what the legal people might or might
+not do. 'But suppose something happens,' he persisted, 'that I
+don't understand, what am I to do, so far away from you?' I could
+only give him one answer. 'Do nothing,' I said. 'Whatever it is,
+hold your tongue about it, and write, or come up to London
+immediately to consult me.' With those parting directions, and
+with an understanding that we were to correspond regularly, I let
+him kiss my hand, and sent him off to the train.
+
+"Now that I am alone again, and able to think calmly of the
+interview between me and my elderly admirer, I find myself
+recalling a certain change in old Bashwood's manner which puzzled
+me at the time, and which puzzles me still.
+
+"Even in his first moments of agitation at seeing me, I thought
+that his eyes rested on my face with a new kind of interest while
+I was speaking to him. Besides this, he dropped a word or two
+afterward, in telling me of his lonely life at Thorpe Ambrose,
+which seemed to imply that he had been sustained in his solitude
+by a feeling of confidence about his future relations with me
+when we next met If he had been a younger and a bolder man (and
+if any such discovery had been possible), I should almost have
+suspected him of having found out something about my past life
+which had made him privately confident of controlling me, if I
+showed any disposition to deceive and desert him again. But such
+an idea as this in connection with old Bashwood is simply absurd.
+Perhaps I am overexcited by the suspense and anxiety of my
+present position? Perhaps the merest fancies and suspicions are
+leading me astray? Let this be as it may, I have, at any rate,
+more serious subjects than the subject of old Bashwood to occupy
+me now. Tomorrow's post may tell me what Armadale's
+representatives think of the claim of Armadale's widow.
+
+
+"November 26th.--The answer has arrived this morning, in the form
+(as Bashwood supposed) of a letter from Mr. Darch. The crabbed
+old lawyer acknowledges my letter in three lines. Before he takes
+any steps, or expresses any opinion on the subject, he wants
+evidence of identity as well as the evidence of the certificate;
+and he ventures to suggest that it may be desirable, before we go
+any further, to refer him to my legal advisers.
+
+"Two o'clock.--The doctor called shortly after twelve to say that
+he had found a lodging for me within twenty minutes' walk of the
+Sanitarium. In return for his news, I showed him Mr. Darch's
+letter. He took it away at once to his lawyers, and came back
+with the necessary information for my guidance. I have answered
+Mr. Darch by sending him the address of my legal
+advisers--otherwise, the doctor's lawyers--without making any
+comment on the desire that he has expressed for additional
+evidence of the marriage. This is all that can be done to-day.
+To-morrow will bring with it events of greater interest, for
+to-morrow the doctor is to make his Declaration before the
+magistrate, and to-morrow I am to move to my new lodging in my
+widow's weeds.
+
+
+"November 27th.--Fairweather Vale Villas.--The Declaration has
+been made, with all the necessary formalities. And I have taken
+possession, in my widow's costume, of my new rooms.
+
+"I ought to be excited by the opening of this new act in the
+drama, and by the venturesome part that I am playing in it
+myself. Strange to say, I am quiet and depressed. The thought of
+Midwinter has followed me to my new abode, and is pressing on me
+heavily at this moment. I have no fear of any accident happening,
+in the interval that must still pass before I step publicly into
+the place of Armadale's widow. But when that time comes, and when
+Midwinter finds me (as sooner or later find me he must!) figuring
+in my false character, and settled in the position that I have
+usurped--_then,_ I ask myself, What will happen? The answer still
+comes as it first came to me this morning, when I put on my
+widow's dress. Now, as then, the presentiment is fixed in my mind
+that he will kill me. If it was not too late to draw back--
+Absurd! I shall shut up my journal.
+
+
+"November 28th.--The lawyers have heard from Mr. Darch, and have
+sent him the Declaration by return of post.
+
+"When the doctor brought me this news, I asked him whether his
+lawyers were aware of my present address; and, finding that he
+had not yet mentioned it to them, I begged that he would continue
+to keep it a secret for the future. The doctor laughed. 'Are you
+afraid of Mr. Darch's stealing a march on us, and coming to
+attack you personally?' he asked. I accepted the imputation, as
+the easiest way of making him comply with my request. 'Yes,' I
+said, 'I am afraid of Mr. Darch.'
+
+"My spirits have risen since the doctor left me. There is a
+pleasant sensation of security in feeling that no strangers are
+in possession of my address. I am easy enough in my mind to-day
+to notice how wonderfully well I look in my widow's weeds, and to
+make myself agreeable to the people of the house.
+
+"Midwinter disturbed me a little again last night; but I have got
+over the ghastly delusion which possessed me yesterday.
+ I know better now than to dread violence from him when he
+discovers what I have done. And there is still less fear of his
+stooping to assert his claim to a woman who has practiced on him
+such a deception as mine. The one serious trial that I shall be
+put to when the day of reckoning comes will be the trial of
+preserving my false character in his presence. I shall be safe in
+his loathing and contempt for me, after that. On the day when I
+have denied him to his face, I shall have seen the last of him
+forever.
+
+"Shall I be able to deny him to his face? Shall I be able to look
+at him and speak to him as if he had never been more to me than a
+friend? How do I know till the time comes? Was there ever such an
+infatuated fool as I am, to be writing of him at all, when
+writing only encourages me to think of him? I will make a new
+resolution. From this time forth, his name shall appear no more
+in these pages.
+
+
+"Monday, December 1st.--The last month of the worn-out old year
+1851! If I allowed myself to look back, what a miserable year I
+should see added to all the other miserable years that are gone!
+But I have made my resolution to look forward only, and I mean to
+keep it.
+
+"I have nothing to record of the last two days, except that on
+the twenty-ninth I remembered Bashwood, and wrote to tell him of
+my new address. This morning the lawyers heard again from Mr.
+Darch. He acknowledges the receipt of the Declaration, but
+postpones stating the decision at which he has arrived until he
+has communicated with the trustees under the late Mr. Blanchard's
+will, and has received his final instructions from his client,
+Miss Blanchard. The doctor's lawyers declare that this last
+letter is a mere device for gaining time--with what object they
+are, of course, not in a position to guess. The doctor himself
+says, facetiously, it is the usual lawyer's object of making a
+long bill. My own idea is that Mr. Darch has his suspicions of
+something wrong, and that his purpose in trying to gain time--
+
+                              * * * * * * *
+
+"Ten, at night.--I had written as far as that last unfinished
+sentence (toward four in the afternoon) when I was startled by
+hearing a cab drive up to the door. I went to the window, and got
+there just in time to see old Bashwood getting out with an
+activity of which I should never have supposed him capable. So
+little did I anticipate the tremendous discovery that was going
+to burst on me in another minute, that I turned to the glass, and
+wondered what the susceptible old gentleman would say to me in my
+widow's cap.
+
+"The instant he entered the room, I saw that some serious
+disaster had happened. His eyes were wild, his wig was awry. He
+approached me with a strange mixture of eagerness and dismay.
+'I've done as you told me,' he whispered, breathlessly. 'I've
+held my tongue about it, and come straight to _you!_' He caught
+me by the hand before I could speak, with a boldness quite new in
+my experience of him. 'Oh how can I break it to you!' he burst
+out. 'I'm beside myself when I think of it!'
+
+" 'When you _can_ speak,' I said, putting him into a chair,
+'speak out. I see in your face that you bring me news I don't
+look for from Thorpe Ambrose.'
+
+"He put his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and drew out
+a letter. He looked at the letter, and looked at me.
+'New--new--news you don't look for,' he stammered; 'but not from
+Thorpe Ambrose!'
+
+" 'Not from Thorpe Ambrose!'
+
+" 'No. From the sea!'
+
+"The first dawning of the truth broke on me at those words. I
+couldn't speak--I could only hold out my hand to him for the
+letter.
+
+"He still shrank from giving it to me. 'I daren't! I daren't!' he
+said to himself, vacantly. 'The shock of it might be the death of
+her.'
+
+"I snatched the letter from him. One glance at the writing on the
+address was enough. My hands fell on my lap, with the letter fast
+held in them. I sat petrified, without moving, without speaking,
+without hearing a word of what Bashwood was saying to me, and
+slowly realized the terrible truth. The man whose widow I had
+claimed to be was a living man to confront me! In vain I had
+mixed the drink at Naples--in vain I had betrayed him into
+Manuel's hands. Twice I had set the deadly snare for him, and
+twice Armadale had escaped me! "I came to my sense of outward
+things again, and found Bashwood on his knees at my feet, crying.
+
+" 'You look angry,' he murmured, helplessly. 'Are you angry with
+_me?_ Oh, if you only knew what hopes I had when we last saw each
+other, and how cruelly that letter has dashed them all to the
+ground!'
+
+"I put the miserable old creature back from me, but very gently.
+'Hush!' I said. 'Don't distress me now. I want composure; I want
+to read the letter.'
+
+"He went away submissively to the other end of the room. As soon
+as my eye was off him, I heard him say to himself, with impotent
+malignity, 'If the sea had been of my mind, the sea would have
+drowned him!'
+
+"One by one I slowly opened the folds of the letter; feeling,
+while I did so, the strangest incapability of fixing my attention
+on the very lines that I was burning to read. But why dwell any
+longer on sensations which I can't describe? It will be more to
+the purpose if I place the letter itself, for future reference,
+on this page of my journal.
+
+'Fiume, Illyria, November 21, 1851.
+
+"MR. BASHWOOD--The address I date from will surprise you; and you
+will be more surprised still when you hear how it is that I come
+to write to you from a port on the Adriatic Sea.
+
+"I have been the victim of a rascally attempt at robbery and
+murder. The robbery has succeeded; and it is only through the
+mercy of God that the murder did not succeed too.
+
+"I hired a yacht rather more than a month ago at Naples; and
+sailed (I am glad to think now) without any friend with me, for
+Messina. From Messina I went for a cruise in the Adriatic. Two
+days out we were caught in a storm. Storms get up in a hurry, and
+go down in a hurry, in those parts. The vessel behaved nobly: I
+declare I feel the tears in my eyes now, when I think of her at
+the bottom of the sea! Toward sunset it began to moderate; and by
+midnight, except for a long, smooth swell, the sea was as quiet
+as need be. I went below, a little tired (having helped in
+working the yacht while the gale lasted), and fell asleep in five
+minutes. About two hours after, I was woke by something falling
+into my cabin through a chink of the ventilator in the upper part
+of the door. I jumped up, and found a bit of paper with a key
+wrapped in it, and with writing on the inner side, in a hand
+which it was not very easy to read.
+
+"Up to this time I had not had the ghost of a suspicion that I
+was alone at sea with a gang of murderous vagabonds (excepting
+one only) who would stick at nothing. I had got on very well with
+my sailing-master (the worst scoundrel of the lot), and better
+still with his English mate. The sailors, being all foreigners, I
+had very little to say to. They did their work, and no quarrels
+and nothing unpleasant happened. If anybody had told me, before I
+went to bed on the night after the storm, that the sailing-master
+and the crew and the mate (who had been no better than the rest
+of them at starting) were all in a conspiracy to rob me of the
+money I had on board, and then to drown me in my own vessel
+afterward, I should have laughed in his face. Just remember that;
+and then fancy for yourself (for I'm sure I can't tell you) what
+I must have thought when I opened the paper round the key, and
+read what I now copy (from the mate's writing), as follows:
+
+
+" 'SIR--Stay in your bed till you hear a boat shove off from the
+starboard side, or you are a dead man. Your money is stolen; and
+in five minutes' time the yacht will be scuttled, and the cabin
+hatch will be nailed down on you. Dead men tell no tales; and the
+sailing-master's notion is to leave proofs afloat that the vessel
+has foundered with all on board. It was his doing, to begin with,
+and we were all in it. I can't find it in my heart not to give
+you a chance for your life. It's a bad chance, but I can do no
+more. I should be murdered myself if I didn't seem to go with the
+rest. The key of your cabin door is thrown back to you, inside
+this. Don't be alarmed when you hear the hammer above. I shall do
+it, and I shall have short nails in my hand as well as long, and
+use the short ones only. Wait till you hear the boat with all of
+us shove off, and then pry up the cabin hatch with your back. The
+vessel will float a quarter of an hour after the holes are bored
+in her. Slip into the sea on the port side, and keep the vessel
+between you and the boat. You will find plenty of loose lumber,
+wrenched away on purpose, drifting about to hold on by. It's a
+fine night and a smooth sea, and there's a chance that a ship may
+pick you up while there's life left in you. I can do no
+more.--Yours truly, J. M.'
+
+
+"As I came to those last words, I heard the hammering down of the
+hatch over my head. I don't suppose I'm more of a coward than
+most people, but there was a moment when the sweat poured down me
+like rain. I got to be my own man again before the hammering was
+done, and found myself thinking of somebody very dear to me in
+England. I said to myself: 'I'll have a try for my life, for her
+sake, though the chances are dead against me.'
+
+"I put a letter from that person I have mentioned into one of the
+stoppered bottles of my dressing-case, along with the mate's
+warning, in case I lived to see him again. I hung this, and a
+flask of whisky, in a sling round my neck; and, after first
+dressing myself in my confusion, thought better of it, and
+stripped, again, for swimming, to my shirt and drawers. By the
+time I had done that the hammering was over and there was such a
+silence that I could hear the water bubbling into the scuttled
+vessel amidships. The next noise was the noise of the boat and
+the villains in her (always excepting my friend, the mate)
+shoving off from the starboard side. I waited for the splash of
+the oars in the water, and then got my back under the hatch. The
+mate had kept his promise. I lifted it easily--crept across the
+deck, under cover of the bulwarks, on all fours--and slipped into
+the sea on the port side. Lots of things were floating about. I
+took the first thing I came to--a hen-coop--and swam away with it
+about a couple of hundred yards, keeping the yacht between me and
+the boat. Having got that distance, I was seized with a shivering
+fit, and I stopped (fearing the cramp next) to take a pull at my
+flask. When I had closed the flask again, I turned for a moment
+to look back, and saw the yacht in the act of sinking. In a
+minute more there was nothing between me and the boat but the
+pieces of wreck that had been purposely thrown out to float. The
+moon was shining; and, if they had had a glass in the boat, I
+believe they might have seen my head, though I carefully kept the
+hen-coop between me and them.
+
+"As it was, they laid on their oars; and I heard loud voices
+among them disputing. After what seemed an age to me, I
+discovered what the dispute was about. The boat's head was
+suddenly turned my way. Some cleverer scoundrel than the rest
+(the sailing-master, I dare say) had evidently persuaded them to
+row back over the place where the yacht had gone down, and make
+quite sure that I had gone down with her.
+
+"They were more than half-way across the distance that separated
+us, and I had given myself up for lost, when I heard a cry from
+one of them, and saw the boat's progress suddenly checked. In a
+minute or two more the boat's head was turned again; and they
+rowed straight away from me like men rowing for their lives.
+
+"I looked on one side toward the land, and saw nothing. I looked
+on the other toward the sea, and discovered what the boat's crew
+had discovered before me--a sail in the distance, growing
+steadily brighter and bigger in the moonlight the longer I looked
+at it. In a quarter of an hour more the vessel was within hail of
+me, and the crew had got me on board.
+
+"They were all foreigners, and they quite deafened me by their
+jabber. I tried signs, but before I could make them understand me
+I was seized with another shivering fit, and was carried below.
+The vessel held on her course, I have no doubt, but I was in no
+condition to know anything about it. Before morning I was in a
+fever; and from that time I can remember nothing clearly till I
+came to my senses at this place, and found myself under the care
+of a Hungarian merchant, the consignee (as they call it) of the
+coasting vessel that had picked me up. He speaks English as well
+or better than I do; and he has treated me with a kindness which
+I can find no words to praise. When he was a young man he was in
+England himself, learning business, and he says he has
+remembrances of our country which make his heart warm toward an
+Englishman. He has fitted me out with clothes, and has lent me
+the money to travel with, as soon as the doctor allows me to
+start for home. Supposing I don't get a relapse, I shall be fit
+to travel in a week's time from this. If I can catch the mail at
+Trieste, and stand the fatigue, I shall be back again at Thorpe
+Ambrose in a week or ten days at most after you get my letter.
+You will agree with me that it is a terribly long letter. But I
+can't help that. I seem to have lost my old knack at putting
+things short, and finishing on the first page. However, I am near
+the end now; for I have nothing left to mention but the reason
+why I write about what has happened to me, instead of waiting
+till I get home, and telling it all by word of mouth.
+
+"I fancy my head is still muddled by my illness. At any rate, it
+only struck me this morning that there is barely a chance of some
+vessel having passed the place where the yacht foundered, and
+having picked up the furniture, and other things wrenched out of
+her and left to float. Some false report of my being drowned may,
+in that case, have reached England. If this has happened (which I
+hope to God may be an unfounded fear on my part), go directly to
+Major Milroy at the cottage. Show him this letter--I have written
+it quite as much for his eye as for yours--and then give him the
+inclosed note, and ask him if he doesn't think the circumstances
+justify me in hoping he will send it to Miss Milroy. I can't
+explain why I don't write directly to the major, or to Miss
+Milroy, instead of to you. I can only say there are
+considerations I am bound in honor to respect, which oblige me to
+act in this roundabout way.
+
+"I don't ask you to answer this, for I shall be on my way home, I
+hope, long before your letter could reach me in this
+out-of-the-way place. Whatever you do, don't lose a moment in
+going to Major Milroy. Go, on second thoughts, whether the loss
+of the yacht is known in England or not.
+
+"Yours truly,	ALLAN ARMADALE."
+
+
+"I looked up when I had come to the end of the letter, and saw,
+for the first time, that Bashwood had left his chair and had
+placed himself opposite to me. He was intently studying my face,
+with the inquiring expression of a man who was trying to read my
+thoughts. His eyes fell guiltily when they met mine, and he
+shrank away to his chair. Believing, as he did, that I was really
+married to Armadale, was he trying to discover whether the news
+of Armadale's rescue from the sea was good news or bad news in my
+estimation? It was no time then for entering into explanations
+with him. The first thing to be done was to communicate instantly
+with the doctor. I called Bashwood back to me and gave him my
+hand.
+
+" 'You have done me a service,' I said, 'which makes us closer
+friends than ever. I shall say more about this, and about other
+matters of some interest to both of us, later in the day. I want
+you now to lend me Mr. Armadale's letter (which I promise to
+bring back) and to wait here till I return. Will you do that for
+me, Mr. Bashwood?'
+
+"He would do anything I asked him, he said. I went into the
+bedroom and put on my bonnet and shawl.
+
+" 'Let me be quite sure of the facts before I leave you,' I
+resumed, when I was ready to go out. 'You have not shown this
+letter to anybody but me?'
+
+" 'Not a living soul has seen it but our two selves.'
+
+"'What have you done with the note inclosed to Miss Milroy?'
+
+"He produced it from his pocket. I ran it over rapidly--saw that
+there was nothing in it of the slightest importance--and put it
+in the fi re on the spot. That done, I left Bashwood in the
+sitting-room, and went to the Sanitarium, with Armadale's letter
+in my hand.
+
+"The doctor had gone out, and the servant was unable to say
+positively at what time he would be back. I went into his study,
+and wrote a line preparing him for the news I had brought with
+me, which I sealed up, with Armadale's letter, in an envelope, to
+await his return. Having told the servant I would call again in
+an hour, I left the place.
+
+"It was useless to go back to my lodgings and speak to Bashwood,
+until I knew first what the doctor meant to do. I walked about
+the neighborhood, up and down new streets and crescents and
+squares, with a kind of dull, numbed feeling in me, which
+prevented, not only all voluntary exercise of thought, but all
+sensation of bodily fatigue. I remembered the same feeling
+overpowering me, years ago, on the morning when the people of the
+prison came to take me into court to be tried for my life. All
+that frightful scene came back again to my mind in the strangest
+manner, as if it had been a scene in which some other person had
+figured. Once or twice I wondered, in a heavy, senseless way, why
+they had not hanged me!
+
+"When I went back to the Sanitarium, I was informed that the
+doctor had returned half an hour since, and that he was in his
+own room anxiously waiting to see me.
+
+"I went into the study, and found him sitting close by the fire
+with his head down and his hands on his knees. On the table near
+him, beside Armadale's letter and my note, I saw, in the little
+circle of light thrown by the reading-lamp, an open railway
+guide. Was he meditating flight? It was impossible to tell from
+his face, when he looked up at me, what he was meditating, or how
+the shock had struck him when he first discovered that Armadale
+was a living man.
+
+" 'Take a seat near the fire,' he said. 'It's very raw and cold
+to-day.'
+
+"I took a chair in silence. In silence, on his side, the doctor
+sat rubbing his knees before the fire.
+
+" 'Have you nothing to say to me?' I asked.
+
+"He rose, and suddenly removed the shade from the reading-lamp,
+so that the light fell on my face.
+
+" 'You are not looking well,' he said. 'What's the matter?'
+
+" 'My head feels dull, and my eyes are heavy and hot,' I replied.
+'The weather, I suppose.'
+
+"It was strange how we both got further and further from the one
+vitally important subject which we had both come together to
+discuss!
+
+" 'I think a cup of tea would do you good,' remarked the doctor.
+
+"I accepted his suggestion; and he ordered the tea. While it was
+coming, he walked up and down the room, and I sat by the fire,
+and not a word passed between us on either side.
+
+"The tea revived me; and the doctor noticed a change for the
+better in my face. He sat down opposite to me at the table, and
+spoke out at last.
+
+" 'If I had ten thousand pounds at this moment,' he began, 'I
+would give the whole of it never to have compromised myself in
+your desperate speculation on Mr. Armadale's death!'
+
+"He said those words with an abruptness, almost with a violence,
+which was strangely uncharacteristic of his ordinary manner. Was
+he frightened himself, or was he trying to frighten me? I
+determined to make him explain himself at the outset, so far as I
+was concerned. 'Wait a moment, doctor,' I said. 'Do you hold me
+responsible for what has happened?'
+
+" 'Certainly not,' he replied, stiffly. 'Neither you nor anybody
+could have foreseen what has happened. When I say I would give
+ten thousand pounds to be out of this business, I am blaming
+nobody but myself. And when I tell you next that I, for one,
+won't allow Mr. Armadale's resurrection from the sea to be the
+ruin of me without a fight for it, I tell you, my dear madam, one
+of the plainest truths I ever told to man or woman in the whole
+course of my life. Don't suppose I am invidiously separating my
+interests from yours in the common danger that now threatens us
+both. I simply indicate the difference in the risk that we have
+respectively run. _You_ have not sunk the whole of your resources
+in establishing a Sanitarium; and _you_ have not made a false
+declaration before a magistrate, which is punishable as perjury
+by the law.'
+
+"I interrupted him again. His selfishness did me more good than
+his tea: it roused my temper effectually. 'Suppose we let your
+risk and my risk alone, and come to the point,' I said. 'What do
+you mean by making a fight for it? I see a railway guide on your
+table. Does making a fight for it mean--running away?'
+
+" 'Running away?' repeated the doctor. 'You appear to forget that
+every farthing I have in the world is embarked in this
+establishment.'
+
+" 'You stop here, then?' I said.
+
+" 'Unquestionably!'
+
+" 'And what do you mean to do when Mr. Armadale comes to
+England?'
+
+"A solitary fly, the last of his race whom the winter had spared,
+was buzzing feebly about the doctor's face. He caught it before
+he answered me, and held it out across the table in his closed
+hand.
+
+" 'If this fly's name was Armadale,' he said, 'and if you had got
+him as I have got him now, what would _you_ do?'
+
+"His eyes, fixed on my face up to this time, turned
+significantly, as he ended this question, to my widow's dress. I,
+too, looked at it when he looked. A thrill of the old deadly
+hatred and the old deadly determination ran through me again.
+
+" 'I should kill him,' I said.
+
+"The doctor started to his feet (with the fly still in his hand),
+and looked at me--a little too theatrically--with an expression
+of the utmost horror.
+
+" 'Kill him!' repeated the doctor, in a paroxysm of virtuous
+alarm. 'Violence--murderous violence--in My Sanitarium! You take
+my breath away!'
+
+"I caught his eye while he was expressing himself in this
+elaborately indignant manner, scrutinizing me with a searching
+curiosity which was, to say the least of it, a little at variance
+with the vehemence of his language and the warmth of his tone. He
+laughed uneasily when our eyes met, and recovered his smoothly
+confidential manner in the instant that elapsed before he spoke
+again.
+
+" 'I beg a thousand pardons,' he said. 'I ought to have known
+better than to take a lady too literally at her word. Permit me
+to remind you, however, that the circumstances are too serious
+for anything in the nature of--let us say, an exaggeration or a
+joke. You shall hear what I propose, without further preface.' He
+paused, and resumed his figurative use of the fly imprisoned in
+his hand. 'Here is Mr. Armadale. I can let him out, or keep him
+in, just as I please--and he knows it. I say to him,' continued
+the doctor, facetiously addressing the fly, 'Give me proper
+security, Mr. Armadale, that no proceedings of any sort shall be
+taken against either this lady or myself, and I will let you out
+of the hollow of my hand. Refuse--and, be the risk what it may, I
+will keep you in." Can you doubt, my dear madam, what Mr.
+Armadale's answer is, sooner or later, certain to be? Can you
+doubt,' said the doctor, suiting the action to the word, and
+letting the fly go, 'that it will end to the entire satisfaction
+of all parties, in this way?'
+
+" 'I won't say at present,' I answered, 'whether I doubt or not.
+Let me make sure that I understand you first. You propose, if I
+am not mistaken, to shut the doors of this place on Mr. Armadale,
+and not to let him out again until he has agreed to the terms
+which it is our interest to impose on him? May I ask, in that
+case, how you mean to make him walk into the trap that you have
+set for him here?'
+
+" 'I propose,' said the doctor, with his hand on the railway
+guide, 'ascertaining first at what time during every evening of
+this month the tidal trains from Dover and Folkestone reach the
+London Bridge terminus. And I propose, next, posting a person
+whom Mr. Armadale knows, and whom you and I can trust, to wait
+the arrival of the trains, and to meet our man at the moment when
+he steps out of the railway carriage.'
+
+" 'Have you thought,' I inquired, 'of who the person is to be?'
+
+" 'I have thought,' said the doctor, taking up Armadale's letter
+'of the person to whom this letter is addressed.'
+
+"The answer startled me. Was it possible that he and Bashwood
+knew one another? I put the questio n immediately.
+
+" 'Until to-day I never so much as heard of the gentleman's
+name,' said the doctor. 'I have simply pursued the inductive
+process of reasoning, for which we are indebted to the immortal
+Bacon. How does this very important letter come into your
+possession? I can't insult you by supposing it to have been
+stolen. Consequently, it has come to you with the leave and
+license of the person to whom it is addressed. Consequently, that
+person is in your confidence. Consequently, he is the first
+person I think of. You see the process? Very good. Permit me a
+question or two, on the subject of Mr. Bashwood, before we go on
+any further.'
+
+"The doctor's questions went as straight to the point as usual.
+My answers informed him that Mr. Bashwood stood toward Armadale
+in the relation of steward; that he had received the letter at
+Thorpe Ambrose that morning, and had brought it straight to me by
+the first train; that he had not shown it, or spoken of it before
+leaving, to Major Milroy or to any one else; that I had not
+obtained this service at his hands by trusting him with my
+secret; that I had communicated with him in the character of
+Armadale's widow; that he had suppressed the letter, under those
+circumstances, solely in obedience to a general caution I had
+given him to keep his own counsel, if anything strange happened
+at Thorpe Ambrose, until he had first consulted me; and, lastly,
+that the reason why he had done as I told him in this matter, was
+that in this matter, and in all others, Mr. Bashwood was blindly
+devoted to my interests.
+
+"At that point in the interrogatory, the doctor's eyes began to
+look at me distrustfully behind the doctor's spectacles.
+
+" 'What is the secret of this blind devotion of Mr. Bashwood's to
+your interests?' he asked.
+
+"I hesitated for a moment--in pity to Bashwood, not in pity to
+myself. 'If you must know,' I answered, 'Mr. Bashwood is in love
+with me.'
+
+" 'Ay! ay!' exclaimed the doctor, with an air of relief. 'I begin
+to understand now. Is he a young man?'
+
+" 'He is an old man.'
+
+"The doctor laid himself back in his chair, and chuckled softly.
+'Better and better!' he said. 'Here is the very man we want. Who
+so fit as Mr. Armadale's steward to meet Mr. Armadale on his
+return to London? And who so capable of influencing Mr. Bashwood
+in the proper way as the charming object of Mr. Bashwood's
+admiration?'
+
+"There could be no doubt that Bashwood was the man to serve the
+doctor's purpose, and that my influence was to be trusted to make
+him serve it. The difficulty was not here: the difficulty was in
+the unanswered question that I had put to the doctor a minute
+since. I put it to him again.
+
+" 'Suppose Mr. Armadale's steward meets his employer at the
+terminus,' I said. 'May I ask once more how Mr. Armadale is to be
+persuaded to come here?'
+
+"'Don't think me ungallant,' rejoined the doctor in his gentlest
+manner, 'if I ask, on my side, how are men persuaded to do
+nine-tenths of the foolish acts of their lives? They are
+persuaded by your charming sex. The weak side of every man is the
+woman's side of him. We have only to discover the woman's side of
+Mr. Armadale--to tickle him on it gently--and to lead him our way
+with a silken string. I observe here,' pursued the doctor,
+opening Armadale's letter, 'a reference to a certain young lady,
+which looks promising. Where is the note that Mr. Armadale speaks
+of as addressed to Miss Milroy?'
+
+"Instead of answering him, I started, in a sudden burst of
+excitement, to my feet. The instant he mentioned Miss Milroy's
+name all that I had heard from Bashwood of her illness, and of
+the cause of it, rushed back into my memory. I saw the means of
+decoying Armadale into the Sanitarium as plainly as I saw the
+doctor on the other side of the table, wondering at the
+extraordinary change in me. What a luxury it was to make Miss
+Milroy serve my interests at last!
+
+" 'Never mind the note,' I said. 'It's burned, for fear of
+accidents. I can tell you all (and more) than the note could have
+told you. Miss Milroy cuts the knot! Miss Milroy ends the
+difficulty! She is privately engaged to him. She has heard the
+false report of his death; and she has been seriously ill at
+Thorpe Ambrose ever since. When Bashwood meets him at the
+station, the very first question he is certain to ask--'
+
+" 'I see!' exclaimed the doctor, anticipating me. 'Mr. Bashwood
+has nothing to do but to help the truth with a touch of fiction.
+When he tells his master that the false report has reached Miss
+Milroy, he has only to add that the shock has affected her head,
+and that she is here under medical care. Perfect! perfect! We
+shall have him at the Sanitarium as fast as the fastest cab-horse
+in London can bring him to us. And mind! no risk--no necessity
+for trusting other people. This is not a mad-house; this is not a
+licensed establishment; no doctors' certificates are necessary
+here! My dear lady, I congratulate you; I congratulate myself.
+Permit me to hand you the railway guide, with my best compliments
+to Mr. Bashwood, and with the page turned down for him, as an
+additional attention, at the right place.'
+
+"Remembering how long I had kept Bashwood waiting for me, I took
+the book at once, and wished the doctor good-evening without
+further ceremony. As he politely opened the door for me, he
+reverted, without the slightest necessity for doing so, and
+without a word from me to lead to it, to the outburst of virtuous
+alarm which had escaped him at the earlier part of our interview.
+
+" 'I do hope,' he said, 'that you will kindly forget and forgive
+my extraordinary want of tact and perception when--in short, when
+I caught the fly. I positively blush at my own stupidity in
+putting a literal interpretation on a lady's little joke!
+Violence in My Sanitarium!' exclaimed the doctor, with his eyes
+once more fixed attentively on my face--'violence in this
+enlightened nineteenth century! Was there ever anything so
+ridiculous? Do fasten your cloak before you go out, it is so cold
+and raw! Shall I escort you? Shall I send my servant? Ah, you
+were always independent! always, if I may say so, a host in
+yourself! May I call to-morrow morning, and hear what you have
+settled with Mr. Bashwood?'
+
+"I said yes, and got away from him at last. In a quarter of an
+hour more I was back at my lodgings, and was informed by the
+servant that 'the elderly gentleman' was still waiting for me.
+
+"I have not got the heart or the patience--I hardly know
+which--to waste many words on what passed between me and
+Bashwood. It was so easy, so degradingly easy, to pull the
+strings of the poor old puppet in any way I pleased! I met none
+of the difficulties which I should have been obliged to meet in
+the case of a younger man, or of a man less infatuated with
+admiration for me. I left the allusions to Miss Milroy in
+Armadale's letter, which had naturally puzzled him, to be
+explained at a future time. I never even troubled myself to
+invent a plausible reason for wishing him to meet Armadale at the
+terminus, and to entrap him by a stratagem into the doctor's
+Sanitarium. All that I found it necessary to do was to refer to
+what I had written to Mr. Bashwood, on my arrival in London, and
+to what I had afterward said to him, when he came to answer my
+letter personally at the hotel.
+
+" 'You know already,' I said, 'that my marriage has not been a
+happy one. Draw your own conclusions from that; and don't press
+me to tell you whether the news of Mr. Armadale's rescue from the
+sea is, or is not, the welcome news that it ought to be to his
+wife!' That was enough to put his withered old face in a glow,
+and to set his withered old hopes growing again. I had only to
+add, 'If you will do what I ask you to do, no matter how
+incomprehensible and how mysterious my request may seem to be;
+and if you will accept my assurances that you shall run no risk
+yourself, and that you shall receive the proper explanations at
+the proper time, you will have such a claim on my gratitude and
+my regard as no man living has ever had yet!' I had only to say
+those words, and to point them by a look and a stolen pressure of
+his hand, and I had him at my feet, blindly eager to obey me. If
+he could have se en what I thought of myself; but that doesn't
+matter: he saw nothing.
+
+"Hours have passed since I sent him away (pledged to secrecy,
+possessed of his instructions, and provided with his time-table)
+to the hotel near the terminus, at which he is to stay till
+Armadale appears on the railway platform. The excitement of the
+earlier part of the evening has all worn off; and the dull,
+numbed sensation has got me again. Are my energies wearing out, I
+wonder, just at the time when I most want them? Or is some
+foreshadowing of disaster creeping over me which I don't yet
+understand?
+
+"I might be in a humor to sit here for some time longer, thinking
+thoughts like these, and letting them find their way into words
+at their own will and pleasure, if my Diary would only let me.
+But my idle pen has been busy enough to make its way to the end
+of the volume. I have reached the last morsel of space left on
+the last page; and whether I like it or not, I must close the
+book this time for good and all, when I close it to-night.
+
+"Good-by, my old friend and companion of many a miserable day!
+Having nothing else to be fond of, I half suspect myself of
+having been unreasonably fond of _you._
+
+"What a fool I am!"
+
+THE END OF THE FOURTH BOOK.
+
+BOOK THE LAST.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AT THE TERMINUS.
+
+
+ON the night of the 2d of December, Mr. Bashwood took up his post
+of observation at the terminus of the South-eastern Railway for
+the first time. It was an earlier date, by six days, than the
+date which Allan had himself fixed for his return. But the
+doctor, taking counsel of his medical experience, had considered
+it just probable that "Mr. Armadale might be perverse enough, at
+his enviable age, to recover sooner than his medical advisers
+might have anticipated." For caution's sake, therefore, Mr.
+Bashwood was instructed to begin watching the arrival of the
+tidal trains on the day after he had received his employer's
+letter.
+
+From the 2d to the 7th of December, the steward waited punctually
+on the platform, saw the trains come in, and satisfied himself,
+evening after evening, that the travelers were all strangers to
+him. From the 2d to the 7th of December, Miss Gwilt (to return to
+the name under which she is best known in these pages) received
+his daily report, sometimes delivered personally, sometimes sent
+by letter. The doctor, to whom the reports were communicated,
+received them in his turn with unabated confidence in the
+precautions that had been adopted up to the morning of the 8th.
+On that date the irritation of continued suspense had produced a
+change for the worse in Miss Gwilt's variable temper, which was
+perceptible to every one about her, and which, strangely enough,
+was reflected by an equally marked change in the doctor's manner
+when he came to pay his usual visit. By a coincidence so
+extraordinary that his enemies might have suspected it of not
+being a coincidence at all, the morning on which Miss Gwilt lost
+her patience proved to be also the morning on which the doctor
+lost his confidence for the first time.
+
+"No news, of course," he said, sitting down with a heavy sigh.
+"Well! well!"
+
+Miss Gwilt looked up at him irritably from her work.
+
+"You seem strangely depressed this morning," she said. "What are
+you afraid of now?"
+
+"The imputation of being afraid, madam," answered the doctor,
+solemnly, "is not an imputation to cast rashly on any man--even
+when he belongs to such an essentially peaceful profession as
+mine. I am not afraid. I am (as you more correctly put it in the
+first instance) strangely depressed. My nature is, as you know,
+naturally sanguine, and I only see to-day what but for my
+habitual hopefulness I might have seen, and ought to have seen, a
+week since."
+
+Miss Gwilt impatiently threw down her work. "If words cost
+money," she said, "the luxury of talking would be rather an
+expensive luxury in your case!"
+
+"Which I might have seen, and ought to have seen," reiterated the
+doctor, without taking the slightest notice of the interruption,
+"a week since. To put it plainly, I feel by no means so certain
+as I did that Mr. Armadale will consent, without a struggle, to
+the terms which it is my interest (and in a minor degree yours)
+to impose on him. Observe! I don't question our entrapping him
+successfully into the Sanitarium: I only doubt whether he will
+prove quite as manageable as I originally anticipated when we
+have got him there. Say," remarked the doctor, raising his eyes
+for the first time, and fixing them in steady inquiry on Miss
+Gwilt--"say that he is bold, obstinate, what you please; and that
+he holds out--holds out for weeks together, for months together,
+as men in similar situations to his have held out before him.
+What follows? The risk of keeping him forcibly in concealment--of
+suppressing him, if I may so express myself--increases at
+compound interest, and becomes Enormous! My house is at this
+moment virtually ready for patients. Patients may present
+themselves in a week's time. Patients may communicate with Mr.
+Armadale, or Mr. Armadale may communicate with patients. A note
+may be smuggled out of the house, and may reach the Commissioners
+in Lunacy. Even in the case of an unlicensed establishment like
+mine, those gentlemen--no! those chartered despots in a land of
+liberty--have only to apply to the Lord Chancellor for an order,
+and to enter (by heavens, to enter My Sanitarium!) and search the
+house from top to bottom at a moment's notice! I don't wish to
+despond; I don't wish to alarm you; I don't pretend to say that
+the means we are taking to secure your own safety are any other
+than the best means at our disposal. All I ask you to do is to
+imagine the Commissioners in the house--and then to conceive the
+consequences. The consequences!" repeated the doctor, getting
+sternly on his feet, and taking up his hat as if he meant to
+leave the room.
+
+"Have you anything more to say?" asked Miss Gwilt.
+
+"Have you any remarks," rejoined the doctor, "to offer on your
+side?"
+
+He stood, hat in hand, waiting. For a full minute the two looked
+at each other in silence.
+
+Miss Gwilt spoke first.
+
+"I think I understand you," she said, suddenly recovering her
+composure.
+
+"I beg your pardon," returned the doctor, with his hand to his
+ear. "What did you say?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"If you happened to catch another fly this morning," said Miss
+Gwilt, with a bitterly sarcastic emphasis on the words, "I might
+be capable of shocking you by another 'little joke.' "
+
+The doctor held up both hands, in polite deprecation, and looked
+as if he was beginning to recover his good humor again.
+
+"Hard," he murmured, gently, "not to have forgiven me that
+unlucky blunder of mine, even yet!"
+
+"What else have you to say? I am waiting for you," said Miss
+Gwilt. She turned her chair to the window scornfully, and took up
+her work again, as she spoke.
+
+The doctor came behind her, and put his hand on the back of her
+chair.
+
+"I have a question to ask, in the first place," he said; "and a
+measure of necessary precaution to suggest, in the second. If you
+will honor me with your attention, I will put the question
+first."
+
+"I am listening."
+
+"You know that Mr. Armadale is alive," pursued the doctor, "and
+you know that he is coming back to England. Why do you continue
+to wear your widow's dress?"
+
+She answered him without an instant's hesitation, steadily going
+on with her work.
+
+"Because I am of a sanguine disposition, like you. I mean to
+trust to the chapter of accidents to the very last. Mr. Armadale
+may die yet, on his way home."
+
+"And suppose he gets home alive--what then?"
+
+"Then there is another chance still left."
+
+"What is it, pray?"
+
+"He may die in your Sanitarium."
+
+"Madam!" remonstrated the doctor, in the deep bass which he
+reserved for his outbursts of virtuous indignation. "Wait! you
+spoke of the chapter of accidents," he resumed, gliding back into
+his softer conversational tones. "Yes! yes! of course. I
+understand you this time. Even the healing art is at the mercy of
+accidents; even such a Sanitarium as mine is liable to be
+surprised by Death. Just so! just so!" said the doctor, conceding
+the question with the utmost impartiality. "There _is_ the
+chapter of accidents, I admit --if you choose to trust to it.
+Mind! I say emphatically, _if_ you choose to trust to it."
+
+There was another moment of silence--silence so profound that
+nothing was audible in the room but the rapid _click_ of Miss
+Gwilt's needle through her work.
+
+"Go on," she said; "you haven't done yet."
+
+"True!" said the doctor. "Having put my question, I have my
+measure of precaution to impress on you next. You will see, my
+dear madam, that I am not disposed to trust to the chapter of
+accidents on my side. Reflection has convinced me that you and I
+are not (logically speaking) so conveniently situated as we might
+be in case of emergency. Cabs are, as yet, rare in this rapidly
+improving neighborhood. I am twenty minutes' walk from you; you
+are twenty minutes' walk from me. I know nothing of Mr.
+Armadale's character; you know it well. It might be
+necessary--vitally necessary--to appeal to your superior
+knowledge of him at a moment's notice. And how am I to do that
+unless we are within easy reach of each other, under the same
+roof? In both our interests, I beg to invite you, my dear madam,
+to become for a limited period an inmate of My Sanitarium."
+
+Miss Gwilt's rapid needle suddenly stopped. "I understand you,"
+she said again, as quietly as before.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the doctor, with another attack of
+deafness, and with his hand once more at his ear.
+
+She laughed to herself--a low, terrible laugh, which startled
+even the doctor into taking his hand off the back of her chair.
+
+"An inmate of your Sanitarium?" she repeated. "You consult
+appearances in everything else; do you propose to consult
+appearances in receiving me into your house?"
+
+"Most assuredly!" replied the doctor, with enthusiasm. "I am
+surprised at your asking me the question! Did you ever know a man
+of any eminence in my profession who set appearances at defiance?
+If you honor me by accepting my invitation, you enter My
+Sanitarium in the most unimpeachable of all possible
+characters--in the character of a Patient."
+
+"When do you want my answer?"
+
+"Can you decide to-day?"
+
+"To-morrow?"
+
+"Yes. Have you anything more to say?"
+
+''Nothing more."
+
+"Leave me, then. _I_ don't keep up appearances. I wish to be
+alone, and I say so. Good-morning."
+
+"Oh, the sex! the sex!" said the doctor, with his excellent
+temper in perfect working order again. "So delightfully
+impulsive! so charmingly reckless of what they say or how they
+say it! 'Oh, woman, in our hours of ease, uncertain, coy, and
+hard to please!' There! there! there! Good-morning!"
+
+Miss Gwilt rose and looked after him contemptuously from the
+window, when the street door had closed, and he had left the
+house.
+
+"Armadale himself drove me to it the first time," she said.
+"Manuel drove me to it the second time.--You cowardly scoundrel!
+shall I let _you_ drive me to it for the third time, and the
+last?"
+
+She turned from the window, and looked thoughtfully at her
+widow's dress in the glass.
+
+The hours of the day passed--and she decided nothing. The night
+came--and she hesitated still. The new morning dawned--and the
+terrible question was still unanswered.
+
+By the early post there came a letter for her. It was Mr.
+Bashwood's usual report. Again he had watched for Allan's
+arrival, and again in vain.
+
+"I'll have more time!" she determined, passionately. "No man
+alive shall hurry me faster than I like!"
+
+At breakfast that morning (the morning of the 9th) the doctor was
+surprised in his study by a visit from Miss Gwilt.
+
+"I want another day," she said, the moment the servant had closed
+the door on her.
+
+The doctor looked at her before he answered, and saw the danger
+of driving her to extremities plainly expressed in her face.
+
+"The time is getting on," he remonstrated, in his most persuasive
+manner. "For all we know to the contrary, Mr. Armadale may be
+here to-night."
+
+"I want another day!" she repeated, loudly and passionately.
+
+"Granted!" said the doctor, looking nervously toward the door.
+"Don't be too loud--the servants may hear you. Mind!" he added,
+"I depend on your honor not to press me for any further delay."
+
+"You had better depend on my despair," she said, and left him.
+
+The doctor chipped the shell of his egg, and laughed softly.
+
+"Quite right, my dear!" he thought. "I remember where your
+despair led you in past times; and I think I may trust it to lead
+you the same way now."
+
+
+At a quarter to eight o'clock that night Mr. Bashwood took up his
+post of observation, as usual, on the platform of the terminus at
+London Bridge. He was in the highest good spirits; he smiled and
+smirked in irrepressible exultation. The sense that he held in
+reserve a means of influence over Miss Gwilt, in virtue of his
+knowledge of her past career, had had no share in effecting the
+transformation that now appeared in him. It had upheld his
+courage in his forlorn life at Thorpe Ambrose, and it had given
+him that increased confidence of manner which Miss Gwilt herself
+had noticed; but, from the moment when he had regained his old
+place in her favor, it had vanished as a motive power in him,
+annihilated by the electric shock of her touch and her look. His
+vanity--the vanity which in men at his age is only despair in
+disguise--had now lifted him to the seventh heaven of fatuous
+happiness once more. He believed in her again as he believed in
+the smart new winter overcoat that he wore--as he believed in the
+dainty little cane (appropriate to the dawning dandyism of lads
+in their teens) that he flourished in his hand. He hummed! The
+worn-out old creature, who had not sung since his childhood,
+hummed, as he paced the platform, the few fragments he could
+remember of a worn-out old song.
+
+The train was due as early as eight o'clock that night. At five
+minutes past the hour the whistle sounded. In less than five
+minutes more the passengers were getting out on the platform.
+
+Following the instructions that had been given to him, Mr.
+Bashwood made his way, as well as the crowd would let him, along
+the line of carriages, and, discovering no familiar face on that
+first investigation, joined the passengers for a second search
+among them in the custom-house waiting-room next.
+
+He had looked round the room, and had satisfied himself that the
+persons occupying it were all strangers, when he heard a voice
+behind him, exclaiming: "Can that be Mr. Bashwood!" He turned in
+eager expectation, and found himself face to face with the last
+man under heaven whom he had expected to see.
+
+The man was MIDWINTER.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+IN THE HOUSE.
+
+
+NOTICING Mr. Bashwood's confusion (after a moment's glance at the
+change in his personal appearance), Midwinter spoke first.
+
+"I see I have surprised you," he said. "You are looking, I
+suppose, for somebody else? Have you heard from Allan? Is he on
+his way home again already?"
+
+The inquiry about Allan, though it would naturally have suggested
+itself to any one in Midwinter's position at that moment, added
+to Mr. Bashwood's confusion. Not knowing how else to extricate
+himself from the critical position in which he was placed, he
+took refuge in simple denial.
+
+"I know nothing about Mr. Armadale--oh dear, no, sir, I know
+nothing about Mr. Armadale," he answered, with needless eagerness
+and hurry. "Welcome back to England, sir," he went on, changing
+the subject in his nervously talkative manner. "I didn't know you
+had been abroad. It's so long since we have had the
+pleasure--since I have had the pleasure. Have you enjoyed
+yourself, sir, in foreign parts? Such different manners from
+ours--yes, yes, yes--such different manners from ours! Do you
+make a long stay in England, now you have come back?"
+
+"I hardly know," said Midwinter. "I have been obliged to alter my
+plans, and to come to England unexpectedly." He hesitated a
+little; his manner changed, and he added, in lower tones: "A
+serious anxiety has brought me back. I can't say what my plans
+will be until that anxiety is set at rest."
+
+The light of a lamp fell on his face while he spoke, and Mr.
+Bashwood observed, for the first time, that he looked sadly worn
+and changed.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir--I'm sure I'm very sorry. If I could be of any
+use--" suggested Mr. Bashwood, speaking under the influence in
+some degr ee of his nervous politeness, and in some degree of his
+remembrance of what Midwinter had done for him at Thorpe Ambrose
+in the by-gone time.
+
+Midwinter thanked him and turned away sadly. "I am afraid you can
+be of no use, Mr. Bashwood--but I am obliged to you for your
+offer, all the same." He stopped, and considered a little,
+"Suppose she should _not_ be ill? Suppose some misfortune should
+have happened?" he resumed, speaking to himself, and turning
+again toward the steward. "If she has left her mother, some trace
+of her _might_ be found by inquiring at Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+Mr. Bashwood's curiosity was instantly aroused. The whole sex was
+interesting to him now, for the sake of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"A lady, sir?" he inquired. "Are you looking for a lady?"
+
+"I am looking," said Midwinter, simply, "for my wife."
+
+"Married, sir!" exclaimed Mr. Bashwood. "Married since I last had
+the pleasure of seeing you! Might I take the liberty of
+asking--?"
+
+Midwinter's eyes dropped uneasily to the ground.
+
+"You knew the lady in former times," he said. "I have married
+Miss Gwilt."
+
+The steward started back as he might have started back from a
+loaded pistol leveled at his head. His eyes glared as if he had
+suddenly lost his senses, and the nervous trembling to which he
+was subject shook him from head to foot.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Midwinter. There was no answer. "What
+is there so very startling," he went on, a little impatiently,
+"in Miss Gwilt's being my wife?"
+
+"_Your_ wife?" repeated Mr. Bashwood, helplessly. "Mrs.
+Armadale--!" He checked himself by a desperate effort, and said
+no more.
+
+The stupor of astonishment which possessed the steward was
+instantly reflected in Midwinter's face. The name in which he had
+secretly married his wife had passed the lips of the last man in
+the world whom he would have dreamed of admitting into his
+confidence! He took Mr. Bashwood by the arm, and led him away to
+a quieter part of the terminus than the part of it in which they
+had hitherto spoken to each other.
+
+"You referred to my wife just now," he said; "and you spoke of
+_Mrs. Armadale_ in the same breath. What do you mean by that?"
+
+Again there was no answer. Utterly incapable of understanding
+more than that he had involved himself in some serious
+complication which was a complete mystery to him, Mr. Bashwood
+struggled to extricate himself from the grasp that was laid on
+him, and struggled in vain.
+
+Midwinter sternly repeated the question. "I ask you again," he
+said, "what do you mean by it?"
+
+"Nothing, sir! I give you my word of honor, I meant nothing!" He
+felt the hand on his arm tightening its grasp; he saw, even in
+the obscurity of the remote corner in which they stood, that
+Midwinter's fiery temper was rising, and was not to be trifled
+with. The extremity of his danger inspired him with the one ready
+capacity that a timid man possesses when he is compelled by main
+force to face an emergency--the capacity to lie. "I only meant to
+say, sir," he burst out, with a desperate effort to look and
+speak confidently, "that Mr. Armadale would be surprised--"
+
+"You said _Mrs._ Armadale!"
+
+"No, sir--on my word of honor, on my sacred word of honor, you
+are mistaken--you are, indeed! I said _Mr._ Armadale--how could I
+say anything else? Please to let me go, sir--I'm pressed for
+time. I do assure you I'm dreadfully pressed for time!"
+
+For a moment longer Midwinter maintained his hold, and in that
+moment he decided what to do.
+
+He had accurately stated his motive for returning to England as
+proceeding from anxiety about his wife--anxiety naturally caused
+(after the regular receipt of a letter from her every other, or
+every third day) by the sudden cessation of the correspondence
+between them on her side for a whole week. The first vaguely
+terrible suspicion of some other reason for her silence than the
+reason of accident or of illness, to which he had hitherto
+attributed it, had struck through him like a sudden chill the
+instant he heard the steward associate the name of "Mrs.
+Armadale" with the idea of his wife. Little irregularities in her
+correspondence with him, which he had thus far only thought
+strange, now came back on his mind, and proclaimed themselves to
+be suspicions as well. He had hitherto believed the reasons she
+had given for referring him, when he answered her letters, to no
+more definite address than an address at a post-office. _Now_ he
+suspected her reasons of being excuses, for the first time. He
+had hitherto resolved, on reaching London, to inquire at the only
+place he knew of at which a clew to her could be found--the
+address she had given him as the address at which "her mother"
+lived. _Now_ (with a motive which he was afraid to define even to
+himself, but which was strong enough to overbear every other
+consideration in his mind) he determined, before all things, to
+solve the mystery of Mr. Bashwood's familiarity with a secret,
+which was a marriage secret between himself and his wife. Any
+direct appeal to a man of the steward's disposition, in the
+steward's present state of mind, would be evidently useless. The
+weapon of deception was, in this case, a weapon literally forced
+into Midwinter's hands. He let go of Mr. Bashwood's arm, and
+accepted Mr. Bashwood's explanation.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said; "I have no doubt you are right.
+Pray attribute my rudeness to over-anxiety and over-fatigue. I
+wish you good-evening."
+
+The station was by this time almost a solitude, the passengers by
+the train being assembled at the examination of their luggage in
+the custom-house waiting-room. It was no easy matter, ostensibly
+to take leave of Mr. Bashwood, and really to keep him in view.
+But Midwinter's early life with the gypsy master had been of a
+nature to practice him in such stratagems as he was now compelled
+to adopt. He walked away toward the waiting-room by the line of
+empty carriages; opened the door of one of them, as if to look
+after something that he had left behind, and detected Mr.
+Bashwood making for the cab-rank on the opposite side of the
+platform. In an instant Midwinter had crossed, and had passed
+through the long row of vehicles, so as to skirt it on the side
+furthest from the platform. He entered the second cab by the
+left-hand door the moment after Mr. Bashwood had entered the
+first cab by the right-hand door. "Double your fare, whatever it
+is," he said to the driver, "if you keep the cab before you in
+view, and follow it wherever it goes." In a minute more both
+vehicles were on their way out of the station.
+
+The clerk sat in the sentry-box at the gate, taking down the
+destinations of the cabs as they passed. Midwinter heard the man
+who was driving him call out "Hampstead!" as he went by the
+clerk's window.
+
+"Why did you say 'Hampstead'?" he asked, when they had left the
+station.
+
+"Because the man before me said 'Hampstead,' sir," answered the
+driver.
+
+Over and over again, on the wearisome journey to the northwestern
+suburb, Midwinter asked if the cab was still in sight. Over and
+over again, the man answered, "Right in front of us."
+
+It was between nine and ten o'clock when the driver pulled up his
+horse at last. Midwinter got out, and saw the cab before them
+waiting at a house door. As soon as he had satisfied himself that
+the driver was the man whom Mr. Bashwood had hired, he paid the
+promised reward, and dismissed his own cab.
+
+He took a turn backward and forward before the door. The vaguely
+terrible suspicion which had risen in his mind at the terminus
+had forced itself by this time into a definite form which was
+abhorrent to him. Without the shadow of an assignable reason for
+it, he found himself blindly distrusting his wife's fidelity, and
+blindly suspecting Mr. Bashwood of serving her in the capacity of
+go-between. In sheer horror of his own morbid fancy, he
+determined to take down the number of the house, and the name of
+the street in which it stood; and then, in justice to his wife,
+to return at once to the address which she had given him as the
+address at which her mother lived. He had taken  out his
+pocket-book, and was on his way to the corner of the street, when
+he observed the man who had driven Mr. Bashwood looking at him
+with an express ion of inquisitive surprise. The idea of
+questioning the cab-driver, while he had the opportunity,
+instantly occurred to him. He took a half-crown from his pocket
+and put it into the man's ready hand.
+
+"Has the gentleman whom you drove from the station gone into that
+house?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Did you hear him inquire for anybody when the door was opened?"
+
+"He asked for a lady, sir. Mrs.--" The man hesitated. "It wasn't
+a common name, sir; I should know it again if I heard it."
+
+"Was it 'Midwinter'?"
+
+"No, sir.
+
+"Armadale?"
+
+"That's it, sir. Mrs. Armadale."
+
+"Are you sure it was 'Mrs.' and not 'Mr.'?"
+
+"I'm as sure as a man can be who hasn't taken any particular
+notice, sir.
+
+The doubt implied in that last answer decided Midwinter to
+investigate the matter on the spot. He ascended the house steps.
+As he raised his hand to the bell at the side of the door, the
+violence of his agitation mastered him physically for the moment.
+A strange sensation, as of something leaping up from his heart to
+his brain, turned his head wildly giddy. He held by the house
+railings and kept his face to the air, and resolutely waited till
+he was steady again. Then he rang the bell.
+
+"Is?"--he tried to ask for "Mrs. Armadale," when the maid-servant
+had opened the door, but not even his resolution could force the
+name to pass his lips--"is your mistress at home?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The girl showed him into a back parlor, and presented him to a
+little old lady, with an obliging manner and a bright pair of
+eyes.
+
+"There is some mistake," said Midwinter. "I wished to see--" Once
+more he tried to utter the name, and once more he failed to force
+it to his lips.
+
+"Mrs. Armadale?" suggested the little old lady, with a smile.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Show the gentleman upstairs, Jenny."
+
+The girl led the way to the drawing-room floor.
+
+"Any name. sir?"
+
+"No name."
+
+
+Mr. Bashwood had barely completed his report of what had happened
+at the terminus; Mr. Bashwood's imperious mistress was still
+sitting speechless under the shock of the discovery that had
+burst on her--when the door of the room opened; and, without a
+word of warning to proceed him, Midwinter appeared on the
+threshold. He took one step into the room, and mechanically
+pushed the door to behind him. He stood in dead silence, and
+confronted his wife, with a scrutiny that was terrible in its
+unnatural self-possession, and that enveloped her steadily in one
+comprehensive look from head to foot.
+
+In dead silence on her side, she rose from her chair, In dead
+silence she stood erect on the hearth-rug, and faced her husband
+in widow's weeds. He took one step nearer to her, and stopped
+again. He lifted his hand, and pointed with his lean brown finger
+at her dress.
+
+"What does that mean?" he asked, without losing his terrible
+self-possession, and without moving his outstretched hand.
+
+At the sound of his voice, the quick rise and fall of her
+bosom--which had been the one outward betrayal thus far of the
+inner agony that tortured her--suddenly stopped. She stood
+impenetrably silent, breathlessly still--as if his question had
+struck her dead, and his pointing hand had petrified her.
+
+He advanced one step nearer, and reiterated his words in a voice
+even lower and quieter than the voice in which he had spoken
+first.
+
+One moment more of silence, one moment more of inaction, might
+have been the salvation of her. But the fatal force of her
+character triumphed at the crisis of her destiny, and his. White
+and still, and haggard and old, she met the dreadful emergency
+with a dreadful courage, and spoke the irrevocable words which
+renounced him to his face.
+
+"Mr. Midwinter," she said, in tones unnaturally hard and
+unnaturally clear, "our acquaintance hardly entitles you to speak
+to me in that manner." Those were her words. She never lifted her
+eyes from the ground while she spoke them. When she had done, the
+last faint vestige of color in her cheeks faded out.
+
+There was a pause. Still steadily looking at her, he set himself
+to fix the language she had used to him in his mind. "She calls
+me 'Mr. Midwinter,' " he said, slowly, in a whisper. "She speaks
+of 'our acquaintance.' " He waited a little and looked round the
+room. His wandering eyes encountered Mr. Bashwood for the first
+time. He saw the steward standing near the fireplace, trembling,
+and watching him.
+
+"I once did you a service," he said; "and you once told me you
+were not an ungrateful man. Are you grateful enough to answer me
+if I ask you something?"
+
+He waited a little again. Mr. Bashwood still stood trembling at
+the fireplace, silently watching him.
+
+"I see you looking at me," he went on. "Is there some change in
+me that I am not conscious of myself? Am I seeing things that you
+don't see? Am I hearing words that you don't hear? Am I looking
+or speaking like a man out of his senses?"
+
+Again he waited, and again the silence was unbroken. His eyes
+began to glitter; and the savage blood that he had inherited from
+his mother rose dark and slow in his ashy cheeks.
+
+"Is that woman," he asked, "the woman whom you once knew, whose
+name was Miss Gwilt?"
+
+Once more his wife collected her fatal courage. Once more his
+wife spoke her fatal words.
+
+"You compel me to repeat," she said, "that you are presuming on
+our acquaintance, and that you are forgetting what is due to me."
+
+He turned upon her, with a savage suddenness which forced a cry
+of alarm from Mr. Bashwood's lips.
+
+"Are you, or are you not, My Wife?" he asked, through his set
+teeth.
+
+She raised her eyes to his for the first time. Her lost spirit
+looked at him, steadily defiant, out of the hell of its own
+despair.
+
+"I am _not_ your wife," she said.
+
+He staggered back, with his hands groping for something to hold
+by, like the hands of a man in the dark. He leaned heavily
+against the wall of the room, and looked at the woman who had
+slept on his bosom, and who had denied him to his face.
+
+Mr. Bashwood stole panic-stricken to her side. "Go in there!" he
+whispered, trying to draw her toward the folding-doors which led
+into the next room. "For God's sake, be quick! He'll kill you!"
+
+She put the old man back with her hand. She looked at him with a
+sudden irradiation of her blank face. She answered him with lips
+that struggled slowly into a frightful smile.
+
+"_Let_ him kill me," she said.
+
+As the words passed her lips, he sprang forward from the wall,
+with a cry that rang through the house. The frenzy of a maddened
+man flashed at her from his glassy eyes, and clutched at her in
+his threatening hands. He came on till he was within arms-length
+of her--and suddenly stood still. The black flush died out of his
+face in the instant when he stopped. His eyelids fell, his
+outstretched hands wavered and sank helpless. He dropped, as the
+dead drop. He lay as the dead lie, in the arms of the wife who
+had denied him.
+
+She knelt on the floor, and rested his head on her knee. She
+caught the arm of the steward hurrying to help her, with a hand
+that closed round it like a vise. "Go for a doctor," she said,
+"and keep the people of the house away till he comes." There was
+that in her eye, there was that in her voice, which would have
+warned any man living to obey her in silence. In silence Mr.
+Bashwood submitted, and hurried out of the room.
+
+The instant she was alone she raised him from her knee. With both
+arms clasped round him, the miserable woman lifted his lifeless
+face to hers and rocked him on her bosom in an agony of
+tenderness beyond all relief in tears, in a passion of remorse
+beyond all expression in words. In silence she held him to her
+breast, in silence she devoured his forehead, his cheeks, his
+lips, with kisses. Not a sound escaped her till she heard the
+trampling footsteps outside, hurrying up the stairs. Then a low
+moan burst from her lips, as she looked her last at him, and
+lowered his head again to her knee, before the strangers came in.
+
+The landlady and the steward were the first persons whom she saw
+when the door was opened. The medical man (a surgeon living in
+the street) followed. The horror and the beauty of her face as
+she looked up at him absorbed the surgeon's attention for the
+moment, to the exclusion of everything else. Sh e had to beckon
+to him, she had to point to the senseless man, before she could
+claim his attention for his patient and divert it from herself.
+
+"Is he dead?" she asked.
+
+The surgeon carried Midwinter to the sofa, and ordered the
+windows to be opened. "It is a fainting fit," he said; "nothing
+more."
+
+At that answer her strength failed her for the first time. She
+drew a deep breath of relief, and leaned on the chimney-piece for
+support. Mr. Bashwood was the only person present who noticed
+that she was overcome. He led her to the opposite end of the
+room, where there was an easy-chair, leaving the landlady to hand
+the restoratives to the surgeon as they were wanted.
+
+"Are you going to wait here till he recovers?" whispered the
+steward, looking toward the sofa, and trembling as he looked.
+
+The question forced her to a sense of her position--to a
+knowledge of the merciless necessities which that position now
+forced her to confront. With a heavy sigh she looked toward the
+sofa, considered with herself for a moment, and answered Mr.
+Bashwood's inquiry by a question on her side.
+
+"Is the cab that brought you here from the railway still at the
+door?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Drive at once to the gates of the Sanitarium, and wait there
+till I join you."
+
+Mr. Bashwood hesitated. She lifted her eyes to his, and, with a
+look, sent him out of the room.
+
+"The gentleman is coming to, ma'am," said the landlady, as the
+steward closed the door. "He has just breathed again."
+
+She bowed in mute reply, rose, and considered with herself once
+more--looked toward the sofa for the second time--then passed
+through the folding-doors into her own room.
+
+After a short lapse of time the surgeon drew back from the sofa
+and motioned to the landlady to stand aside. The bodily recovery
+of the patient was assured. There was nothing to be done now but
+to wait, and let his mind slowly recall its sense of what had
+happened.
+
+"Where is she?" were the first words he said to the surgeon, and
+the landlady anxiously watching him.
+
+The landlady knocked at the folding-doors, and received no
+answer. She went in, and found the room empty. A sheet of
+note-paper was on the dressing-table, with the doctor's fee
+placed on it. The paper contained these lines, evidently written
+in great agitation or in great haste: "It is impossible for me to
+remain here to-night, after what has happened. I will return
+to-morrow to take away my luggage, and to pay what I owe you."
+
+"Where is she?" Midwinter asked again, when the landlady returned
+alone to the drawing-room.
+
+"Gone, sir."
+
+"I don't believe it!"
+
+The old lady's color rose. "If you know her handwriting, sir,"
+she answered, handing him the sheet of note-paper, "perhaps you
+may believe _that?_"
+
+He looked at the paper. "I beg your pardon, ma'am," he said, as
+he handed it back--"I beg your pardon, with all my heart."
+
+There was something in his face as he spoke those words which
+more than soothed the old lady's irritation: it touched her with
+a sudden pity for the man who had offended her. "I am afraid
+there is some dreadful trouble, sir, at the bottom of all this,"
+she said, simply. "Do you wish me to give any message to the lady
+when she comes back?"
+
+Midwinter rose and steadied himself for a moment against the
+sofa. "I will bring my own message to-morrow," he said. "I must
+see her before she leaves your house."
+
+The surgeon accompanied his patient into the street. "Can I see
+you home?" he said, kindly. "You had better not walk, if it is
+far. You mustn't overexert yourself; you mustn't catch a chill
+this cold night."
+
+Midwinter took his hand and thanked him. "I have been used to
+hard walking and cold nights, sir," he said; "and I am not easily
+worn out, even when I look so broken as I do now. If you will
+tell me the nearest way out of these streets, I think the quiet
+of the country and the quiet of the night will help me. I have
+something serious to do to-morrow," he added, in a lower tone;
+"and I can't rest or sleep till I have thought over it to-night."
+
+The surgeon understood that he had no common man to deal with. He
+gave the necessary directions without any further remark, and
+parted with his patient at his own door.
+
+Left by himself, Midwinter paused, and looked up at the heavens
+in silence. The night had cleared, and the stars were out--the
+stars which he had first learned to know from his gypsy master on
+the hillside. For the first time his mind went back regretfully
+to his boyish days. "Oh, for the old life!" he thought,
+longingly. "I never knew till now how happy the old life was!"
+
+He roused himself, and went on toward the open country. His face
+darkened as he left the streets behind him and advanced into the
+solitude and obscurity that lay beyond.
+
+"She has denied her husband to-night," he said. "She shall know
+her master to-morrow."
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PURPLE FLASK.
+
+
+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 tonight? 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 Mr s. 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 we ary 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, ladi es 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 as sistant 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, a bove 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
+circums tances 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 en d; 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
+windowsill 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, i n
+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 w hom 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.
+
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+NEWS FROM NORFOLK.
+
+_From Mr. Pedgift, Senior (Thorpe Ambrose), to Mr. Pedgift,
+Junior (Paris)._
+
+"High Street, December 20th.
+
+"MY DEAR AUGUSTUS--Your letter reached me yesterday. You seem to
+be making the most of your youth (as you call it) with a
+vengeance. Well! enjoy your holiday. I made the most of my youth
+when I was your age; and, wonderful to relate, I haven't
+forgotten it yet!
+
+"You ask me for a good budget of news, and especially for more
+information about that mysterious business at the Sanitarium.
+
+"Curiosity, my dear boy, is a quality which (in our profession
+especially) sometimes leads to great results. I doubt, however,
+if you will find it leading to much on this occasion. All I know
+of the mystery of the Sanitarium, I know from Mr. Armadale: and
+he is entirely in the dark on more than one point of importance.
+I have already told you how they were entrapped into the house,
+and how they passed the night there. To this I can now add that
+something did certainly happen to Mr. Midwinter, which deprived
+him of consciousness; and that the doctor, who appears to have
+been mixed up in the matter, carried things with a high hand, and
+insisted on taking his own course in his own Sanitarium. There is
+not the least doubt that the miserable woman (however she might
+have come by her death) was found dead--that a coroner's inquest
+inquired into the circumstances--that the evidence showed her to
+have entered the house as a patient--and that the medical
+investigation ended in discovering that she had died of apoplexy.
+My idea is that Mr. Midwinter had a motive of his own for not
+coming forward with the evidence that he might have given. I have
+also reason to suspect that Mr. Armadale, out of regard for him,
+followed his lead, and that the verdict at the inquest (attaching
+no blame to anybody) proceeded, like many other verdicts of the
+same kind, from an entirely superficial investigation of the
+circumstances.
+
+"The key to the whole mystery is to be found, I firmly believe,
+in that wretched woman's attempt to personate the character of
+Mr. Armadale's widow when the news of his death appeared in the
+papers. But what first set her on this, and by what inconceivable
+process of deception she can have induced Mr. Midwinter to marry
+her (as the certificate proves) under Mr. Armadale's name, is
+more than Mr. Armadale himself knows. The point was not touched
+at the inquest, for the simple reason that the inquest only
+concerned itself with the circumstances attending her death. Mr.
+Armadale, at his friend's request, saw Miss Blanchard, and
+induced her to silence old Darch on the subject of the claim that
+had been made relating to the widow's income. As the claim had
+never been admitted, even our stiff-necked brother practitioner
+consented for once to do as he was asked. The doctor's statement
+that his patient was the widow of a gentleman named Armadale was
+accordingly left unchallenged, and so the matter has been hushed
+up. She is buried in the great cemetery, near the place where she
+died. Nobody but Mr. Midwinter and Mr. Armadale (who insisted on
+going with him) followed her to the grave; and nothing has been
+inscribed on the tombstone but the initial letter of her
+Christian name and the date of her death. So, after all the harm
+she has done, she rests at last; and so the two men whom she has
+injured have forgiven her.
+
+"Is there more to say on this subject before we leave it? On
+referring to your letter, I find you have raised one other point,
+which may be worth a moment's notice.
+
+"You ask if there is reason to suppose that the doctor comes out
+of the matter with hands which are really as clean as they look?
+My dear Augustus, I believe the doctor to have been at the bottom
+of more of this mischief than we shall ever find out; and to have
+profited by the self-imposed silence of Mr. Midwinter and Mr.
+Armadale, as rogues perpetually profit by the misfortunes and
+necessities of honest men. It is an ascertained fact that he
+connived at the false statement about Miss Milroy, which
+entrapped the two gentlemen into his house; and that one
+circumstance (after my Old Bailey experience) is enough for _me._
+As to evidence against him, there is not a jot; and as to
+Retribution overtaking him, I can only say I heartily hope
+Retribution may prove, in the long run, to be the more cunning
+customer of the two. There is not much prospect of it at present.
+The doctor's friends and admirers are, I understand, about to
+present him with a Testimonial, 'expressive of their sympathy
+under the sad occurrence which has thrown a cloud over the
+opening of his Sanitarium, and of their undiminished confidence
+in his integrity and ability as a medical man.' We live,
+Augustus, in an age eminently favorable to the growth of all
+roguery which is careful enough to keep up appearances. In this
+enlightened nineteenth century, I look upon the doctor as one of
+our rising men.
+
+"To turn now to pleasanter subjects than Sanitariums, I may tell
+you that Miss Neelie is as good as well again, and is, in my
+humble opinion, prettier than ever. She is staying in London
+under the care of a female relative; and Mr. Armadale satisfies
+her of the fact of his existence (in case she should forget it)
+regularly every day. They are to be married in the spring, unless
+Mrs. Milroy's death causes the ceremony to be postponed. The
+medical men are of opinion that the poor lady is sinking at last.
+It may be a question of weeks or a question of months, they can
+say no more. She is greatly altered--quiet and gentle, and
+anxiously affectionate with her husband and her child. But in her
+case this happy change is, it seems, a sign of approaching
+dissolution, from the medical point of view. There is a
+difficulty in making the poor old, major understand this. He only
+sees that she has gone back to the likeness of her better self
+when he first married her; and he sits for hours by her bedside
+now, and tells her about his wonderful clock.
+
+"Mr. Midwinter, of whom you will next expect me to say something,
+is improving rapidly. After causing some anxiety at first to the
+medical men (who declared that he was suffering from a serious
+nervous shock, produced by circumstances about which their
+patient's obstinate silence kept them quite in the dark), he has
+rallied, as only men of his sensitive temperament (to quote the
+doctors again) can rally. He and Mr. Armadale are together in a
+quiet lodging. I saw him last week when I was in London. His face
+showed signs of wear and tear, very sad to see in so young a man.
+But he spoke of himself and his future with a courage and
+hopefulness which men of twice his years (if he has suffered as I
+suspect him to have suffered) might have envied. If I know
+anything of humanity, this is no common man; and we shall hear of
+him yet in no common way.
+
+"You will wonder how I came to be in London. I went up, with a
+return ticket (from Saturday to Monday), about that matter in
+dispute at our agent's. We had a tough fight; but, curiously
+enough, a point occurred to me just as I got up to go; and I went
+back to my chair, and settled the question in no time. Of course
+I stayed at Our Hotel in Covent Garden. William, the waiter,
+asked after you with the affection of a father; and Matilda, the
+chamber-maid, said you almost persuaded her that last time to
+have the hollow tooth taken out of her lower jaw. I had the
+agent's second son (the young chap you nicknamed Mustapha, when
+he made that dreadful mess about the Turkish Securities) to dine
+with me on Sunday. A little incident happened in the evening
+which may be worth recording, as it connected itself with a
+certain old lady who was not 'at home' when you and Mr. Armadale
+blundered on that house in Pimlico in the bygone time.
+
+"Mustapha was like all the rest of you young men of the present
+day--he go t restless after dinner. 'Let's go to a public
+amusement, Mr. Pedgift,' says he. 'Public amusement? Why, it's
+Sunday evening!' says I. 'All right, sir,' says Mustapha. 'They
+stop acting on the stage, I grant you, on Sunday evening--but
+they don't stop acting in the pulpit. Come and see the last new
+Sunday performer of our time.' As he wouldn't have any more wine,
+there was nothing else for it but to go.
+
+"We went to a street at the West End, and found it blocked up
+with carriages. If it hadn't been Sunday night, I should have
+thought we were going to the opera. 'What did I tell you?' says
+Mustapha, taking me up to an open door with a gas star outside
+and a bill of the performance. I had just time to notice that I
+was going to one of a series of 'Sunday Evening Discourses on the
+Pomps and Vanities of the World, by A Sinner Who Has Served
+Them,' when Mustapha jogged my elbow, and whispered, 'Half a
+crown is the fashionable tip.' I found myself between two demure
+and silent gentlemen, with plates in their hands, uncommonly well
+filled already with the fashionable tip. Mustapha patronized one
+plate, and I the other. We passed through two doors into a long
+room, crammed with people. And there, on a platform at the
+further end, holding forth to the audience, was--not a man, as I
+had expected-- but a Woman, and that woman, MOTHER OLDERSHAW! You
+never listened to anything more eloquent in your life. As long as
+I heard her she was never once at a loss for a word anywhere. I
+shall think less of oratory as a human accomplishment, for the
+rest of my days, after that Sunday evening. As for the matter of
+the sermon, I may describe it as a narrative of Mrs. Oldershaw's
+experience among dilapidated women, profusely illustrated in the
+pious and penitential style. You will ask what sort of audience
+it was. Principally Women, Augustus--and, as I hope to be saved,
+all the old harridans of the world of fashion whom Mother
+Oldershaw had enameled in her time, sitting boldly in the front
+places, with their cheeks ruddled with paint, in a state of
+devout enjoyment wonderful to see! I left Mustapha to hear the
+end of it. And I thought to myself, as I went out, of what
+Shakespeare says somewhere, 'Lord, what fools we mortals be!'
+
+"Have I anything more to tell you before I leave off? Only one
+thing that I can remember.
+
+"That wretched old Bashwood has confirmed the fears I told you I
+had about him when he was brought back here from London. There is
+no kind of doubt that he has really lost all the little reason he
+ever had. He is perfectly harmless, and perfectly happy. And he
+would do very well if we could only prevent him from going out in
+his last new suit of clothes, smirking and smiling and inviting
+everybody to his approaching marriage with the handsomest woman
+in England. It ends of course in the boys pelting him, and in his
+coming here crying to me, covered with mud. The moment his
+clothes are cleaned again he falls back into his favorite
+delusion, and struts about before the church gates, in the
+character of a bridegroom, waiting for Miss Gwilt. We must get
+the poor wretch taken care of somewhere for the rest of the
+little time he has to live. Who would ever have thought of a man
+at his age falling in love? And who would ever have believed that
+the mischief that woman's beauty has done could have reached as
+far in the downward direction as our superannuated old clerk?
+
+"Good-by, for the present, my dear boy. If you see a particularly
+handsome snuff-box in Paris, remember--though your father scorns
+Testimonials--he doesn't object to receive a present from his
+son.
+
+"Yours affectionately,
+
+A. PEDGIFT, Sen.
+
+"POSTSCRIPT.--I think it likely that the account you mention in
+the French papers, of a fatal quarrel among some foreign sailors
+in one of the Lipari Islands, and of the death of their captain,
+among others, may really have been a quarrel among the scoundrels
+who robbed Mr. Armadale and scuttled his yacht. _Those_ fellows,
+luckily for society, can't always keep up appearances; and, in
+their case, Rogues and Retribution do occasionally come into
+collision with each other."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+MIDWINTER.
+
+THE spring had advanced to the end of April. It was the eve of
+Allan's wedding-day. Midwinter and he had sat talking together at
+the great house till far into the night--till so far that it had
+struck twelve long since, and the wedding day was already some
+hours old.
+
+For the most part the conversation had turned on the bridegroom's
+plans and projects. It was not till the two friends rose to go to
+rest that Allan insisted on making Midwinter speak of himself.
+
+"We have had enough, and more than enough, of _my_ future," he
+began, in his bluntly straightforward way. "Let's say something
+now, Midwinter, about yours. You have promised me, I know, that,
+if you take to literature, it shan't part us, and that, if you go
+on a sea-voyage, you will remember, when you come back, that my
+house is your home. But this is the last chance we have of being
+together in our old way; and I own I should like to know--" His
+voice faltered, and his eyes moistened a little. He left the
+sentence unfinished.
+
+Midwinter took his hand and helped him, as he had often helped
+him to the words that he wanted in the by-gone time.
+
+"You would like to know, Allan," he said, "that I shall not bring
+an aching heart with me to your wedding day? If you will let me
+go back for a moment to the past, I think I can satisfy you."
+
+They took their chairs again. Allan saw that Midwinter was moved.
+"Why distress yourself?" he asked, kindly--"why go back to the
+past?"
+
+"For two reasons, Allan. I ought to have thanked you long since
+for the silence you have observed, for my sake, on a matter that
+must have seemed very strange to you. You know what the name is
+which appears on the register of my marriage, and yet you have
+forborne to speak of it, from the fear of distressing me. Before
+you enter on your new life, let us come to a first and last
+understanding about this. I ask you--as one more kindness to
+me--to accept my assurance (strange as the thing may seem to you)
+that I am blameless in this matter; and I entreat you to believe
+that the reasons I have for leaving it unexplained are reasons
+which, if Mr. Brock was living, Mr. Brook himself would approve."
+In those words he kept the secret of the two names; and left the
+memory of Allan's mother, what he had found it, a sacred memory
+in the heart of her son.
+
+"One word more," he went on--"a word which will take us, this
+time, from past to future. It has been said, and truly said, that
+out of Evil may come Good. Out of the horror and the misery of
+that night you know of has come the silencing of a doubt which
+once made my life miserable with groundless anxiety about you and
+about myself. No clouds raised by my superstition will ever come
+between us again. I can't honestly tell you that I am more
+willing now than I was when we were in the Isle of Man to take
+what is called the rational view of your Dream. Though I know
+what extraordinary coincidences are perpetually happening in the
+experience of all of us, still I cannot accept coincidences as
+explaining the fulfillment of the Visions which our own eyes have
+seen. All I can sincerely say for myself is, what I think it will
+satisfy you to know, that I have learned to view the purpose of
+the Dream with a new mind. I once believed that it was sent to
+rouse your distrust of the friendless man whom you had taken as a
+brother to your heart. I now _know_ that it came to you as a
+timely warning to take him closer still. Does this help to
+satisfy you that I, too, am standing hopefully on the brink of a
+new life, and that while we live, brother, your love and mine
+will never be divided again?"
+
+They shook hands in silence. Allan was the first to recover
+himself. He answered in the few words of kindly assurance which
+were the best words that he could address to his friend.
+
+"I have heard all I ever want to hear about the past," he said;
+"and I know what I most wanted to know about the future.
+Everybody says, Midwinter, you have a career before you, and I
+believe that everybody is right. Who knows what great things may
+ happen before you and I are many years older?"
+
+"Who _need_ know?" said Midwinter, calmly. "Happen what may, God
+is all-merciful, God is all-wise. In those words your dear old
+friend once wrote to me. In that faith I can look back without
+murmuring at the years that are past, and can look on without
+doubting to the years that are to come."
+
+He rose, and walked to the window. While they had been speaking
+together the darkness had passed. The first light of the new day
+met him as he looked out, and rested tenderly on his face.
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+NOTE--My readers will perceive that I have purposely left them,
+with reference to the Dream in this story, in the position which
+they would occupy in the case of a dream in real life: they are
+free to interpret it by the natural or the supernatural theory,
+as the bent of their own minds may incline them. Persons disposed
+to take the rational view may, under these circumstances, be
+interested in hearing of a coincidence relating to the present
+story, which actually happened, and which in the matter of
+"extravagant improbability" sets anything of the same kind that a
+novelist could imagine at flat defiance.
+
+In November, 1865, that is to say, when thirteen monthly parts of
+"Armadale" had been published, and, I may add, when more than a
+year and a half had elapsed since the end of the story, as it now
+appears, was first sketched in my notebook--a vessel lay in the
+Huskisson Dock at Liverpool which was looked after by one man,
+who slept on board, in the capacity of shipkeeper. On a certain
+day in the week this man was found dead in the deck-house. On the
+next day a second man, who had taken his place, was carried dying
+to the Northern Hospital. On the third day a third ship-keeper
+was appointed, and was found dead in the deck-house which had
+already proved fatal to the other two. _The name of that ship was
+"The Armadale."_ And the proceedings at the Inquest proved that
+the three men had been all suffocated _by sleeping in poisoned
+air!_
+
+I am indebted for these particulars to the kindness of the
+reporters at Liverpool, who sent me their statement of the facts.
+The case found its way into most of the newspapers. It was
+noticed--to give two instances in which I can cite the dates--in
+the _Times_ of November 30th, 1865, and was more fully described
+in the _Daily News_ of November 28th, in the same year.
+
+Before taking leave of "Armadale," I may perhaps be allowed to
+mention, for the benefit of any readers who may be curious on
+such points, that the "Norfolk Broads" are here described after
+personal investigation of them. In this, as in other cases, I
+have spared no pains to instruct myself on matters of fact.
+Wherever the story touches on questions connected with Law,
+Medicine, or Chemistry, it has been submitted before publication
+to the experience of professional men. The kindness of a friend
+supplied me with a plan of the doctor's apparatus, and I saw the
+chemical ingredients at work before I ventured on describing the
+action of them in the closing scenes of this book.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Armadale, by Wilkie Collins
+
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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Armadale, by Wilkie Collins***
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+Armadale
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+by Wilkie Collins
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+September, 1999  [Etext #1895]
+
+
+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Armadale, by Wilkie Collins***
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+
+
+
+Prepared by James Rusk (jrusk@cyberramp.net)
+Italics are indicated by underscores.
+
+
+
+
+
+Armadale
+
+by Wilkie Collins
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+JOHN FORSTER.
+
+In acknowledgment of the services which he has rendered to
+the cause of literature by his "Life of Goldsmith;" and in
+affectionate remembrance of a friendship which is associated
+with some of the happiest years of my life.
+
+
+
+Readers in general--on whose friendly reception experience has
+given me some reason to rely--will, I venture to hope, appreciate
+whatever merit there may be in this story without any prefatory
+pleading for it on my part. They will, I think, see that it has
+not been hastily meditated or idly wrought out. They will judge
+it accordingly, and I ask no more.
+
+Readers in particular will, I have some reason to suppose, be
+here and there disturbed, perhaps even offended, by finding that
+"Armadale" oversteps, in more than one direction, the narrow
+limits within which they are disposed to restrict the development
+of modern fiction--if they can.
+
+Nothing that I could say to these persons here would help me with
+them as Time will help me if my work lasts. I am not afraid of my
+design being permanently misunderstood, provided the execution
+has done it any sort of justice. Estimated by the clap-trap
+morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book.
+Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only
+a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.
+
+LONDON, April, 1866.
+
+
+
+ARMADALE.
+
+PROLOGUE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE TRAVELERS.
+
+It was the opening of the season of eighteen hundred and
+thirty-two, at the Baths of Wildbad.
+
+The evening shadows were beginning to gather over the quiet
+little German town, and the diligence was expected every minute.
+Before the door of the principal inn, waiting the arrival of the
+first visitors of the year, were assembled the three notable
+personages of Wildbad, accompanied by their wives--the mayor,
+representing the inhabitants; the doctor, representing the
+waters; the landlord, representing his own establishment. Beyond
+this select circle, grouped snugly about the trim little square
+in front of the inn, appeared the towns-people in general, mixed
+here and there with the country people, in their quaint German
+costume, placidly expectant of the diligence--the men in short
+black jackets, tight black breeches, and three-cornered beaver
+hats; the women with their long light hair hanging in one thickly
+plaited tail behind them, and the waists of their short woolen
+gowns inserted modestly in the region of their shoulder-blades.
+Round the outer edge of the assemblage thus formed, flying
+detachments of plump white-headed children careered in perpetual
+motion; while, mysteriously apart from the rest of the
+inhabitants, the musicians of the Baths stood collected in one
+lost corner, waiting the appearance of the first visitors to play
+the first tune of the season in the form of a serenade. The light
+of a May evening was still bright on the tops of the great wooded
+hills watching high over the town on the right hand and the left;
+and the cool breeze that comes before sunset came keenly fragrant
+here with the balsamic odor of the first of the Black Forest.
+
+"Mr. Landlord," said the mayor's wife (giving the landlord his
+title), "have you any foreign guests coming on this first day of
+the season?"
+
+"Madame Mayoress," replied the landlord (returning the
+compliment), "I have two. They have written--the one by the hand
+of his servant, the other by his own hand apparently--to order
+their rooms; and they are from England, both, as I think by their
+names. If you ask me to pronounce those names, my tongue
+hesitates; if you ask me to spell them, here they are, letter by
+letter, first and second in their order as they come. First, a
+high-born stranger (by title Mister) who introduces himself in
+eight letters, A, r, m, a, d, a, l, e--and comes ill in his own
+carriage. Second, a high-born stranger (by title Mister also),
+who introduces himself in four letters--N, e, a, l--and comes ill
+in the diligence. His excellency of the eight letters writes to
+me (by his servant) in French; his excellency of the four letters
+writes to me in German. The rooms of both are ready. I know no
+more."
+
+"Perhaps," suggested the mayor's wife, "Mr. Doctor has heard from
+one or both of these illustrious strangers?"
+
+"From one only, Madam Mayoress; but not, strictly speaking, from
+the person himself. I have received a medical report of his
+excellency of the eight letters, and his case seems a bad one.
+God help him!"
+
+"The diligence!" cried a child from the outskirts of the crowd.
+
+The musicians seized their instruments, and silence fell on the
+whole community. From far away in the windings of the forest
+gorge, the ring of horses' bells came faintly clear through the
+evening stillness. Which carriage was approaching--the private
+carriage with Mr. Armadale, or the public carriage with Mr. Neal?
+
+"Play, my friends!" cried the mayor to the musicians. "Public or
+private, here are the first sick people of the season. Let them
+find us cheerful."
+
+The band played a lively dance tune, and the children in the
+square footed it merrily to the music. At the same moment, their
+elders near the inn door drew aside, and disclosed the first
+shadow of gloom that fell over the gayety and beauty of the
+scene. Through the opening made on either hand, a little
+procession of stout country girls advanced, each drawing after
+her an empty chair on wheels; each in waiting (and knitting while
+she waited) for the paralyzed wretches who came helpless by
+hundreds then--who come helpless by thousands now--to the waters
+of Wildbad for relief.
+
+While the band played, while the children danced, while the buzz
+of many talkers deepened, while the strong young nurses of the
+coming cripples knitted impenetrably, a woman's insatiable
+curiosity about other women asserted itself in the mayor's wife.
+She drew the landlady aside, and whispered a question to her on
+the spot.
+
+"A word more, ma'am," said the mayor's wife, "about the two
+strangers from England. Are their letters explicit? Have they got
+any ladies with them?"
+
+"The one by the diligence--no," replied the landlady. "But the
+one by the private carriage--yes. He comes with a child; he comes
+with a nurse; and," concluded the landlady, skillfully keeping
+the main point of interest till the last, "he comes with a Wife."
+
+The mayoress brightened; the doctoress (assisting at the
+conference) brightened; the landlady nodded significantly. In the
+minds of all three the same thought started into life at the same
+moment--"We shall see the Fashions! "
+
+In a minute more, there was a sudden movement in the crowd; and
+a chorus of voices proclaimed that the travelers were at hand.
+
+By this time the coming vehicle was in sight, and all further
+doubt was at an end. It was the diligence that now approached by
+the long street leading into the square--the diligence (in a
+dazzling new coat of yellow paint) that delivered the first
+visitors of the season at the inn door. Of the ten travelers
+released from the middle compartment and the back compartment
+of the carriage--all from various parts of Germany--three were
+lifted out helpless, and were placed in the chairs on wheels to
+be drawn to their lodgings in the town. The front compartment
+contained two passengers only--Mr. Neal and his traveling
+servant. With an arm on either side to assist him, the stranger
+(whose malady appeared to be locally confined to a lameness in
+one of his feet) succeeded in descending the steps of the
+carriage easily enough. While he steadied himself on the pavement
+by the help of his stick--looking not over-patiently toward the
+musicians who were serenading him with the waltz in "Der
+Freischutz"--his personal appearance rather damped the enthusiasm
+of the friendly little circle assembled to welcome him. He was
+a lean, tall, serious, middle-aged man, with a cold gray eye and
+a long upper lip, with overhanging eyebrows and high cheek-bones;
+a man who looked what he was--every inch a Scotchman.
+
+"Where is the proprietor of this hotel?" he asked, speaking in
+the German language, with a fluent readiness of expression, and
+an icy coldness of manner. "Fetch the doctor," he continued,
+when the landlord had presented himself, "I want to see him
+immediately."
+
+"I am here already, sir," said the doctor, advancing from the
+circle of friends, "and my services are entirely at your
+disposal."
+
+"Thank you," said Mr. Neal, looking at the doctor, as the rest of
+us look at a dog when we have whistled and the dog has come. "I
+shall be glad to consult you to-morrow morning, at ten o'clock,
+about my own case. I only want to trouble you now with a message
+which I have undertaken to deliver. We overtook a traveling
+carriage on the road here with a gentleman in it--an Englishman,
+I believe--who appeared to be seriously ill. A lady who was with
+him begged me to see you immediately on my arrival, and to secure
+your professional assistance in removing the patient from the
+carriage. Their courier has met with an accident, and has been
+left behind on the road, and they are obliged to travel very
+slowly. If you are here in an hour, you will be here in time
+to receive them. That is the message. Who is this gentleman who
+appears to be anxious to speak to me? The mayor? If you wish
+to see my passport, sir, my servant will show it to you. No? You
+wish to welcome me to the place, and to offer your services? I am
+infinitely flattered. If you have any authority to shorten the
+performances of your town band, you would be doing me a kindness
+to exert it. My nerves are irritable, and I dislike music. Where
+is the landlord? No; I want to see my rooms. I don't want your
+arm; I can get upstairs with the help of my stick. Mr. Mayor and
+Mr. Doctor, we need not detain one another any longer. I wish you
+good-night."
+
+Both mayor and doctor looked after the Scotchman as he limped
+upstairs, and shook their heads together in mute disapproval of
+him. The ladies, as usual, went a step further, and expressed
+their opinions openly in the plainest words. The case under
+consideration (so far as _they_ were concerned) was the
+scandalous case of a man who had passed them over entirely
+without notice. Mrs. Mayor could only attribute such an outrage
+to the native ferocity of a savage. Mrs. Doctor took a stronger
+view still, and considered it as proceeding from the inbred
+brutality of a hog.
+
+The hour of waiting for the traveling-carriage wore on, and
+the creeping night stole up the hillsides softly. One by one
+the stars appeared, and the first lights twinkled in the windows
+of the inn. As the darkness came, the last idlers deserted the
+square; as the darkness came, the mighty silence of the forest
+above flowed in on the valley, and strangely and suddenly hushed
+the lonely little town.
+
+The hour of waiting wore out, and the figure of the doctor,
+walking backward and forward anxiously, was still the only
+living figure left in the square. Five minutes, ten minutes,
+twenty minutes, were counted out by the doctor's watch, before
+the first sound came through the night silence to warn him of
+the approaching carriage. Slowly it emerged into the square,
+at the walking pace of the horses, and drew up, as a hearse
+might have drawn up, at the door of the inn.
+
+"Is the doctor here?" asked a woman's voice, speaking, out of
+the darkness of the carriage, in the French language.
+
+"I am here, madam," replied the doctor, taking a light from
+the landlord's hand and opening the carriage door.
+
+The first face that the light fell on was the face of the lady
+who had just spoken--a young, darkly beautiful woman, with the
+tears standing thick and bright in her eager black eyes. The
+second face revealed was the face of a shriveled old negress,
+sitting opposite the lady on the back seat. The third was the
+face of a little sleeping child in the negress's lap. With a
+quick gesture of impatience, the lady signed to the nurse to
+leave the carriage first with the child. "Pray take them out
+of the way," she said to the landlady; "pray take them to their
+room." She got out herself when her request had been complied
+with. Then the light fell clear for the first time on the further
+side of the carriage, and the fourth traveler was disclosed to
+view.
+
+He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his
+hair, long and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide
+open, rolling to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his
+face as void of all expression of the character within him, and
+the thought within him, as if he had been dead. There was no
+looking at him now, and guessing what he might once have been.
+The leaden blank of his face met every question as to his age,
+his rank, his temper, and his looks which that face might once
+have answered, in impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him
+now but the shock that had struck him with the death-in-life
+of paralysis. The doctor's eye questioned his lower limbs, and
+Death-in-Life answered, _I am here_. The doctor's eye, rising
+attentively by way of his hands and arms, questioned upward and
+upward to the muscles round his mouth, and Death-in-Life
+answered, _I am coming_.
+
+In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was
+nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that
+could be offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage
+door.
+
+As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel,
+his wandering eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested
+on her for a moment, and in that moment he spoke.
+
+"The child?" he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
+articulation.
+
+"The child is safe upstairs," she answered, faintly.
+
+"My desk?"
+
+"It is in my hands. Look! I won't trust it to anybody; I am
+taking care of it for you myself."
+
+He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said
+no more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs,
+with his wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously
+silent) on the other. The landlord and the servants following saw
+the door of his room open and close on him; heard the lady burst
+out crying hysterically as soon as she was alone with the doctor
+and the sick man; saw the doctor come out, half an hour later,
+with his ruddy face a shade paler than usual; pressed him eagerly
+for information, and received but one answer to all their
+inquiries--"Wait till I have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing
+to-night." They all knew the doctor's ways, and they augured ill
+when he left them hurriedly with that reply.
+
+So the two first English visitors of the year came to the Baths
+of Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE SOLID SIDE OF THE SCOTCH CHARACTER.
+
+AT ten o'clock the next morning, Mr. Neal--waiting for the
+medical visit which he had himself appointed for that
+hour--looked at his watch, and discovered, to his amazement,
+that he was waiting in vain. It was close on eleven when the
+door opened at last, and the doctor entered the room.
+
+"I appointed ten o'clock for your visit," said Mr. Neal. "In
+my country, a medical man is a punctual man."
+
+"In my country," returned the doctor, without the least
+ill-humor, "a medical man is exactly like other men--he is at
+the mercy of accidents. Pray grant me your pardon, sir, for being
+so long after my time; I have been detained by a very distressing
+case--the case of Mr. Armadale, whose traveling-carriage you
+passed on the road yesterday."
+
+Mr. Neal looked at his medical attendant with a sour surprise.
+There was a latent anxiety in the doctor's eye, a latent
+preoccupation in the doctor's manner, which he was at a loss
+to account for. For a moment the two faces confronted each other
+silently, in marked national contrast--the Scotchman's, long
+and lean, hard and regular; the German's, plump and florid, soft
+and shapeless. One face looked as if it had never been young;
+the other, as if it would never grow old.
+
+"Might I venture to remind you," said Mr. Neal, "that the case
+now under consideration is MY case, and not Mr. Armadale's?"
+
+"Certainly," replied the doctor, still vacillating between the
+case he had come to see and the case he had just left. "You
+appear to be suffering from lameness; let me look at your foot."
+
+Mr. Neal's malady, however serious it might be in his own
+estimation, was of no extraordinary importance in a medical
+point of view. He was suffering from a rheumatic affection of
+the ankle-joint. The necessary questions were asked and answered
+and the necessary baths were prescribed. In ten minutes the
+consultation was at an end, and the patient was waiting in
+significant silence for the medical adviser to take his leave.
+
+"I cannot conceal from myself," said the doctor, rising, and
+hesitating a little, "that I am intruding on you. But I am
+compelled to beg your indulgence if I return to the subject
+of Mr. Armadale."
+
+"May I ask what compels you?"
+
+"The duty which I owe as a Christian," answered the doctor,
+"to a dying man."
+
+Mr. Neal started. Those who touched his sense of religious duty
+touched the quickest sense in his nature.
+
+"You have established your claim on my attention," he said,
+gravely. "My time is yours."
+
+"I will not abuse your kindness," replied the doctor, resuming
+his chair. "I will be as short as I can. Mr. Armadale's case is
+briefly this: He has passed the greater part of his life in the
+West Indies--a wild life, and a vicious life, by his own
+confession. Shortly after his marriage--now some three years
+since--the first symptoms of an approaching paralytic affection
+began to show themselves, and his medical advisers ordered him
+away to try the climate of Europe. Since leaving the West Indies
+he has lived principally in Italy, with no benefit to his health.
+From Italy, before the last seizure attacked him, he removed to
+Switzerland, and from Switzerland he has been sent to this place.
+So much I know from his doctor's report; the rest I can tell you
+from my own personal experience. Mr. Armadale has been sent to
+Wildbad too late: he is virtually a dead man. The paralysis is
+fast spreading upward, and disease of the lower part of the spine
+has already taken place. He can still move his hands a little,
+but he can hold nothing in his fingers. He can still articulate,
+but he may wake speechless to-morrow or next day. If I give him
+a week more to live, I give him what I honestly believe to be
+the utmost length of his span. At his own request I told him, as
+carefully and as tenderly as I could, what I have just told you.
+The result was very distressing; the violence of the patient's
+agitation was a violence which I despair of describing to you.
+I took the liberty of asking him whether his affairs were
+unsettled. Nothing of the sort. His will is in the hands of 
+is executor in London, and he leaves his wife and child well
+provided for. My next question succeeded better; it hit the mark:
+'Have you something on your mind to do before you die which is
+not done yet?' He gave a great gasp of relief, which said, as no
+words could have said it, Yes. 'Can I help you?' 'Yes. I have
+something to write that I _must_ write; can you make me hold
+a pen?'
+
+"He might as well have asked me if I could perform a miracle.
+I could only say No. 'If I dictate the words,' he went on, 'can
+you write what I tell you to write?' Once more I could only say
+No I understand a little English, but I can neither speak it nor
+write it. Mr. Armadale understands French when it is spoken
+(as I speak it to him) slowly, but he cannot express himself
+in that language; and of German he is totally ignorant. In this
+difficulty, I said, what any one else in my situation would have
+said: 'Why ask _me_? there is Mrs. Armadale at your service in
+the next room.' Before I could get up from my chair to fetch her,
+he stopped me--not by words, but by a look of horror which fixed
+me, by main force of astonishment, in my place. 'Surely,' I said,
+'your wife is the fittest person to write for you as you desire?'
+'The last person under heaven!' he answered. 'What!' I said, 'you
+ask me, a foreigner and a stranger, to write words at your
+dictation which you keep a secret from your wife!' Conceive my
+astonishment when he answered me, without a moment's hesitation,
+'Yes!' I sat lost; I sat silent. 'If _you_ can't write English,'
+he said, 'find somebody who can.' I tried to remonstrate. He
+burst into a dreadful moaning cry--a dumb entreaty, like the
+entreaty of a dog. 'Hush! hush!' I said, 'I will find somebody.'
+'To-day!' he broke out, 'before my speech fails me, like my
+hand.' 'To-day, in an hour's time.' He shut his eyes; he quieted
+himself instantly. 'While I am waiting for you,' he said, 'let me
+see my little boy.' He had shown no tenderness when he spoke of
+his wife, but I saw the tears on his cheeks when he asked for his
+child. My profession, sir, has not made me so hard a man as you
+might think; and my doctor's heart was as heavy, when I went out
+to fetch the child, as if I had not been a doctor at all. I am
+afraid you think this rather weak on my part?"
+
+The doctor looked appealingly at Mr. Neal. He might as well have
+looked at a rock in the Black Forest. Mr. Neal entirely declined
+to be drawn by any doctor in Christendom out of the regions of
+plain fact.
+
+"Go on," he said. "I presume you have not told me all that you
+have to tell me, yet?"
+
+"Surely you understand my object in coming here, now?" returned
+the other
+
+"Your object is plain enough, at last. You invite me to connect
+myself blindfold with a matter which is in the last degree
+suspicious, so far. I decline giving you any answer until I know
+more than I know now. Did you think it necessary to inform this
+man's wife of what had passed between you, and to ask her for an
+explanation?"
+
+"Of course I thought it necessary!" said the doctor, indignant
+at the reflection on his humanity which the question seemed to
+imply. "If ever I saw a woman fond of her husband, and sorry for
+her husband, it is this unhappy Mrs. Armadale. As soon as we were
+left alone together, I sat down by her side, and I took her hand
+in mine. Why not? I am an ugly old man, and I may allow myself
+such liberties as these!"
+
+"Excuse me," said the impenetrable Scotchman. "I beg to suggest
+that you are losing the thread of the narrative."
+
+"Nothing more likely," returned the doctor, recovering his good
+humor. "It is in the habit of my nation to be perpetually losing
+the thread; and it is evidently in the habit of yours, sir, to be
+perpetually finding it. What an example here of the order of
+the universe, and the everlasting fitness of things!"
+
+"Will you oblige me, once for all, by confining yourself to the
+facts," persisted Mr. Neal, frowning impatiently. "May I inquire,
+for my own information, whether Mrs. Armadale could tell you what
+it is her husband wishes me to write, and why it is that he
+refuses to let her write for him?"
+
+"There is my thread found--and thank you for finding it!" said
+the doctor. "You shall hear what Mrs. Armadale had to tell me,
+in Mrs. Armadale's own words. 'The cause that now shuts me out of
+his confidence,' she said, 'is, I firmly believe, the same cause
+that has always shut me out of his heart. I am the wife he has
+wedded, but I am not the woman he loves. I knew when he married
+me that another man had won from him the woman he loved. I
+thought I could make him forget her. I hoped when I married him;
+I hoped again when I bore him a son. Need I tell you the end of
+my hopes--you have seen it for yourself.' (Wait, sir, I entreat
+you! I have not lost the thread again; I am following it inch by
+inch.) 'Is this all you know?' I asked. 'All I knew,' she said,
+'till a short time since. It was when we were in Switzerland, and
+when his illness was nearly at its worst, that news came to him
+by accident of that other woman who has been the shadow and the
+poison of my life--news that she (like me) had borne her husband
+a son. On the instant of his making that discovery--a trifling
+discovery, if ever there was one yet--a mortal fear seized on
+him: not for me, not for himself; a fear for his own child. The
+same day (without a word to me) he sent for the doctor. I was
+mean, wicked, what you please--I listened at the door. I heard
+him say: _I have something to tell my son, when my son grows old
+enough to understand me. Shall I live to tell it_? The doctor
+would say nothing certain. The same night (still without a word
+to me) he locked himself into his room. What would any woman,
+treated as I was, have done in my place? She would have done as
+I did--she would have listened again. I heard him say to himself:
+_I shall not live to tell it: I must; write it before I die_.
+I heard his pen scrape, scrape, scrape over the paper; I heard
+him groaning and sobbing as he wrote; I implored him for God's
+sake to let me in. The cruel pen went scrape, scrape, scrape;
+the cruel pen was all the answer he gave me. I waited at the
+door--hours--I don't know how long. On a sudden, the pen stopped;
+and I heard no more. I whispered through the keyhole softly; I
+said I was cold and weary with waiting; I said, Oh, my love, let
+me in! Not even the cruel pen answered me now: silence answered
+me. With all the strength of my miserable hands I beat at
+the door. The servants came up and broke it in. We were too late;
+the harm was done. Over that fatal letter, the stroke had struck
+him--over that fatal letter, we found him paralyzed as you see
+him now. Those words which he wants you to write are the words he
+would have written himself if the stroke had spared him till the
+morning. From that time to this there has been a blank place left
+in the letter; and it is that blank place which he has just asked
+you to fill up.'--In those words Mrs. Armadale spoke to me; in
+those words you have the sum and substance of all the information
+I can give. Say, if you please, sir, have I kept the thread at
+last? Have I shown you the necessity which brings me here from
+your countryman's death-bed?"
+
+"Thus far," said Mr. Neal, "you merely show me that you are
+exciting yourself. This is too serious a matter to be treated
+as you are treating it now. You have involved Me in the business,
+and I insist on seeing my way plainly. Don't raise your hands;
+your hands are not a part of the question. If I am to be
+concerned in the completion of this mysterious letter, it is only
+an act of justifiable prudence on my part to inquire what the
+letter is about. Mrs. Armadale appears to have favored you with
+an infinite number of domestic particulars--in return, I presume,
+for your polite attention in taking her by the hand. May I ask
+what she could tell you about her husband's letter, so far as
+her husband has written it?"
+
+"Mrs. Armadale could tell me nothing," replied the doctor, with a
+sudden formality in his manner, which showed that his forbearance
+was at last failing him. "Before she was composed enough to think
+of the letter, her husband had asked for it, and had caused it to
+be locked up in his desk. She knows that he has since, time after
+time, tried to finish it, and that, time after time, the pen has
+dropped from his fingers. She knows, when all other hope of his
+restoration was at an end, that his medical advisers encouraged
+him to hope in the famous waters of this place. And last, she
+knows how that hope has ended; for she knows what I told her
+husband this morning."
+
+The frown which had been gathering latterly on Mr. Neal's face
+deepened and darkened. He looked at the doctor as if the doctor
+had personally offended him.
+
+"The more I think of the position you are asking me to take,"
+he said, "the less I like it. Can you undertake to say positively
+that Mr. Armadale is in his right mind?"
+
+"Yes; as positively as words can say it."
+
+"Does his wife sanction your coming here to request my
+interference?"
+
+"His wife sends me to you--the only Englishman in Wildbad--to
+write for your dying countryman what he cannot write for himself;
+and what no one else in this place but you can write for him."
+
+That answer drove Mr. Neal back to the last inch of ground left
+him to stand on. Even on that inch the Scotchman resisted still.
+
+"Wait a little!" he said. "You put it strongly; let us be quite
+sure you put it correctly as well. Let us be quite sure there is
+nobody to take this responsibility but myself. There is a mayor
+in Wildbad, to begin with--a man who possesses an official
+character to justify his interference."
+
+"A man of a thousand," said the doctor. "With one fault--he knows
+no language but his own."
+
+"There is an English legation at Stuttgart," persisted Mr. Neal.
+
+"And there are miles on miles of the forest between this and
+Stuttgart," rejoined the doctor. "If we sent this moment, we
+could get no help from the legation before to-morrow; and it is
+as likely as not, in the state of this dying man's articulation,
+that to-morrow may find him speechless. I don't know whether
+his last wishes are wishes harmless to his child and to others,
+wishes hurtful to his child and to others; but I _do_ know that
+they must be fulfilled at once or never, and that you are the
+only man that can help him."
+
+That open declaration brought the discussion to a close. It fixed
+Mr. Neal fast between the two alternatives of saying Yes, and
+committing an act of imprudence, or of saying No, and committing
+an act of inhumanity. There was a silence of some minutes. The
+Scotchman steadily reflected; and the German steadily watched
+him.
+
+The responsibility of saying the next words rested on Mr. Neal,
+and in course of time Mr. Neal took it. He rose from his chair
+with a sullen sense of injury lowering on his heavy eyebrows,
+and working sourly in the lines at the corners of his mouth.
+
+"My position is forced on me," he said. "I have no choice but
+to accept it."
+
+The doctor's impulsive nature rose in revolt against the
+merciless brevity and gracelessness of that reply. "I wish to
+God," he broke out fervently, "I knew English enough to take
+your place at Mr. Armadale's bedside!"
+
+"Bating your taking the name of the Almighty in vain," answered
+the Scotchman, "I entirely agree with you. I wish you did."
+
+Without another word on either side, they left the room
+together--the doctor leading the way.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WRECK OF THE TIMBER SHIP.
+
+NO one answered the doctor's knock when he and his companion
+reached the antechamber door of Mr. Armadale's apartments. They
+entered unannounced; and when they looked into the sitting-room,
+the sitting-room was empty.
+
+"I must see Mrs. Armadale," said Mr. Neal. "I decline acting in
+the matter unless Mrs. Armadale authorizes my interference with
+her own lips."
+
+"Mrs. Armadale is probably with her husband," replied the doctor.
+He approached a door at the inner end of the sitting-room while
+he spoke--hesitated--and, turning round again, looked at his sour
+companion anxiously. "I am afraid I spoke a little harshly, sir,
+when we were leaving your room," he said. "I beg your pardon for
+it, with all my heart. Before this poor afflicted lady comes in,
+will you--will you excuse my asking your utmost gentleness and
+consideration for her?"
+
+"No, sir," retorted the other harshly; "I won't excuse you. What
+right have I given you to think me wanting in gentleness and
+consideration toward anybody?"
+
+The doctor saw it was useless. "I beg your pardon again," he
+said, resignedly, and left the unapproachable stranger to
+himself.
+
+Mr. Neal walked to the window, and stood there, with his eyes
+mechanically fixed on the prospect, composing his mind for the
+coming interview.
+
+It was midday; the sun shone bright and warm; and all the little
+world of Wildbad was alive and merry in the genial springtime.
+Now and again heavy wagons, with black-faced carters in charge,
+rolled by the window, bearing their precious lading of charcoal
+from the forest. Now and again, hurled over the headlong current
+of the stream that runs through the town, great lengths of
+timber, loosely strung together in interminable series--with
+the booted raftsmen, pole in hand, poised watchful at either
+end--shot swift and serpent-like past the houses on their course
+to the distant Rhine. High and steep above the gabled wooden
+buildings on the river-bank, the great hillsides, crested black
+with firs, shone to the shining heavens in a glory of lustrous
+green. In and out, where the forest foot-paths wound from the
+grass through the trees, from the trees over the grass, the
+bright spring dresses of women and children, on the search for
+wild flowers, traveled to and fro in the lofty distance like
+spots of moving light. Below, on the walk by the stream side,
+the booths of the little bazar that had opened punctually with
+the opening season showed all their glittering trinkets, and
+fluttered in the balmy air their splendor of many-colored flags.
+Longingly, here the children looked at the show; patiently the
+sunburned lasses plied their knitting as they paced the walk;
+courteously the passing townspeople, by fours and fives, and the
+passing visitors, by ones and twos, greeted each other, hat in
+hand; and slowly, slowly, the cripple and the helpless in their
+chairs on wheels came out in the cheerful noontide with the rest,
+and took their share of the blessed light that cheers, of the
+blessed sun that shines for all.
+
+On this scene the Scotchman looked, with eyes that never noted
+its beauty, with a mind far away from every lesson that it
+taught. One by one he meditated the words he should say when the
+wife came in. One by one he pondered over the conditions he might
+impose before he took the pen in hand at the husband's bedside.
+
+"Mrs. Armadale is here," said the doctor's voice, interposing
+suddenly between his reflections and himself.
+
+He turned on the instant, and saw before him, with the pure
+midday light shining full on her, a woman of the mixed blood of
+the European and the African race, with the Northern delicacy in
+the shape of her face, and the Southern richness in its color--a
+woman in the prime of her beauty, who moved with an inbred grace,
+who looked with an inbred fascination, whose large, languid black
+eyes rested on him gratefully, whose little dusky hand offered
+itself to him in mute expression of her thanks, with the welcome
+that is given to the coming of a friend. For the first time
+in his life the Scotchman was taken by surprise. Every
+self-preservative word that he had been meditating but an instant
+since dropped out of his memory. His thrice impenetrable armor
+of habitual suspicion, habitual self-discipline, and habitual
+reserve, which had never fallen from him in a woman's presence
+before, fell from him in this woman's presence, and brought him
+to his knees, a conquered man. He took the hand she offered him,
+and bowed over it his first honest homage to the sex, in silence.
+
+She hesitated on her side. The quick feminine perception which,
+in happier circumstances, would have pounced on the secret of
+his embarrassment in an instant, failed her now. She attributed
+his strange reception of her to pride, to reluctance--to any
+cause but the unexpected revelation of her own beauty. "I have no
+words to thank you," she said, faintly, trying to propitiate him.
+"I should only distress you if I tried to speak." Her lip began
+to tremble, she drew back a little, and turned away her head in
+silence.
+
+The doctor, who had been standing apart, quietly observant in
+a corner, advanced before Mr. Neal could interfere, and led Mrs.
+Armadale to a chair. "Don't be afraid of him," whispered the good
+man, patting her gently on the shoulder. "He was hard as iron in
+my hands, but I think, by the look of him, he will be soft as wax
+in yours. Say the words I told you to say, and let us take him to
+your husband's room, before those sharp wits of his have time to
+recover themselves."
+
+She roused her sinking resolution, and advanced half-way to the
+window to meet Mr. Neal. "My kind friend, the doctor, has told
+me, sir, that your only hesitation in coming here is a hesitation
+on my account," she said, her head drooping a little, and her
+rich color fading away while she spoke. "I am deeply grateful,
+but I entreat you not to think of _me_. What my husband wishes--"
+Her voice faltered; she waited resolutely, and recovered herself.
+"What my husband wishes in his last moments, I wish too."
+
+This time Mr. Neal was composed enough to answer her. In low,
+earnest tones, he entreated her to say no more. "I was only
+anxious to show you every consideration," he said. "I am only
+anxious now to spare you every distress." As he spoke, something
+like a glow of color rose slowly on his sallow face. Her eyes
+were looking at him, softly attentive; and he thought guiltily
+of his meditations at the window before she came in.
+
+The doctor saw his opportunity. He opened the door that led into
+Mr. Armadale's room, and stood by it, waiting silently. Mrs.
+Armadale entered first. In a minute more the door was closed
+again; and Mr. Neal stood committed to the responsibility that
+had been forced on him--committed beyond recall.
+
+The room was decorated in the gaudy continental fashion, and
+the warm sunlight was shining in joyously. Cupids and flowers
+were painted on the ceiling; bright ribbons looped up the white
+window-curtains; a smart gilt clock ticked on a velvet-covered
+mantelpiece; mirrors gleamed on the walls, and flowers in all the
+colors of the rainbow speckled the carpet. In the midst of the
+finery, and the glitter, and the light, lay the paralyzed man,
+with his wandering eyes, and his lifeless lower face--his head
+propped high with many pillows; his helpless hands laid out over
+the bed-clothes like the hands of a corpse. By the bed head
+stood, grim, and old, and silent, the shriveled black nurse; and
+on the counter-pane, between his father's outspread hands, lay
+the child, in his little white frock, absorbed in the enjoyment
+of a new toy. When the door opened, and Mrs. Armadale led
+the way in, the boy was tossing his plaything--a soldier on
+horseback--backward and forward over the helpless hands on either
+side of him; and the father's wandering eyes were following
+the toy to and fro, with a stealthy and ceaseless vigilance--a
+vigilance as of a wild animal, terrible to see.
+
+The moment Mr. Neal appeared in the doorway, those restless eyes
+stopped, looked up, and fastened on the stranger with a fierce
+eagerness of inquiry. Slowly the motionless lips struggled into
+movement. With thick, hesitating articulation, they put the
+question which the eyes asked mutely, into words: "Are you the
+man?"
+
+Mr. Neal advanced to the bedside, Mrs. Armadale drawing back from
+it as he approached, and waiting with the doctor at the further
+end of the room. The child looked up, toy in hand, as the
+stranger came near, opened his bright brown eyes in momentary
+astonishment, and then went on with his game.
+
+"I have been made acquainted with your sad situation, sir,"
+said Mr. Neal; "and I have come here to place my services at
+your disposal--services which no one but myself, as your medical
+attendant informs me, is in a position to render you in this
+strange place. My name is Neal. I am a writer to the signet
+in Edinburgh; and I may presume to say for myself that any
+confidence you wish to place in me will be confidence not
+improperly bestowed."
+
+The eyes of the beautiful wife were not confusing him now. He
+spoke to the helpless husband quietly and seriously, without his
+customary harshness, and with a grave compassion in his manner
+which presented him at his best. The sight of the death-bed had
+steadied him.
+
+"You wish me to write something for you?" he resumed, after
+waiting for a reply, and waiting in vain.
+
+"Yes!" said the dying man, with the all-mastering impatience
+which his tongue was powerless to express, glittering angrily
+in his eye. "My hand is gone, and my speech is going. Write!"
+
+Before there was time to speak again, Mr. Neal heard the rustling
+of a woman's dress, and the quick creaking of casters on the
+carpet behind him. Mrs. Armadale was moving the writing-table
+across the room to the foot of the bed. If he was to set up those
+safeguards of his own devising that were to bear him harmless
+through all results to come, now was the time, or never. He, kept
+his back turned on Mrs. Armadale, and put his precautionary
+question at once in the plainest terms.
+
+"May I ask, sir, before I take the pen in hand, what it is you
+wish me to write?"
+
+The angry eyes of the paralyzed man glittered brighter and
+brighter. His lips opened and closed again. He made no reply.
+
+Mr. Neal tried another precautionary question, in a new
+direction.
+
+"When I have written what you wish me to write," he asked, "what
+is to be done with it?"
+
+This time the answer came:
+
+"Seal it up in my presence, and post it to my ex--"
+
+His laboring articulation suddenly stopped and he looked
+piteously in the questioner's face for the next word.
+
+"Do you mean your executor?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?" There was no
+answer. "May I ask if it is a letter altering your will?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort."
+
+Mr. Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one
+way out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that
+strange story of the unfinished letter which the doctor had
+repeated to him in Mrs. Armadale's words. The nearer he
+approached his unknown responsibility, the more ominous it seemed
+of something serious to come. Should he risk another question
+before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt crossed his
+mind, he felt Mrs. Armadale's silk dress touch him on the side
+furthest from her husband. Her delicate dark hand was laid gently
+on his arm; her full deep African eyes looked at him in
+submissive entreaty. "My husband is very anxious," she whispered.
+"Will you quiet his anxiety, sir, by taking your place at the
+writing-table?"
+
+It was from _her_ lips that the request came--from the lips of
+the person who had the best right to hesitate, the wife who was
+excluded from the secret! Most men in Mr. Neal's position would
+have given up all their safeguards on the spot. The Scotchman
+gave them all up but one.
+
+"I will write what you wish me to write," he said, addressing Mr.
+Armadale. "I will seal it in your presence; and I will post it to
+your executor myself. But, in engaging to do this, I must beg you
+to remember that I am acting entirely in the dark; and I must ask
+you to excuse me, if I reserve my own entire freedom of action,
+when your wishes in relation to the writing and the posting of
+the letter have been fulfilled."
+
+"Do you give me your promise?"
+
+"It you want my promise, sir, I will give it--subject to the
+condition I have just named."
+
+"Take your condition, and keep your promise. My desk," he added,
+looking at his wife for the first time.
+
+She crossed the room eagerly to fetch the desk from a chair
+in a corner. Returning with it, she made a passing sign to
+the negress, who still stood, grim and silent, in the place that
+she had occupied from the first. The woman advanced, obedient to
+the sign, to take the child from the bed. At the instant when
+she touched him, the father's eyes--fixed previously on the
+desk--turned on her with the stealthy quickness of a cat. "No!"
+he said. "No!" echoed the fresh voice of the boy, still charmed
+with his plaything, and still liking his place on the bed. The
+negress left the room, and the child, in high triumph, trotted
+his toy soldier up and down on the bedclothes that lay rumpled
+over his father's breast. His mother's lovely face contracted
+with a pang of jealousy as she looked at him.
+
+"Shall I open your desk?" she asked, pushing back the child's
+plaything sharply while she spoke. An answering look from her
+husband guided her hand to the place under his pillow where the
+key was hidden. She opened the desk, and disclosed inside some
+small sheets of manuscript pinned together. "These?" she
+inquired, producing them.
+
+"Yes," he said. "You can go now."
+
+The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring
+a stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an
+anxiety in both their faces which they could neither of them
+control. The words that banished the wife from the room were
+spoken. The moment had come.
+
+"You can go now," said Mr. Armadale, for the second time.
+
+She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and
+an ashy paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the
+fatal letter which was a sealed secret to her, and a torture of
+jealous suspicion--suspicion of that other woman who had been the
+shadow and the poison of her life--wrung her to the heart. After
+moving a few steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back
+again. Armed with the double courage of her love and her despair,
+she pressed her lips on her dying husband's cheek, and pleaded
+with him for the last time. Her burning tears dropped on his face
+as she whispered to him: "Oh, Allan, think how I have loved you!
+think how hard I have tried to make you happy! think how soon
+I shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don't, don't send me away!"
+
+The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the
+recollection of the love that had been given to him, and never
+returned, touched the heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing
+had touched it since the day of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke
+from him. He looked at her, and hesitated.
+
+"Let me stay," she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.
+
+"It will only distress you," he whispered back.
+
+"Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from _you_!"
+
+He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.
+
+"If I let you stay a little--?"
+
+"Yes! yes!"
+
+"Will you go when I tell you?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"On your oath?"
+
+The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for
+a moment in the great outburst of anxiety which forced that
+question to his lips. He spoke those startling words as he had
+spoken no words yet.
+
+"On my oath!" she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the
+bedside, passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the
+room turned their heads away by common consent. In the silence
+that followed, the one sound stirring was the small sound of
+the child's toy, as he moved it hither and thither on the bed.
+
+The doctor was the first who broke the spell of stillness which
+had fallen on all the persons present. He approached the patient,
+and examined him anxiously. Mrs. Armadale rose from her knees;
+and, first waiting for her husband's permission, carried
+the sheets of manuscript which she had taken out of the desk
+to the table at which Mr. Neal was waiting. Flushed and eager,
+more beautiful than ever in the vehement agitation which still
+possessed her, she stooped over him as she put the letter into
+his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a woman's
+headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to him,
+"Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!" Her
+eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on
+his cheek. Before he could answer, before he could think, she was
+back with her husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that
+instant her beauty had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning
+in reluctant acknowledgment of his own inability to resist her,
+he turned over the leaves of the letter; looked at the blank
+place where the pen had dropped from the writer's hand and had
+left a blot on the paper; turned back again to the beginning,
+and said the words, in the wife's interest, which the wife
+herself had put into his lips.
+
+"Perhaps, sir, you may wish to make some corrections," he began,
+with all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with
+every outward appearance of letting his sour temper again get the
+better of him. "Shall I read over to you what you have already
+written?"
+
+Mrs. Armadale, sitting at the bed head on one side, and the
+doctor, with his fingers on the patient's pulse, sitting on
+the other, waited with widely different anxieties for the answer
+to Mr. Neal's question. Mr. Armadale's eyes turned searchingly
+from his child to his wife.
+
+"You _will_ hear it?" he said. Her breath came and went quickly;
+her hand stole up and took his; she bowed her head in silence.
+Her husband paused, taking secret counsel with his thoughts, and
+keeping his eyes fixed on his wife. At last he decided, and gave
+the answer. "Read it," he said, "and stop when I tell you."
+
+It was close on one o'clock, and the bell was ringing which
+summoned the visitors to their early dinner at the inn. The quick
+beat of footsteps, and the gathering hum of voices outside,
+penetrated gayly into the room, as Mr. Neal spread the manuscript
+before him on the table, and read the opening sentences in these
+words:
+
+
+"I address this letter to my son, when my son is of an age to
+understand it. Having lost all hope of living to see my boy grow
+up to manhood, I have no choice but to write here what I would
+fain have said to him at a future time with my own lips.
+
+"I have three objects in writing. First, to reveal the
+circumstances which attended the marriage of an English lady of
+my acquaintance, in the island of Madeira. Secondly, to throw the
+true light on the death of her husband a short time afterward, on
+board the French timber ship _La Grace de Dieu_. Thirdly, to warn
+my son of a danger that lies in wait for him--a danger that will
+rise from his father's grave when the earth has closed over his
+father's ashes.
+
+"The story of the English lady's marriage begins with my
+inheriting the great Armadale property, and my taking the fatal
+Armadale name.
+
+"I am the only surviving son of the late Mathew Wrentmore, of
+Barbadoes. I was born on our family estate in that island, and
+I lost my father when I was still a child. My mother was blindly
+fond of me; she denied me nothing, she let me live as I pleased.
+My boyhood and youth were passed in idleness and self-indulgence,
+among people--slaves and half-castes mostly--to whom my will was
+law. I doubt if there is a gentleman of my birth and station in
+all England as ignorant as I am at this moment. I doubt if there
+was ever a young man in this world whose passions were left so
+entirely without control of any kind as mine were in those early
+days.
+
+"My mother had a woman's romantic objection to my father's homely
+Christian name. I was christened Allan, after the name of a
+wealthy cousin of my father's--the late Allan Armadale--who
+possessed estates in our neighborhood, the largest and most
+productive in the island, and who consented to be my godfather by
+proxy. Mr. Armadale had never seen his West Indian property. He
+lived in England; and, after sending me the customary godfather's
+present, he held no further communication with my parents for
+years afterward. I was just twenty-one before we heard again from
+Mr. Armadale. On that occasion my mother received a letter from
+him asking if I was still alive, and offering no less (if I was)
+than to make me the heir to his West Indian property.
+
+"This piece of good fortune fell to me entirely through the
+misconduct of Mr. Armadale's son, an only child. The young man
+had disgraced himself beyond all redemption; had left his home
+an outlaw; and had been thereupon renounced by his father at once
+and forever. Having no other near male relative to succeed him,
+Mr. Armadale thought of his cousin's son and his own godson; and
+he offered the West Indian estate to me, and my heirs after me,
+on one condition--that I and my heirs should take his name. The
+proposal was gratefully accepted, and the proper legal measures
+were adopted for changing my name in the colony and in the mother
+country. By the next mail information reached Mr. Armadale that
+his condition had been complied with. The return mail brought
+news from the lawyers. The will had been altered in my favor,
+and in a week afterward the death of my benefactor had made me
+the largest proprietor and the richest man in Barbadoes.
+
+"This was the first event in the chain. The second event followed
+it six weeks afterward.
+
+"At that time there happened to be a vacancy in the clerk's
+office on the estate, and there came to fill it a young man about
+my own age who had recently arrived in the island. He announced
+himself by the name of Fergus Ingleby. My impulses governed me in
+everything; I knew no law but the law of my own caprice, and I
+took a fancy to the stranger the moment I set eyes on him. He had
+the manners of a gentleman, and he possessed the most attractive
+social qualities which, in my small experience, I had ever met
+with. When I heard that the written references to character which
+he had brought with him were pronounced to be unsatisfactory,
+I interfered, and insisted that he should have the place. My will
+was law, and he had it.
+
+"My mother disliked and distrusted Ingleby from the first. When
+she found the intimacy between us rapidly ripening; when she
+found me admitting this inferior to the closest companionship
+and confidence (I had lived with my inferiors all my life, and
+I liked it), she made effort after effort to part us, and failed
+in one and all. Driven to her last resources, she resolved to try
+the one chance left--the chance of persuading me to take a voyage
+which I had often thought of--a voyage to England.
+
+"Before she spoke to me on the subject, she resolved to interest
+me in the idea of seeing England, as I had never been interested
+yet. She wrote to an old friend and an old admirer of hers, the
+late Stephen Blanchard, of Thorpe Ambrose, in Norfolk--a
+gentleman of landed estate, and a widower with a grown-up family.
+After-discoveries informed me that she must have alluded to their
+former attachment (which was checked, I believe, by the parents
+on either side); and that, in asking Mr. Blanchard's welcome for
+her son when he came to England, she made inquiries about his
+daughter, which hinted at the chance of a marriage uniting the
+two families, if the young lady and I met and liked one another.
+We were equally matched in every respect, and my mother's
+recollection of her girlish attachment to Mr. Blanchard made the
+prospect of my marrying her old admirer's daughter the brightest
+and happiest prospect that her eyes could see. Of all this I knew
+nothing until Mr. Blanchard's answer arrived at Barbadoes. Then
+my mother showed me the letter, and put the temptation which was
+to separate me from Fergus Ingleby openly in my way.
+
+"Mr. Blanchard's letter was dated from the Island of Madeira. He
+was out of health, and he had been ordered there by the doctors
+to try the climate. His daughter was with him. After heartily
+reciprocating all my mother's hopes and wishes, he proposed (if I
+intended leaving Barbadoes shortly) that I should take Madeira on
+my way to England, and pay him a visit at his temporary residence
+in the island. If this could not be, he mentioned the time at
+which he expected to be back in England, when I might be sure
+of finding a welcome at his own house of Thorpe Ambrose. In
+conclusion, he apologized for not writing at greater length;
+explaining that his sight was affected, and that he had disobeyed
+the doctor's orders by yielding to the temptation of writing to
+his old friend with his own hand.
+
+"Kindly as it was expressed, the letter itself might have had
+little influence on me. But there was something else besides the
+letter; there was inclosed in it a miniature portrait of Miss
+Blanchard. At the back of the portrait, her father had written,
+half-jestingly, half-tenderly, 'I can't ask my daughter to spare
+my eyes as usual, without telling her of your inquiries, and
+putting a young lady's diffidence to the blush. So I send her
+in effigy (without her knowledge) to answer for herself. It is
+a good likeness of a good girl. If she likes your son--and if
+I like him, which I am sure I shall--we may yet live, my good
+friend, to see our children what we might once have been
+ourselves--man and wife.' My mother gave me the miniature with
+the letter. The portrait at once struck me--I can't say why, I
+can't say how--as nothing of the kind had ever struck me before.
+
+"Harder intellects than mine might have attributed the
+extraordinary impression produced on me to the disordered
+condition of my mind at that time; to the weariness of my own
+base pleasures which had been gaining on me for months past,
+to the undefined longing which that weariness implied for newer
+interests and fresher hopes than any that had possessed me yet.
+I attempted no such sober self-examination as this: I believed
+in destiny then, I believe in destiny now. It was enough for me
+to know--as I did know--that the first sense I had ever felt of
+something better in my nature than my animal self was roused by
+that girl's face looking at me from her picture as no woman's
+face had ever looked at me yet. In those tender eyes--in the
+chance of making that gentle creature my wife--I saw my destiny
+written. The portrait which had come into my hands so strangely
+and so unexpectedly was the silent messenger of happiness close
+at hand, sent to warn, to encourage, to rouse me before it was
+too late. I put the miniature under my pillow at night; I looked
+at it again the next morning. My conviction of the day before
+remained as strong as ever; my superstition (if you please to
+call it so) pointed out to me irresistibly the way on which
+I should go. There was a ship in port which was to sail for
+England in a fortnight, touching at Madeira. In that ship I took
+my passage."
+
+
+Thus far the reader had advanced with no interruption to disturb
+him. But at the last words the tones of another voice, low and
+broken, mingled with his own.
+
+"Was she a fair woman," asked the voice, "or dark, like me?"
+
+Mr. Neal paused, and looked up. The doctor was still at the bed
+head, with his fingers mechanically on the patient's pulse. The
+child, missing his midday sleep, was beginning to play languidly
+with his new toy. The father's eyes were watching him with a rapt
+and ceaseless attention. But one great change was visible in
+the listeners since the narrative had begun. Mrs. Armadale had
+dropped her hold of her husband's hand, and sat with her face
+steadily turned away from him The hot African blood burned red
+in her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question:
+"Was she a fair woman, or dark, like me?"
+
+"Fair," said her husband, without looking at her.
+
+Her hands, lying clasped together in her lap, wrung each other
+hard--she said no more. Mr. Neal's overhanging eyebrows lowered
+ominously as he returned to the narrative. He had incurred his
+own severe displeasure--he had caught himself in the act of
+secretly pitying her.
+
+
+"I have said"--the letter proceeded--"that Ingleby was admitted
+to my closest confidence. I was sorry to leave him; and I was
+distressed by his evident surprise and mortification when he
+heard that I was going away. In my own justification, I showed
+him the letter and the likeness, and told him the truth. His
+interest in the portrait seemed to be hardly inferior to my own.
+He asked me about Miss Blanchard's family and Miss Blanchard's
+fortune with the sympathy of a true friend; and he strengthened
+my regard for him, and my belief in him, by putting himself out
+of the question, and by generously encouraging me to persist in
+my new purpose. When we parted, I was in high health and spirits.
+Before we met again the next day, I was suddenly struck by an
+illness which threatened both my reason and my life.
+
+"I have no proof against Ingleby. There was more than one woman
+on the island whom I had wronged beyond all forgiveness, and
+whose vengeance might well have reached me at that time. I can
+accuse nobody. I can only say that my life was saved by my old
+black nurse; and that the woman afterward acknowledged having
+used the known negro antidote to a known negro poison in those
+parts. When my first days of convalescence came, the ship in
+which my passage had been taken had long since sailed. When
+I asked for Ingleby, he was gone. Proofs of his unpardonable
+misconduct in his situation were placed before me, which not even
+my partiality for him could resist. He had been turned out of
+the office in the first days of my illness, and nothing more was
+known of him but that he had left the island.
+
+"All through my sufferings the portrait had been under my pillow.
+All through my convalescence it was my one consolation when I
+remembered the past, and my one encouragement when I thought of
+the future. No words can describe the hold that first fancy had
+now taken of me--with time and solitude and suffering to help it.
+My mother, with all her interest in the match, was startled by
+the unexpected success of her own project. She had written to
+tell Mr. Blanchard of my illness, but had received no reply. She
+now offered to write again, if I would promise not to leave her
+before my recovery was complete. My impatience acknowledged no
+restraint. Another ship in port gave me another chance of leaving
+for Madeira. Another examination of Mr. Blanchard's letter of
+invitation assured me that I should find him still in the island,
+if I seized my opportunity on the spot. In defiance of my
+mother's entreaties, I insisted on taking my passage in the
+second ship--and this time, when the ship sailed, I was on board.
+
+"The change did me good; the sea-air made a man of me again.
+After an unusually rapid voyage, I found myself at the end of
+my pilgrimage. On a fine, still evening which I can never forget,
+I stood alone on the shore, with her likeness in my bosom, and
+saw the white walls of the house where I knew that she lived.
+
+"I strolled round the outer limits of the grounds to compose
+myself before I went in. Venturing through a gate and a
+shrubbery, I looked into the garden, and saw a lady there,
+loitering alone on the lawn. She turned her face toward me--and I
+beheld the original of my portrait, the fulfillment of my dream!
+It is useless, and worse than useless, to write of it now. Let me
+only say that every promise which the likeness had made to my
+fancy the living woman kept to my eyes in the moment when they
+first looked on her. Let me say this--and no more.
+
+"I was too violently agitated to trust myself in her presence.
+I drew back undiscovered, and, making my way to the front door of
+the house, asked for her father first. Mr. Blanchard had retired
+to his room, and could see nobody. Upon that I took courage, and
+asked for Miss Blanchard. The servant smiled. 'My young lady is
+not Miss Blanchard any longer, sir,' he said. 'She is married.'
+Those words would have struck some men, in my position, to
+the earth. They fired my hot blood, and I seized the servant
+by the throat, in a frenzy of rage 'It's a lie!' I broke out,
+speaking to him as if he had been one of the slaves on my own
+estate.  'It's the truth,' said the man, struggling with me;
+'her husband is in the house at this moment.' 'Who is he, you
+scoundrel?'The servant answered by repeating my own name, to
+my own face: '_Allan Armadale_.'
+
+"You can now guess the truth. Fergus Ingleby was the outlawed son
+whose name and whose inheritance I had taken. And Fergus Ingleby
+was even with me for depriving him of his birthright.
+
+"Some account of the manner in which the deception had been
+carried out is necessary to explain--I don't say to justify--the
+share I took in the events that followed my arrival at Madeira.
+
+"By Ingleby's own confession, he had come to Barbadoes--knowing
+of his father's death and of my succession to the estates--with
+the settled purpose of plundering and injuring me. My rash
+confidence put such an opportunity into his hands as he could
+never have hoped for. He had waited to possess himself of
+the letter which my mother wrote to Mr. Blanchard at the outset
+of my illness--had then caused his own dismissal from his
+situation--and had sailed for Madeira in the very ship that was
+to have sailed with me. Arrived at the island, he had waited
+again till the vessel was away once more on her voyage, and had
+then presented himself at Mr. Blanchard's--not in the assumed
+name by which I shall continue to speak of him here, but in the
+name which was as certainly his as mine, 'Allan Armadale.' The
+fraud at the outset presented few difficulties. He had only an
+ailing old man (who had not seen my mother for half a lifetime)
+and an innocent, unsuspicious girl (who had never seen her at
+all) to deal with; and he had learned enough in my service to
+answer the few questions that were put to him as readily as
+I might have answered them myself. His looks and manners, his
+winning ways with women, his quickness and cunning, did the rest.
+While I was still on my sickbed, he had won Miss Blanchard's
+affections. While I was dreaming over the likeness in the first
+days of my convalescence, he had secured Mr. Blanchard's consent
+to the celebration of the marriage before he and his daughter
+left the island.
+
+"Thus far Mr. Blanchard's infirmity of sight had helped the
+deception. He had been content to send messages to my mother, and
+to receive the messages which were duly invented in return. But
+when the suitor was accepted, and the wedding-day was appointed,
+he felt it due to his old friend to write to her, asking her
+formal consent and inviting her to the marriage. He could only
+complete part of the letter himself; the rest was finished, under
+his dictation, by Miss Blanchard. There was no chance of being
+beforehand with the post-office this time; and Ingleby, sure of
+his place in the heart of his victim, waylaid her as she came out
+of her father's room with the letter, and privately told her the
+truth. She was still under age, and the position was a serious
+one. If the letter was posted, no resource would be left but to
+wait and be parted forever, or to elope under circumstances which
+made detection almost a certainty. The destination of any ship
+which took them away would be known beforehand; and the
+fast-sailing yacht in which Mr. Blanchard had come to Madeira was
+waiting in the harbor to take him back to England. The only other
+alternative was to continue the deception by suppressing the
+letter, and to confess the truth when they were securely married.
+What arts of persuasion Ingleby used--what base advantage he
+might previously have taken of her love and her trust in him to
+degrade Miss Blanchard to his own level--I cannot say. He did
+degrade her. The letter never went to its destination; and, with
+the daughter's privity and consent, the father's confidence was
+abused to the very last.
+
+"The one precaution now left to take was to fabricate the answer
+from my mother which Mr. Blanchard expected, and which would
+arrive in due course of post before the day appointed for
+the marriage. Ingleby had my mother's stolen letter with him;
+but he was without the imitative dexterity which would have
+enabled him to make use of it for a forgery of her handwriting.
+Miss Blanchard, who had consented passively to the deception,
+refused to take any active share in the fraud practiced on her
+father. In this difficulty, Ingleby found an instrument ready to
+his hand in an orphan girl of barely twelve years old, a marvel
+of precocious ability, whom Miss Blanchard had taken a romantic
+fancy to befriend and whom she had brought away with her from
+England to be trained as her maid. That girl's wicked dexterity
+removed the one serious obstacle left to the success of
+the fraud. I saw the imitation of my mother's writing which she
+had produced under Ingleby's instructions and (if the shameful
+truth must be told) with her young mistress's knowledge--and
+I believe I should have been deceived by it myself. I saw
+the girl afterward--and my blood curdled at the sight of her.
+If she is alive now, woe to the people who trust her! No creature
+more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever walked
+this earth.
+
+"The forged letter paved the way securely for the marriage;
+and when I reached the house, they were (as the servant had
+truly told me) man and wife. My arrival on the scene simply
+precipitated the confession which they had both agreed to make.
+Ingleby's own lips shamelessly acknowledged the truth. He had
+nothing to lose by speaking out--he was married, and his wife's
+fortune was beyond her father's control. I pass over all that
+followed--my interview with the daughter, and my interview with
+the father--to come to results. For two days the efforts of the
+wife, and the efforts of the clergyman who had celebrated the
+marriage, were successful in keeping Ingleby and myself apart. On
+the third day I set my trap more successfully, and I and the man
+who had mortally injured me met together alone, face to face.
+
+"Remember how my confidence had been abused; remember how the one
+good purpose of my life had been thwarted; remember the violent
+passions rooted deep in my nature, and never yet controlled--and
+then imagine for yourself what passed between us. All I need tell
+here is the end. He was a taller and a stronger man than I, and
+he took his brute's advantage with a brute's ferocity. He struck
+me.
+
+"Think of the injuries I had received at that man's hands, and
+then think of his setting his mark on my face by a blow!
+
+"I went to an English officer who had been my fellow-passenger
+on the voyage from Barbadoes. I told him the truth, and he agreed
+with me that a meeting was inevitable. Dueling had its received
+formalities and its established laws in those days; and he began
+to speak of them. I stopped him. 'I will take a pistol in my
+right hand,' I said, 'and he shall take a pistol in his: I will
+take one end of a handkerchief in my left hand, and he shall take
+the other end in his; and across that handkerchief the duel shall
+be fought.' The officer got up, and looked at me as if I had
+personally insulted him. 'You are asking me to be present at a
+murder and a suicide,' he said; 'I decline to serve you.' He left
+the room. As soon as he was gone I wrote down the words I had
+said to the officer and sent them by a messenger to Ingleby.
+While I was waiting for an answer, I sat down before the glass,
+and looked at his mark on my face. 'Many a man has had blood on
+his hands and blood on his conscience,' I thought, 'for less than
+this.'
+
+"The messenger came back with Ingleby's answer. It appointed a
+meeting for three o'clock the next day, at a lonely place in the
+interior of the island. I had resolved what to do if he refused;
+his letter released me from the horror of my own resolution.
+I felt grateful to him--yes, absolutely grateful to him--for
+writing it.
+
+"The next day I went to the place. He was not there. I waited two
+hours, and he never came. At last the truth dawned on me. 'Once
+a coward, always a coward,' I thought. I went back to Mr.
+Blanchard's house. Before I got there, a sudden misgiving seized
+me, and I turned aside to the harbor. I was right; the harbor was
+the place to go to. A ship sailing for Lisbon that afternoon had
+offered him the opportunity of taking a passage for himself and
+his wife, and escaping me. His answer to my challenge had served
+its purpose of sending me out of the way into the interior of
+the island. Once more I had trusted in Fergus Ingleby, and once
+more those sharp wits of his had been too much for me.
+
+"I asked my informant if Mr. Blanchard was aware as yet of
+his daughter's departure. He had discovered it, but not until
+the ship had sailed. This time I took a lesson in cunning from
+Ingleby. Instead of showing myself at Mr. Blanchard's house,
+I went first and looked at Mr. Blanchard's yacht.
+
+"The vessel told me what the vessel's master might have
+concealed--the truth. I found her in the confusion of a sudden
+preparation for sea. All the crew were on board, with the
+exception of some few who had been allowed their leave on shore,
+and who were away in the interior of the island, nobody knew
+where. When I discovered that the sailing-master was trying in,
+to supply their places with the best men he could pick up at
+a moment's notice, my resolution was instantly taken. I knew
+the duties on board a yacht well enough, having had a vessel
+of my own, and having sailed her myself. Hurrying into the town,
+I changed my dress for a sailor's coat and hat, and, returning
+to the harbor, I offered myself as one of the volunteer crew.
+I don't know what the sailing-master saw in my face. My answers
+to his questions satisfied him, and yet he looked at me and
+hesitated. But hands were scarce, and it ended in my being taken
+on board. An hour later Mr. Blanchard joined us, and was assisted
+into the cabin, suffering pitiably in mind and body both. An hour
+after that we were at sea, with a starless night overhead, and
+a fresh breeze behind us.
+
+"As I had surmised, we were in pursuit of the vessel in which
+Ingleby and his wife had left the island that afternoon. The ship
+was French, and was employed in the timber trade: her name was
+_La Grace de Dieu_. Nothing more was known of her than that she
+was bound for Lisbon; that she had been driven out of her course;
+and that she had touched at Madeira, short of men and short of
+provisions. The last want had been supplied, but not the first.
+Sailors distrusted the sea-worthiness of the ship, and disliked
+the look of the vagabond crew. When those two serious facts had
+been communicated to Mr. Blanchard, the hard words he had spoken
+to his child in the first shock of discovering that she had
+helped to deceive him smote him to the heart. He instantly
+determined to give his daughter a refuge on board his own vessel,
+and to quiet her by keeping her villain of a husband out of the
+way of all harm at my hands. The yacht sailed three feet and more
+to the ship's one. There was no doubt of our overtaking _La Grace
+de Dieu_; the only fear was that we might pass her in the
+darkness.
+
+"After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly
+dropped, and there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the
+order came to get the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large
+sails, we all knew what to expect. In little better than an hour
+more, the storm was upon us, the thunder was pealing over our
+heads, and the yacht was running for it. She was a powerful
+schooner-rigged vessel of three hundred tons, as strong as wood
+and iron could make her; she was handled by a sailing-master who
+thoroughly understood his work, and she behaved nobly. As the new
+morning came, the fury of the wind, blowing still from the
+southwest quarter, subsided a little, and the sea was less heavy.
+Just before daybreak we heard faintly, through the howling of the
+gale, the report of a gun. The men collected anxiously on deck,
+looked at each other, and said: 'There she is!'
+
+"With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber-ship it was.
+She lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her
+mainmast both gone--a water-logged wreck. The yacht carried three
+boats; one amidships, and two slung to davits on the quarters;
+and the sailing-master, seeing signs of the storm renewing its
+fury before long, determined on lowering the quarter-boats while
+the lull lasted. Few as the people were on board the wreck, they
+were too many for one boat, and the risk of trying two boats at
+once was thought less, in the critical state of the weather, than
+the risk of making two separate trips from the yacht to the ship.
+There might be time to make one trip in safety, but no man could
+look at the heavens and say there would be time enough for two.
+
+"The boats were manned by volunteers from the crew, I being in
+the second of the two. When the first boat was got alongside of
+the timber-ship--a service of difficulty and danger which no
+words can describe--all the men on board made a rash to leave the
+wreck together. If the boat had not been pulled off again before
+the whole of them had crowded in, the lives of all must have been
+sacrificed. As our boat approached the vessel in its turn, we
+arranged that four of us should get on board--two (I being one of
+them) to see to the safety of Mr. Blanchard's daughter, and two
+to beat back the cowardly remnant of the crew if they tried
+to crowd in first. The other three--the coxswain and two
+oarsmen--were left in the boat to keep her from being crushed by
+the ship. What the others saw when they first boarded _La Grace
+de Dieu_ I don't know; what I saw was the woman whom I had lost,
+the woman vilely stolen from me, lying in a swoon on the deck.
+We lowered her, insensible, into the boat. The remnant of the
+crew--five in number--were compelled by main force to follow her
+in an orderly manner, one by one, and minute by minute, as the
+chance offered for safely taking them in. I was the last who
+left; and, at the next roll of the ship toward us, the empty
+length of the deck, without a living creature on it from stem
+to stern, told the boat's crew that their work was done. With
+the louder and louder howling of the fast-rising tempest to warn
+them, they rowed for their lives back to the yacht.
+
+"A succession of heavy squalls had brought round the course of
+the new storm that was coming, from the south to the north; and
+the sailing-master, watching his opportunity, had wore the yacht
+to be ready for it. Before the last of our men had got on board
+again, it burst on us with the fury of a hurricane. Our boat was
+swamped, but not a life was lost. Once more we ran before it,
+due south, at the mercy of the wind. I was on deck with the rest,
+watching the one rag of sail we could venture to set, and waiting
+to supply its place with another, if it blew out of the
+bolt-ropes, when the mate came close to me, and shouted in my ear
+through the thunder of the storm: 'She has come to her senses in
+the cabin, and has asked for her husband. Where is he?' Not a man
+on board knew. The yacht was searched from one end to another
+without finding him. The men were mustered in defiance of the
+weather--he was not among them. The crews of the two boats were
+questioned. All the first crew could say was that they had pulled
+away from the wreck when the rush into their boat took place, and
+that they knew nothing of whom they let in or whom they kept out.
+All the second crew could say was that they had brought back to
+the yacht every living soul left by the first boat on the deck of
+the timber-ship. There was no blaming anybody; but, at the same
+time, there was no resisting the fact that the man was missing.
+
+"All through that day the storm, raging unabatedly, never gave us
+even the shadow of a chance of returning and searching the wreck.
+The one hope for the yacht was to scud. Toward evening the gale,
+after having carried us to the southward of Madeira, began at
+last to break--the wind shifted again--and allowed us to bear up
+for the island. Early the next morning we got back into port. Mr.
+Blanchard and his daughter were taken ashore, the sailing-master
+accompanying them, and warning us that he should have something
+to say on his return which would nearly concern the whole crew.
+
+"We were mustered on deck, and addressed by the sailing-master as
+soon as he came on board again. He had Mr. Blanchard's orders to
+go back at once to the timber-ship and to search for the missing
+man. We were bound to do this for his sake, and for the sake
+of his wife, whose reason was despaired of by the doctors if
+something was not done to quiet her. We might be almost sure of
+finding the vessel still afloat, for her ladling of timber would
+keep her above water as long as her hull held together. If the
+man was on board--living or dead--he must be found and brought
+back. And if the weather continued to be moderate, there was no
+reason why the men, with proper assistance, should not bring the
+ship back, too, and (their master being quite willing) earn their
+share of the salvage with the officers of the yacht.
+
+"Upon this the crew gave three cheers, and set to work forthwith
+to get the schooner to sea again. I was the only one of them who
+drew back from the enterprise. I told them the storm had upset
+me--I was ill, and wanted rest. They all looked me in the face as
+I passed through them on my way out of the yacht, but not a man
+of them spoke to me.
+
+"I waited through that day at a tavern on the port for the first
+news from the wreck. It was brought toward night-fall by one
+of the pilot-boats which had taken part in the enterprise--a
+successful enterprise, as the event proved--for saving the
+abandoned ship. _La Grace de Dieu_ had been discovered still
+floating, and the body of Ingleby had been found on board,
+drowned in the cabin. At dawn the next morning the dead man was
+brought back by the yacht; and on the same day the funeral took
+place in the Protestant cemetery."
+
+
+"Stop!" said the voice from the bed, before the reader could turn
+to a new leaf and begin the next paragraph.
+
+There was a change in the room, and there were changes in the
+audience, since Mr. Neal had last looked up from the narrative.
+A ray of sunshine was crossing the death-bed; and the child,
+overcome by drowsiness, lay peacefully asleep in the golden
+light. The father's countenance had altered visibly. Forced into
+action by the tortured mind, the muscles of the lower face, which
+had never moved yet, were moving distortedly now. Warned by the
+damps gathering heavily on his forehead, the doctor had risen to
+revive the sinking man. On the other side of the bed the wife's
+chair stood empty. At the moment when her husband had interrupted
+the reading, she had drawn back behind the bed head, out of his
+sight. Supporting herself against the wall, she stood there in
+hiding, her eyes fastened in hungering suspense on the manuscript
+in Mr. Neal's hand.
+
+In a minute more the silence was broken again by Mr. Armadale.
+
+"Where is she?" he asked, looking angrily at his wife's empty
+chair. The doctor pointed to the place. She had no choice but
+to come forward. She came slowly and stood before him.
+
+"You promised to go when I told you," he said. "Go now."
+
+Mr. Neal tried hard to control his hand as it kept his place
+between the leaves of the manuscripts but it trembled in spite
+of him. A suspicion which had been slowly forcing itself on
+his mind, while he was reading, became a certainty when he heard
+those words. From one revelation to another the letter had gone
+on, until it had now reached the brink of a last disclosure to
+come. At that brink the dying man had predetermined to silence
+the reader's voice, before he had permitted his wife to hear the
+narrative read. There was the secret which the son was to know
+in after years, and which the mother was never to approach. From
+that resolution, his wife's tenderest pleadings had never moved
+him an inch--and now, from his own lips, his wife knew it.
+
+She made him no answer. She stood there and looked at him; looked
+her last entreaty--perhaps her last farewell. His eyes gave her
+back no answering glance: they wandered from her mercilessly to
+the sleeping boy. She turned speechless from the bed. Without
+a look at the child--without a word to the two strangers
+breathlessly watching her--she kept the promise she had given,
+and in dead silence left the room.
+
+There was something in the manner of her departure which shook
+the self-possession of both the men who witnessed it. When the
+door closed on her, they recoiled instinctively from advancing
+further in the dark. The doctor's reluctance was the first to
+express itself. He attempted to obtain the patient's permission
+to withdraw until the letter was completed. The patient refused.
+
+Mr. Neal spoke next at greater length and to more serious
+purpose.
+
+"The doctor is accustomed in his profession," he began, "and I am
+accustomed in mine, to have the secrets of others placed in our
+keeping. But it is my duty, before we go further, to ask if you
+really understand the extraordinary position which we now occupy
+toward one another. You have just excluded Mrs. Armadale, before
+our own eyes, from a place in your confidence. And you are now
+offering that same place to two men who are total strangers to
+you."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Armadale, "_because_ you are strangers."
+
+Few as the words were, the inference to be drawn from them was
+not of a nature to set distrust at rest. Mr. Neal put it plainly
+into words.
+
+"You are in urgent need of my help and of the doctor's help," he
+said. "Am I to understand (so long as you secure our assistance)
+that the impression which the closing passages of this letter may
+produce on us is a matter of indifference to you?"
+
+"Yes. I don't spare you. I don't spare myself. I _do_ spare my
+wife."
+
+"You force me to a conclusion, sir, which is a very serious one,"
+said Mr. Neal. "If I am to finish this letter under your
+dictation, I must claim permission--having read aloud the greater
+part of it already--to read aloud what remains, in the hearing
+of this gentleman, as a witness."
+
+"Read it."
+
+Gravely doubting, the doctor resumed his chair. Gravely doubting,
+Mr. Neal turned the leaf, and read the next words:
+
+
+"There is more to tell before I can leave the dead man to
+his rest. I have described the finding of his body. But I have
+not described the circumstances under which he met his death.
+
+"He was known to have been on deck when the yacht's boats were
+seen approaching the wreck; and he was afterward missed in the
+confusion caused by the panic of the crew. At that time the water
+was five feet deep in the cabin, and was rising fast. There was
+little doubt of his having gone down into that water of his own
+accord. The discovery of his wife's jewel box, close under him,
+on the floor, explained his presence in the cabin. He was known
+to have seen help approaching, and it was quite likely that he
+had thereupon gone below to make an effort at saving the box. It
+was less probable--though it might still have been inferred--that
+his death was the result of some accident in diving, which had
+for the moment deprived him of his senses. But a discovery made
+by the yacht's crew pointed straight to a conclusion which struck
+the men, one and all, with the same horror. When the course of
+their search brought them to the cabin, they found the scuttle
+bolted, and the door locked on the outside. Had some one closed
+the cabin, not knowing he was there? Setting the panic-stricken
+condition of the crew out of the question, there was no motive
+for closing the cabin before leaving the wreck. But one other
+conclusion remained. Had some murderous hand purposely locked
+the man in, and left him to drown as the water rose over him?
+
+"Yes. A murderous hand had locked him in, and left him to drown.
+That hand was mine. "
+
+
+The Scotchman started up from the table; the doctor shrank from
+the bedside. The two looked at the dying wretch, mastered by the
+same loathing, chilled by the same dread. He lay there, with his
+child's head on his breast; abandoned by the sympathies of man,
+accursed by the justice of God--he lay there, in the isolation
+of Cain, and looked back at them.
+
+At the moment when the two men rose to their feet, the door
+leading into the next room was shaken heavily on the outer side,
+and a sound like the sound of a fall, striking dull on their
+ears, silenced them both. Standing nearest to the door, the
+doctor opened it, passed through, and closed it instantly. Mr.
+Neal turned his back on the bed, and waited the event in silence.
+The sound, which had failed to awaken the child, had failed also
+to attract the father's notice. His own words had taken him far
+from all that was passing at his deathbed. His helpless body was
+back on the wreck, and the ghost of his lifeless hand was turning
+the lock of the cabin door.
+
+A bell rang in the next room--eager voices talked; hurried
+footsteps moved in it--an interval passed, and the doctor
+returned. "Was she listening?" whispered Mr. Neal, in German.
+"The women are restoring her," the doctor whispered back. "She
+has heard it all. In God's name, what are we to do next?" Before
+it was possible to reply, Mr. Armadale spoke. The doctor's return
+had roused him to a sense of present things.
+
+"Go on," he said, as if nothing had happened.
+
+"I refuse to meddle further with your infamous secret," returned
+Mr. Neal. "You are a murderer on your own confession. If that
+letter is to be finished, don't ask _me_ to hold the pen for
+you."
+
+"You gave me your promise," was the reply, spoken with the same
+immovable self-possession. "You must write for me, or break your
+word."
+
+For the moment, Mr. Neal was silenced. There the man
+lay--sheltered from the execration of his fellow-creatures, under
+the shadow of Death--beyond the reach of all human condemnation,
+beyond the dread of all mortal laws; sensitive to nothing but his
+one last resolution to finish the letter addressed to his son.
+
+Mr. Neal drew the doctor aside. "A word with you," he said, in
+German. "Do you persist in asserting that he may be speechless
+before we can send to Stuttgart?"
+
+"Look at his lips," said the doctor, "and judge for yourself."
+
+His lips answered for him: the reading of the narrative had left
+its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his
+mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the
+room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation labored more
+and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was
+emphatically a terrible one. After a moment more of hesitation,
+Mr. Neal made a last attempt to withdraw from it.
+
+"Now my eyes are open," he said, sternly, "do you dare hold me
+to an engagement which you forced on me blindfold?"
+
+"No," answered Mr. Armadale. "I leave you to break your word."
+
+The look which accompanied that reply stung the Scotchman's pride
+to the quick. When he spoke next, he spoke seated in his former
+place at the table.
+
+"No man ever yet said of me that I broke my word," he retorted,
+angrily; "and not even you shall say it of me now. Mind this!
+If you hold me to my promise, I hold you to my condition. I have
+reserved my freedom of action, and I warn you I will use it at
+my own sole discretion, as soon as I am released from the sight
+of you."
+
+"Remember he is dying," pleaded the doctor, gently.
+
+"Take your place, sir," said Mr. Neal, pointing to the empty
+chair. "What remains to be read, I will only read in your
+hearing. What remains to be written, I will only write in your
+presence. _You_ brought me here. I have a right to insist--and
+I do insist--on your remaining as a witness to the last."
+
+The doctor accepted his position without remonstrance. Mr. Neal
+returned to the manuscript, and read what remained of it
+uninterruptedly to the end:
+
+
+"Without a word in my own defense, I have acknowledged my guilt.
+Without a word in my own defense, I will reveal how the crime was
+committed.
+
+"No thought of him was in my mind, when I saw his wife insensible
+on the deck of the timber-ship. I did my part in lowering her
+safely into the boat. Then, and not till then, I felt the thought
+of him coming back. In the confusion that prevailed while the men
+of the yacht were forcing the men of the ship to wait their time,
+I had an opportunity of searching for him unobserved. I stepped
+back from the bulwark, not knowing whether he was away in the
+first boat, or whether he was still on board--I stepped back,
+and saw him mount the cabin stairs empty-handed, with the water
+dripping from him. After looking eagerly toward the boat (without
+noticing me), he saw there was time to spare before the crew were
+taken. 'Once more!' he said to himself--and disappeared again, to
+make a last effort at recovering the jewel box. The devil at my
+elbow whispered, 'Don't shoot him like a man: drown him like a
+dog!' He was under water when I bolted the scuttle. But his head
+rose to the surface before I could close the cabin door. I looked
+at him, and he looked at me--and I locked the door in his face.
+The next minute, I was back among the last men left on deck.
+The minute after, it was too late to repent. The storm was
+threatening us with destruction, and the boat's crew were pulling
+for their lives from the ship.
+
+"My son! I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which
+my love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why.
+
+"I will say nothing of my sufferings; I will plead for no mercy
+to my memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange
+trembling in my hand, while I write these lines, which warns me
+to hasten to the end. I left the island without daring to look
+for the last time at the woman whom I had lost so miserably, whom
+I had injured so vilely. When I left, the whole weight of the
+suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby's death rested on the
+crew of the French vessel. No motive for the supposed murder
+could be brought home to any of them; but they were known to be,
+for the most part, outlawed ruffians capable of any crime, and
+they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till
+afterward that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting
+round at last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague
+description given of the strange man who had made one of the
+yacht's crew, and who had disappeared the day afterward. The
+widow alone knew, from that time forth, why her husband had been
+murdered, and who had done the deed. When she made that
+discovery, a false report of my death had been previously
+circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the report
+for my immunity from all legal proceedings; perhaps (no eye but
+Ingleby's having seen me lock the cabin door) there was not
+evidence enough to justify an inquiry; perhaps the widow shrank
+from the disclosures which must have followed a public charge
+against me, based on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However
+it might be, the crime which I had committed unseen has remained
+a crime unpunished from that time to this.
+
+"I left Madeira for the West Indies in disguise. The first news
+that met me when the ship touched at Barbadoes was the news of
+my mother's death. I had no heart to return to the old scenes.
+The prospect of living at home in solitude, with the torment
+of my own guilty remembrances gnawing at me day and night,
+was more than I had the courage to confront. Without landing,
+or discovering myself to any one on shore, I went on as far
+as the ship would take me--to the island of Trinidad.
+
+"At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell
+her the truth--and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty
+to spare her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her
+happiness to such an existence as mine--and I did her the injury
+of marrying her. If she is alive when you read this, grant her
+the mercy of still concealing the truth. The one atonement I can
+make to her is to keep her unsuspicious to the last of the man
+she has married. Pity her, as I have pitied her. Let this letter
+be a sacred confidence between father and son.
+
+"The time when you were born was the time when my health began
+to give way. Some months afterward, in the first days of my
+recovery, you were brought to me; and I was told that you had
+been christened during my illness. Your mother had done as other
+loving mothers do--she had christened her first-born by his
+father's name. You, too, were Allan Armadale. Even in that early
+time--even while I was happily ignorant of what I have discovered
+since--my mind misgave me when I looked at you, and thought of
+that fatal name.
+
+"As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my
+estates in Barbadoes. It crossed my mind--wild as the idea may
+appear to you--to renounce the condition which compelled my son
+as well as myself to take the Armadale name, or lose the
+succession to the Armadale property. But, even in those days,
+the rumor of a contemplated emancipation of the slaves--the
+emancipation which is now close at hand--was spreading widely
+in the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian
+property might be affected if that threatened change ever took
+place. No man could tell--if I gave you back my own paternal
+name, and left you without other provision in the future than
+my own paternal estate--how you might one day miss the broad
+Armadale acres, or to what future penury I might be blindly
+condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how the fatalities
+gathered one on the other! Mark how your Christian name came
+to you, how your surname held to you, in spite of me!
+
+"My health had improved in my old home--but it was for a time
+only. I sank again, and the doctors ordered me to Europe.
+Avoiding England (why, you may guess), I took my passage, with
+you and your mother, for France. From France we passed into
+Italy. We lived here; we lived there. It was useless. Death had
+got met and Death followed me, go where I might. I bore it, for
+I had an alleviation to turn to which I had not deserved. You may
+shrink in horror from the very memory of me now. In those days,
+you comforted me. The only warmth I still felt at my heart was
+the warmth you brought to it. My last glimpses of happiness in
+this world were the glimpses given me by my infant son.
+
+"We removed from Italy, and went next to Lausanne--the place
+from which I am now writing to you. The post of this morning has
+brought me news, later and fuller than any I had received thus
+far, of the widow of the murdered man. The letter lies before me
+while I write. It comes from a friend of my early days, who has
+seen her, and spoken to her--who has been the first to inform her
+that the report of my death in Madeira was false. He writes, at
+a loss to account for the violent agitation which she showed on
+hearing that I was still alive, that I was married, and that I
+had an infant son. He asks me if I can explain it. He speaks in
+terms of sympathy for her--a young and beautiful woman, buried
+in the retirement of a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast;
+her father dead; her family estranged from her, in merciless
+disapproval of her marriage. He writes words which might have cut
+me to the heart, but for a closing passage in his letter, which
+seized my whole attention the instant I came to it, and which has
+forced from me the narrative that these pages contain.
+
+"I now know what never even entered my mind as a suspicion till
+the letter reached me. I now know that the widow of the man whose
+death lies at my door has borne a posthumous child. That child
+is a boy--a year older than my own son. Secure in her belief in
+my death, his mother has done what my son's mother did: she has
+christened her child by his father's name. Again, in the second
+generation, there are two Allan Armadales as there were in the
+first. After working its deadly mischief with the fathers, the
+fatal resemblance of names has descended to work its deadly
+mischief with the sons.
+
+"Guiltless minds may see nothing thus far but the result of
+a series of events which could lead no other way. I--with that
+man's life to answer for--I, going down into my grave, with my
+crime unpunished and unatoned, see what no guiltless minds can
+discern. I see danger in the future, begotten of the danger in
+the past--treachery that is the offspring of _his_ treachery,
+and crime that is the child of _my_ crime. Is the dread that now
+shakes me to the soul a phantom raised by the superstition of a
+dying man? I look into the Book which all Christendom venerates,
+and the Book tells me that the sin of the father shall be visited
+on the child. I look out into the world, and I see the living
+witnesses round me to that terrible truth. I see the vices which
+have contaminated the father descending, and contaminating
+the child; I see the shame which has disgraced the father's name
+descending, and disgracing the child's. I look in on myself, and
+I see my crime ripening again for the future in the self-same
+circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the past,
+and descending, in inherited contamination of evil, from me
+to my son."
+
+
+At those lines the writing ended. There the stroke had struck
+him, and the pen had dropped from his hand.
+
+He knew the place; he remembered the words. At the instant when
+the reader's voice stopped, he looked eagerly at the doctor.
+"I have got what comes next in my mind," he said, with slower
+and slower articulation. "Help me to speak it."
+
+The doctor administered a stimulant, and signed to Mr. Neal to
+give him time. After a little delay, the flame of the sinking
+spirit leaped up in his eyes once more. Resolutely struggling
+with his failing speech, he summoned the Scotchman to take the
+pen, and pronounced the closing sentences of the narrative, as
+his memory gave them back to him, one by one, in these words:
+
+
+"Despise my dying conviction if you will, but grant me, I
+solemnly implore you, one last request. My son! the only hope
+I have left for you hangs on a great doubt--the doubt whether we
+are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that
+mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we
+all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is
+before death. If this be so, indeed, respect--though you respect
+nothing else--the warning which I give you from my grave. Never,
+to your dying day, let any living soul approach you who is
+associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your
+father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if
+the widow still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed
+the way to the marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And
+more than all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own.
+Offend your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has
+connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you,
+if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from
+him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between
+you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent
+to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof,
+and breathe the same air, with that man. Never let the two Allan
+Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!
+
+"There lies the way by which you may escape--if any way there be.
+Take it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness,
+through all your life to come!
+
+"I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than
+the influence of this confession to incline you to my will,
+I would have spared you the disclosure which these pages contain.
+You are lying on my breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a
+child, while a stranger's hand writes these words for you as they
+fall from my lips. Think what the strength of my conviction must
+be, when I can find the courage, on my death-bed, to darken all
+your young life at its outset with the shadow of your father's
+crime. Think, and be warned. Think, and forgive me if you can."
+
+
+There it ended. Those were the father's last words to the son.
+
+Inexorably faithful to his forced duty, Mr. Neal laid aside the
+pen, and read over aloud the lines he had just written. "Is there
+more to add?" he asked, with his pitilessly steady voice. There
+was no more to add.
+
+Mr. Neal folded the manuscript, inclosed it in a sheet of paper,
+and sealed it with Mr. Armadale's own seal. "The address?" he
+said, with his merciless business formality. "To Allan Armadale,
+junior," he wrote, as the words were dictated from the bed. "Care
+of Godfrey Hammick, Esq., Offices of Messrs. Hammick and Ridge,
+Lincoln's Inn Fields, London." Having written the address, he
+waited, and considered for a moment. "Is your executor to open
+this?" he asked.
+
+"No! he is to give it to my son when my son is of an age to
+understand it."
+
+"In that case," pursued Mr. Neal, with all his wits in
+remorseless working order, "I will add a dated note to the
+address, repeating your own words as you have just spoken them,
+and explaining the circumstances under which my handwriting
+appears on the document." He wrote the note in the briefest and
+plainest terms, read it over aloud as he had read over what went
+before, signed his name and address at the end, and made the
+doctor sign next, as witness of the proceedings, and as medical
+evidence of the condition in which Mr. Armadale then lay. This
+done, he placed the letter in a second inclosure, sealed it as
+before, and directed it to Mr. Hammick, with the superscription
+of "private" added to the address. "Do you insist on my posting
+this?" he asked, rising with the letter in his hand.
+
+"Give him time to think," said the doctor. "For the child's sake,
+give him time to think! A minute may change him."
+
+"I will give him five minutes," answered Mr. Neal, placing
+his watch on the table, implacable just to the very last.
+
+They waited, both looking attentively at Mr. Armadale. The signs
+of change which had appeared in him already were multiplying
+fast. The movement which continued mental agitation had
+communicated to the muscles of his face was beginning, under
+the same dangerous influence, to spread downward. His once
+helpless hands lay still no longer; they struggled pitiably on
+the bedclothes. At sight of that warning token, the doctor turned
+with a gesture of alarm, and beckoned Mr. Neal to come nearer.
+"Put the question at once," he said; "if you let the five minutes
+pass, you may be too late."
+
+Mr. Neal approached the bed. He, too, noticed the movement of
+the hands. "Is that a bad sign?" he asked.
+
+The doctor bent his head gravely. "Put your question at once,"
+he repeated, "or you may be too late."
+
+Mr. Neal held the letter before the eyes of the dying man "Do you
+know what this is?"
+
+"My letter."
+
+"Do you insist on my posting it?"
+
+He mastered his failing speech for the last time, and gave the
+answer: "Yes!"
+
+Mr. Neal moved to the door, with the letter in his hand. The
+German followed him a few steps, opened his lips to plead for a
+longer delay, met the Scotchman's inexorable eye, and drew back
+again in silence. The door closed and parted them, without a word
+having passed on either side.
+
+The doctor went back to the bed and whispered to the sinking man:
+"Let me call him back; there is time to stop him yet!" It was
+useless. No answer came; nothing showed that he heeded, or even
+heard. His eyes wandered from the child, rested for a moment on
+his own struggling hand, and looked up entreatingly in the
+compassionate face that bent over him. The doctor lifted the
+hand, paused, followed the father's longing eyes back to the
+child, and, interpreting his last wish, moved the hand gently
+toward the boy's head. The hand touched it, and trembled
+violently. In another instant the trembling seized on the arm,
+and spread over the whole upper part of the body. The face turned
+from pale to red, from red to purple, from purple to pale again.
+Then the toiling hands lay still, and the shifting color changed
+no more.
+
+
+The window of the next room was open, when the doctor entered it
+from the death chamber, with the child in his arms. He looked out
+as he passed by, and saw Mr. Neal in the street below, slowly
+returning to the inn.
+
+"Where is the letter?" he asked.
+
+Three words sufficed for the Scotchman's answer.
+
+"In the post."
+
+THE END OF THE PROLOGUE.
+
+
+
+THE STORY.
+
+_BOOK THE FIRST_.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE MYSTERY OF OZIAS MIDWINTER.
+
+ON a warm May night, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one,
+the Reverend Decimus Brock--at that time a visitor to the Isle of
+Man--retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious
+personal responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no
+distinct idea of the means by which he might relieve himself from
+the pressure of his present circumstances.
+
+The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life at
+which a sensible man learns to decline (as often as his temper
+will let him) all useless conflict with the tyranny of his own
+troubles. Abandoning any further effort to reach a decision in
+the emergency that now beset him, Mr. Brock sat down placidly in
+his shirt sleeves on the side of his bed, and applied his mind to
+consider next whether the emergency itself was as serious as he
+had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this new way
+out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly
+traveling to the end in view by the least inspiriting of all
+human journeys--a journey through the past years of his own life.
+
+One by one the events of those years--all connected with the same
+little group of characters, and all more or less answerable for
+the anxiety which was now intruding itself between the clergyman
+and his night's rest--rose, in progressive series, on Mr. Brock's
+memory. The first of the series took him back, through a period
+of fourteen years, to his own rectory on the Somersetshire shores
+of the Bristol Channel, and closeted him at a private interview
+with a lady who had paid him a visit in the character of a total
+stranger to the parson and the place.
+
+
+The lady's complexion was fair, the lady's figure was well
+preserved; she was still a young woman, and she looked even
+younger than her age. There was a shade of melancholy in her
+expression, and an undertone of suffering in her voice--enough,
+in each case, to indicate that she had known trouble, but not
+enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of others. She
+brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old, whom
+she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way, at the
+beginning of the interview, to amuse himself in the rectory
+garden. Her card had preceded her entrance into the study, and
+had announced her under the name of "Mrs. Armadale." Mr. Brock
+began to feel interested in her before she had opened her lips;
+and when the son had been dismissed, he awaited with some anxiety
+to hear what the mother had to say to him.
+
+Mrs. Armadale began by informing the rector that she was a widow.
+Her husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their
+union, on the voyage from Madeira to Lisbon. She had been brought
+to England, after her affliction, under her father's protection;
+and her child--a posthumous son--had been born on the family
+estate in Norfolk. Her father's death, shortly afterward, had
+deprived her of her only surviving parent, and had exposed her
+to neglect and misconstruction on the part of her remaining
+relatives (two brothers), which had estranged her from them, she
+feared, for the rest of her days. For some time past she had
+lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devoting herself
+to the education of her boy, who had now reached an age at which
+he required other than his mother's teaching. Leaving out of the
+question her own unwillingness to part with him, in her solitary
+position, she was especially anxious that he should not be thrown
+among strangers by being sent to school. Her darling project was
+to bring him up privately at home, and to keep him, as he
+advanced in years, from all contact with the temptations and the
+dangers of the world.
+
+With these objects in view, her longer sojourn in her own
+locality (where the services of the resident clergyman, in the
+capacity of tutor, were not obtainable) must come to an end. She
+had made inquiries, had heard of a house that would suit her in
+Mr. Brock's neighborhood, and had also been told that Mr. Brock
+himself had formerly been in the habit of taking pupils.
+Possessed of this information, she had ventured to present
+herself, with references that vouched for her respectability, but
+without a formal introduction; and she had now to ask whether (in
+the event of her residing in the neighborhood) any terms that
+could be offered would induce Mr. Brock to open his doors once
+more to a pupil, and to allow that pupil to be her son.
+
+If Mrs. Armadale had been a woman of no personal attractions, or
+if Mr. Brock had been provided with an intrenchment to fight
+behind in the shape of a wife, it is probable that the widow's
+journey might have been taken in vain. As things really were, the
+rector examined the references which were offered to him, and
+asked time for consideration. When the time had expired, he did
+what Mrs. Armadale wished him to do--he offered his back to the
+burden, and let the mother load him with the responsibility of
+the son.
+
+This was the first event of the series; the date of it being the
+year eighteen hundred and thirty-seven. Mr. Brock's memory,
+traveling forward toward the present from that point, picked up
+the second event in its turn, and stopped next at the year
+eighteen hundred and forty-five.
+
+-------------
+
+The fishing-village on the Somersetshire coast was still the
+scene, and the characters were once again--Mrs. Armadale and her
+son.
+
+Through the eight years that had passed, Mr. Brock's
+responsibility had rested on him lightly enough. The boy had
+given his mother and his tutor but little trouble. He was
+certainly slow over his books, but more from a constitutional
+inability to fix his attention on his tasks than from want of
+capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be
+denied, was heedless to the last degree: he acted recklessly on
+his first impulses, and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions.
+On the other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his
+disposition was open as the day; a more generous, affectionate,
+sweet-tempered lad it would have been hard to find anywhere. A
+certain quaint originality of character, and a natural
+healthiness in all his tastes, carried him free of most of the
+dangers to which his mother's system of education inevitably
+exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of the sea and of
+all that belongs to it; and as he grew in years, there was no
+luring him away from the water-side, and no keeping him out of
+the boat-builder's yard. In course of time his mother caught him
+actually working there, to her infinite annoyance and surprise,
+as a volunteer. He acknowledged that his whole future ambition
+was to have a yard of his own, and that his one present object
+was to learn to build a boat for himself. Wisely foreseeing that
+such a pursuit as this for his leisure hours was exactly what was
+wanted to reconcile the lad to a position of isolation from
+companions of his own rank and age, Mr. Brock prevailed on Mrs.
+Armadale, with no small difficulty, to let her son have his way.
+At the period of that second event in the clergyman's life with
+his pupil which is now to be related, young Armadale had
+practiced long enough in the builder's yard to have reached the
+summit of his wishes, by laying with his own hands the keel of
+his own boat.
+
+Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allan had completed
+his sixteenth year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the
+yard, and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking
+the _Times_ newspaper with him in his hand.
+
+The years that had passed since they had first met had long since
+regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbor. The first
+advances which Mr. Brock's growing admiration for the widow had
+led him to make in the early days of their intercourse had been
+met on her side by an appeal to his forbearance which had closed
+his lips for the future. She had satisfied him, at once and
+forever, that the one place in her heart which he could hope to
+occupy was the place of a friend. He loved her well enough to
+take what she would give him: friends they became, and friends
+they remained from that time forth. No jealous dread of another
+man's succeeding where he had failed imbittered the clergyman's
+placid relations with the woman whom he loved. Of the few
+resident gentlemen in the neighborhood, none were ever admitted
+by Mrs. Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her.
+Contentedly self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof
+against every social attraction that would have tempted other
+women in her position and at her age. Mr. Brock and his
+newspaper, appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea-table
+three times a week, told her all she knew or cared to know of the
+great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless
+limits of her daily life.
+
+On the evening in question Mr. Brock took the arm-chair in which
+he always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank,
+and opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs.
+Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same
+sofa, with the same sort of needle-work everlastingly in her
+hand.
+
+"Bless my soul!" cried the rector, with his voice in a new
+octave, and his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of
+the newspaper.
+
+No such introduction to the evening readings as this had ever
+happened before in all Mrs. Armadale's experience as a listener.
+She looked up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity, and
+besought her reverend friend to favor her with an explanation.
+
+"I can hardly believe my own eyes," said Mr. Brock. "Here is an
+advertisement, Mrs. Armadale, addressed to your son."
+
+Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows:
+
+
+IF this should meet the eye of ALLAN ARMADALE, he is desired to
+communicate, either personally or by letter, with Messrs. Hammick
+and Ridge (Lincoln's Inn Fields, London), on business of
+importance which seriously concerns him. Any one capable of
+informing Messrs. E. and R. where the person herein advertised
+can be found would confer a favor by doing the same. To prevent
+mistakes, it is further notified that the missing Allan Armadale
+is a youth aged fifteen years, and that this advertisement is
+inserted at the instance of his family and friends.
+
+
+"Another family, and other friends," said Mrs. Armadale. "The
+person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son."
+
+The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in
+her face, when he looked up, shocked him. Her delicate complexion
+had faded away to a dull white; her eyes were averted from her
+visitor with a strange mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked
+an older woman than she was, by ten good years at least.
+
+"The name is so very uncommon," said Mr. Brock, imagining he had
+offended her, and trying to excuse himself. "It really seemed
+impossible there could be two persons--"
+
+"There _are_ two," interposed Mrs. Armadale. "Allan, as you know,
+is sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you
+will find the missing person described as being only fifteen.
+Although he bears the same surname and the same Christian name,
+he is, I thank God, in no way whatever related to my son. As long
+as I live, it will be the object of my hopes and prayers that
+Allan may never see him, may never even hear of him. My kind
+friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with me if I leave
+these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past misfortune
+and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of, even
+to _you_. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by
+never referring to this again? Will you do even more--will you
+promise not to speak of it to Allan, and not to let that
+newspaper fall in his way?"
+
+Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left
+her to herself.
+
+The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs.
+Armadale to be capable of regarding her with any unworthy
+distrust. But it would be idle to deny that he felt disappointed
+by her want of confidence in him, and that he looked
+inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on his way back
+to his own house.
+
+It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale's motives for
+burying her son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote
+country village was not so much to keep him under her own eye as
+to keep him from discovery by his namesake. Why did she dread the
+idea of their ever meeting? Was it a dread for herself, or a
+dread for her son? Mr. Brock's loyal belief in his friend
+rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at some
+past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale's. That night he destroyed the
+advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the
+subject should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There
+was another Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his
+pupil's blood, and a vagabond advertised in the public
+newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. More, for Mrs.
+Armadale's sake, he had no wish to discover--and more he would
+never seek to know.
+
+This was the second in the series of events which dated from the
+rector's connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock's
+memory, traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances,
+reached the third stage of its journey through the by-gone time,
+and stopped at the year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.
+
+The five years that had passed had made little if any change in
+Allan's character. He had simply developed (to use his tutor's
+own expression) from a boy of sixteen to a boy of twenty-one. He
+was just as easy and open in his disposition as ever; just as
+quaintly and inveterately good-humored; just as heedless in
+following his own impulses, lead him where they might. His bias
+toward the sea had strengthened with his advance to the years of
+manhood. From building a boat, he had now got on--with two
+journeymen at work under him--to building a decked vessel of
+five-and-thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to
+divert him to higher aspirations; had taken him to Oxford, to see
+what college life was like; had taken him to London, to expand
+his mind by the spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had
+diverted Allan, but had not altered him in the least. He was as
+impenetrably superior to all worldly ambition as Diogenes
+himself. "Which is best," asked this unconscious philosopher, "to
+find out the way to be happy for yourself, or to let other people
+try if they can find it out for you?" From that moment Mr. Brock
+permitted his pupil's character to grow at its own rate of
+development, and Allan went on uninterruptedly with the work of
+his yacht.
+
+Time, which had wrought so little change in the son, had not
+passed harmless over the mother.
+
+Mrs. Armadale's health was breaking fast. As her strength failed,
+her temper altered for the worse: she grew more and more fretful,
+more and more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more
+reluctant to leave her own room. Since the appearance of the
+advertisement five years since, nothing had happened to force her
+memory back to the painful associations connected with her early
+life. No word more on the forbidden topic had passed between the
+rector and herself; no suspicion had ever been raised in Allan's
+mind of the existence of his namesake; and yet, without the
+shadow of a reason for any special anxiety, Mrs. Armadale had
+become, of late years, obstinately and fretfully uneasy on the
+subject of her son. More than once Mr. Brock dreaded a serious
+disagreement between them; but Allan's natural sweetness of
+temper, fortified by his love for his mother, carried him
+triumphantly through all trials. Not a hard word or a harsh look
+ever escaped him in her presence; he was unchangeably loving and
+forbearing with her to the very last.
+
+Such were the positions of the son, the mother, and the friend,
+when the next notable event happened in the lives of the three.
+On a dreary afternoon, early in the month of November, Mr. Brock
+was disturbed over the composition of his sermon by a visit from
+the landlord of the village inn.
+
+After making his introductory apologies, the landlord stated the
+urgent business on which he had come to the rectory clearly
+enough.
+
+A few hours since a young man had been brought to the inn by some
+farm laborers in the neighborhood, who had found him wandering
+about one of their master's fields in a disordered state of mind,
+which looked to their eyes like downright madness. The landlord
+had given the poor creature shelter while he sent for medical
+help; and the doctor, on seeing him, had pronounced that he was
+suffering from fever on the brain, and that his removal to the
+nearest town at which a hospital or a work-house infirmary could
+be found to receive him would in all probability be fatal to his
+chances of recovery. After hearing this expression of opinion,
+and after observing for himself that the stranger's only luggage
+consisted of a small carpet-bag which had been found in the field
+near him, the landlord had set off on the spot to consult the
+rector, and to ask, in this serious emergency, what course he was
+to take next.
+
+Mr. Brock was the magistrate as well as the clergyman of the
+district, and the course to be taken, in the first instance, was
+to his mind clear enough. He put on his hat, and accompanied the
+landlord back to the inn.
+
+At the inn door they were joined by Allan, who had heard the news
+through another channel, and who was waiting Mr. Brock's arrival,
+to follow in the magistrate's train, and to see what the stranger
+was like. The village surgeon joined them at the same moment, and
+the four went into the inn together.
+
+They found the landlord's son on one side, and the hostler on the
+other, holding the man down in his chair. Young, slim, and
+undersized, he was strong enough at that moment to make it a
+matter of difficulty for the two to master him. His tawny
+complexion, his large, bright brown eyes, and his black beard
+gave him something of a foreign look. His dress was a little
+worn, but his linen was clean. His dusky hands were wiry and
+nervous, and were lividly discolored in more places than one by
+the scars of old wounds. The toes of one of his feet, off which
+he had kicked the shoe, grasped at the chair rail through his
+stocking, with the sensitive muscular action which is only seen
+in those who have been accustomed to go barefoot. In the frenzy
+that now possessed him, it was impossible to notice, to any
+useful purpose, more than this. After a whispered consultation
+with Mr. Brock, the surgeon personally superintended the
+patient's removal to a quiet bedroom at the back of the house.
+Shortly afterward his clothes and his carpet-bag were sent
+downstairs, and were searched, on the chance of finding a clew by
+which to communicate with his friends, in the magistrate's
+presence.
+
+The carpet- bag contained nothing but a change of clothing, and
+two books--the Plays of Sophocles, in the original Greek, and the
+"Faust" of Goethe, in the original German. Both volumes were much
+worn by reading, and on the fly-leaf of each were inscribed the
+initials O. M. So much the bag revealed, and no more.
+
+The clothes which the man wore when he was discovered in the
+field were tried next. A purse (containing a sovereign and a few
+shillings), a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a handkerchief, and a little
+drinking-cup of horn were produced in succession. The next
+object, and the last, was found crumpled up carelessly in the
+breast-pocket of the coat. It was a written testimonial to
+character, dated and signed, but without any address.
+
+So far as this document could tell it, the stranger's story was a
+sad one indeed. He had apparently been employed for a short time
+as usher at a school, and had been turned adrift in the world, at
+the outset of his illness, from the fear that the fever might be
+infectious, and that the prosperity of the establishment might
+suffer accordingly. Not the slightest imputation of any
+misbehavior in his employment rested on him. On the contrary, the
+schoolmaster had great pleasure in testifying to his capacity and
+his character, and in expressing a fervent hope that he might
+(under Providence) succeed in recovering his health in somebody
+else's house. The written testimonial which afforded this glimpse
+at the man's story served one purpose more: it connected him with
+the initials on the books, and identified him to the magistrate
+and the landlord under the strangely uncouth name of Ozias
+Midwinter.
+
+Mr. Brock laid aside the testimonial, suspecting that the
+schoolmaster had purposely abstained from writing his address on
+it, with the view of escaping all responsibility in the event of
+his usher's death. In any case, it was manifestly useless, under
+existing circumstances, to think of tracing the poor wretch's
+friends, if friends he had. To the inn he had been brought, and,
+as a matter of common humanity, at the inn he must remain for the
+present. The difficulty about expenses, if it came to the worst,
+might possibly be met by charitable contributions from the
+neighbors, or by a collection after a sermon at church. Assuring
+the landlord that he would consider this part of the question and
+would let him know the result, Mr. Brock quitted the inn, without
+noticing for the moment that he had left Allan there behind him.
+
+Before he had got fifty yards from the house his pupil overtook
+him. Allan had been most uncharacteristically silent and serious
+all through the search at the inn; but he had now recovered his
+usual high spirits. A stranger would have set him down as wanting
+in common feeling.
+
+"This is a sad business," said the rector. "I really don't know
+what to do for the best about that unfortunate man."
+
+"You may make your mind quite easy, sir," said young Armadale, in
+his off-hand way. "I settled it all with the landlord a minute
+ago."
+
+"You!" exclaimed Mr. Brock, in the utmost astonishment.
+
+"I have merely given a few simple directions," pursued Allan.
+"Our friend the usher is to have everything he requires, and is
+to be treated like a prince; and when the doctor and the landlord
+want their money they are to come to me."
+
+"My dear Allan," Mr. Brock gently remonstrated, "when will you
+learn to think before you act on those generous impulses of
+yours? You are spending more money already on your yacht-building
+than you can afford--"
+
+"Only think! we laid the first planks of the deck the day before
+yesterday," said Allan, flying off to the new subject in his
+usual bird-witted way. "There's just enough of it done to walk
+on, if you don't feel giddy. I'll help you up the ladder, Mr.
+Brock, if you'll only come and try."
+
+"Listen to me," persisted the rector. "I'm not talking about the
+yacht now; that is to say, I am only referring to the yacht as
+an illustration--"
+
+"And a very pretty illustration, too," remarked the incorrigible
+Allan. "Find me a smarter little vessel of her size in all
+England, and I'll give up yacht-building to-morrow. Whereabouts
+were we in our conversation, sir? I'm rather afraid we have lost
+ourselves somehow."
+
+"I am rather afraid one of us is in the habit of losing himself
+every time he opens his lips," retorted Mr. Brock. "Come, come,
+Allan, this is serious. You have been rendering yourself liable
+for expenses which you may not be able to pay. Mind, I am far
+from blaming you for your kind feeling toward this poor
+friendless man--"
+
+"Don't be low-spirited about him, sir. He'll get over it--he'll
+be all right again in a week or so. A capital fellow, I have not
+the least doubt!" continued Allan, whose habit it was to believe
+in everybody and to despair of nothing. "Suppose you ask him to
+dinner when he gets well, Mr. Brock? I should like to find out
+(when we are all three snug and friendly together over our wine,
+you know) how he came by that extraordinary name of his. Ozias
+Midwinter! Upon my life, his father ought to be ashamed of
+himself."
+
+"Will you answer me one question before I go in?" said the
+rector, stopping in despair at his own gate. "This man's bill for
+lodging and medical attendance may mount to twenty or thirty
+pounds before he gets well again, if he ever does get well. How
+are you to pay for it?"
+
+"What's that the Chancellor of the Exchequer says when he finds
+himself in a mess with his accounts, and doesn't see his way out
+again?" asked Allan. "He always tells his honorable friend he is
+quite willing to leave a something or other--"
+
+"A margin?" suggested Mr. Brock.
+
+"That's it," said Allan. "I'm like the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer. I'm quite willing to leave a margin. The yacht (bless
+her heart!) doesn't eat up everything. If I'm short by a pound or
+two, don't be afraid, sir. There's no pride about me; I'll go
+round with the hat, and get the balance in the neighborhood.
+Deuce take the pounds, shillings, and pence! I wish they could
+all three get rid of themselves, like the Bedouin brothers at the
+show. Don't you remember the Bedouin brothers, Mr. Brock? 'Ali
+will take a lighted torch, and jump down the throat of his
+brother Muli; Muli will take a lighted torch, and jump down the
+throat of his brother Hassan; and Hassan, taking a third lighted
+torch, will conclude the performances by jumping down his own
+throat, and leaving the spectators in total darkness.'
+Wonderfully good, that--what I call real wit, with a fine strong
+flavor about it. Wait a minute! Where are we? We have lost
+ourselves again. Oh, I remember--money. What I can't beat into my
+thick head," concluded Allan, quite unconscious that he was
+preaching socialist doctrines to a clergyman; "is the meaning of
+the fuss that's made about giving money away. Why can't the
+people who have got money to spare give it to the people who
+haven't got money to spare, and make things pleasant and
+comfortable all the world over in that way? You're always telling
+me to cultivate ideas, Mr. Brock There's an idea, and, upon my
+life, I don't think it's a bad one."
+
+Mr. Brock gave his pupil a good-humored poke with the end of his
+stick. "Go back to your yacht," he said. "All the little
+discretion you have got in that flighty head of yours is left on
+board in your tool-chest. How that lad will end," pursued the
+rector, when he was left by himself, "is more than any human
+being can say. I almost wish I had never taken the responsibility
+of him on my shoulders."
+
+Three weeks passed before the stranger with the uncouth name was
+pronounced to be at last on the way to recovery.
+
+During this period Allan had made regular inquiries at the inn,
+and, as soon as the sick man was allowed to see visitors, Allan
+was the first who appeared at his bedside. So far Mr. Brock's
+pupil had shown no more than a natural interest in one of the few
+romantic circumstances which had varied the monotony of the
+village life: he had committed no imprudence, and he had exposed
+himself to no blame. But as the days passed, young Armadale's
+visits to the inn began to lengthen considerably, and the surgeon
+(a cautious elderly man) gave the rector a private hint to bestir
+himself. Mr. Brock acted on the hint immediately, and discovered
+that Allan had followed his usual impulses in his usual headlong
+way. He had taken a violent fancy to the castaway usher and had
+invited Ozias Midwinter to reside permanently in the neighborhood
+in the new and interesting character of his bosom friend.
+
+Before Mr. Brock could make up his mind how to act in this
+emergency, he received a note from Allan's mother, begging him to
+use his privilege as an old friend, and to pay her a visit in her
+room.
+
+He found Mrs. Armadale suffering under violent nervous agitation,
+caused entirely by a recent interview with her son. Allan had
+been sitting with her all the morning, and had talked of nothing
+but his new friend. The man with the horrible name (as poor Mrs.
+Armadale described him) had questioned Allan, in a singularly
+inquisitive manner, on the subject of himself and his family, but
+had kept his own personal history entirely in the dark. At some
+former period of his life he had been accustomed to the sea and
+to sailing. Allan had, unfortunately, found this out, and a bond
+of union between them was formed on the spot. With a merciless
+distrust of the stranger--simply _because_ he was a
+stranger--which appeared rather unreasonable to Mr. Brock, Mrs.
+Armadale besought the rector to go to the inn without a moment's
+loss of time, and never to rest until he had made the man give a
+proper account of himself. "Find out everything about his father
+and mother!" she said, in her vehement female way. "Make sure
+before you leave him that he is not a vagabond roaming the
+country under an assumed name."
+
+"My dear lady," remonstrated the rector, obediently taking his
+hat, "whatever else we may doubt, I really think we may feel sure
+about the man's name! It is so remarkably ugly that it must be
+genuine. No sane human being would _assume_ such a name as Ozias
+Midwinter."
+
+"You may be quite right, and I may be quite wrong; but pray go
+and see him," persisted Mrs. Armadale. "Go, and don't spare him,
+Mr. Brock. How do we know that this illness of his may not have
+been put on for a purpose?"
+
+It was useless to reason with her. The whole College of
+Physicians might have certified to the man's illness, and, in her
+present frame of mind, Mrs. Armadale would have disbelieved the
+College, one and all, from the president downward. Mr. Brock took
+the wise way out of the difficulty--he said no more, and he set
+off for the inn immediately.
+
+Ozias Midwinter, recovering from brain-fever, was a startling
+object to contemplate on a first view of him. His shaven head,
+tied up in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard
+cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild;
+his rough black beard; his long, supple, sinewy fingers, wasted
+by suffering till they looked like claws--all tended to
+discompose the rector at the outset of the interview. When the
+first feeling of surprise had worn off, the impression that
+followed it was not an agreeable one. Mr. Brock could not conceal
+from himself that the stranger's manner was against him. The
+general opinion has settled that, if a man is honest, he is bound
+to assert it by looking straight at his fellow-creatures when he
+speaks to them. If this man was honest, his eyes showed a
+singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they
+were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his
+organization, which appeared to pervade every fiber in his lean,
+lithe body. The rector's healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept
+responsively at every casual movement of the usher's supple brown
+fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher's haggard
+yellow face. "God forgive me!" thought Mr. Brock, with his mind
+running on Allan and Allan's mother, "I wish I could see my way
+to turning Ozias Midwinter adrift in the world again!"
+
+The conversation which ensued between the two was a very guarded
+one. Mr. Brock felt his way gently, and found himself, try where
+he might, always kept politely, more or less, in the dark.
+
+From first to last, the man's real character shrank back with a
+savage shyness from the rector's touch. He started by an
+assertion which it was impossible to look at him and believe--he
+declared that he was only twenty years of age. All he could be
+persuaded to say on the subject of the school was that the bare
+recollection of it was horrible to him. He had only filled the
+usher's situation for ten days when the first appearance of his
+illness caused his dismissal. How he had reached the field in
+which he had been found was more than he could say. He remembered
+traveling a long distance by railway, with a purpose (if he had a
+purpose) which it was now impossible to recall, and then
+wandering coastward, on foot, all through the day, or all through
+the night--he was not sure which. The sea kept running in his
+mind when his mind began to give way. He had been employed on the
+sea as a lad. He had left it, and had filled a situation at a
+bookseller's in a country town. He had left the bookseller's, and
+had tried the school. Now the school had turned him out, he must
+try something else. It mattered little what he tried---failure
+(for which nobody was ever to blame but himself) was sure to be
+the end of it, sooner or later. Friends to assist him, he had
+none to apply to; and as for relations, he wished to be excused
+from speaking of them. For all he knew they might be dead, and
+for all _they_ knew _he_ might be dead. That was a melancholy
+acknowledgment to make at his time of life, there was no denying
+it. It might tell against him in the opinions of others; and it
+did tell against him, no doubt, in the opinion of the gentleman
+who was talking to him at that moment.
+
+These strange answers were given in a tone and manner far removed
+from bitterness on the one side, or from indifference on the
+other. Ozias Midwinter at twenty spoke of his life as Ozias
+Midwinter at seventy might have spoken with a long weariness of
+years on him which he had learned to bear patiently.
+
+Two circumstances pleaded strongly against the distrust with
+which, in sheer perplexity of mind, Mr. Brock blindly regarded
+him. He had written to a savings-bank in a distant part of
+England, had drawn his money, and had paid the doctor and the
+landlord. A man of vulgar mind, after acting in this manner,
+would have treated his obligations lightly when he had settled
+his bills. Ozias Midwinter spoke of his obligations--and
+especially of his obligation to Allan--with a fervor of
+thankfulness which it was not surprising only, but absolutely
+painful to witness. He showed a horrible sincerity of
+astonishment at having been treated with common Christian
+kindness in a Christian land. He spoke of Allan's having become
+answerable for all the expenses of sheltering, nursing, and
+curing him, with a savage rapture of gratitude and surprise which
+burst out of him like a flash of lightning. "So help me God!"
+cried the castaway usher, "I never met with the like of him: I
+never heard of the like of him before!" In the next instant, the
+one glimpse of light which the man had let in on his own
+passionate nature was quenched again in darkness. His wandering
+eyes, returning to their old trick, looked uneasily away from Mr.
+Brock, and his voice dropped back once more into its unnatural
+steadiness and quietness of tone. "I beg your pardon, sir," he
+said. "I have been used to be hunted, and cheated, and starved.
+Everything else comes strange to me. " Half attracted by the man,
+half repelled by him, Mr. Brock, on rising to take leave,
+impulsively offered his hand, and then, with a sudden misgiving,
+confusedly drew it back again. "You meant that kindly, sir," said
+Ozias Midwinter, with his own hands crossed resolutely behind
+him. "I don't complain of your thinking better of it. A man who
+can't give a proper account of himself is not a man for a
+gentleman in your position to take by the hand."
+
+Mr. Brock left the inn thoroughly puzzled. Before returning to
+Mrs. Armadale he sent for her son. The chances were that the
+guard had been off the stranger's tongue when he spoke to Allan,
+and with Allan's frankness there was no fear of his concealing
+anything that had passed between them from the rector's
+knowledge.
+
+Here again Mr. Brock's diplomacy achieved no useful results.
+
+Once started on the subject of Ozias Midwinter, Allan rattled on
+about his new friend in his usual easy, light-hearted way. But he
+had really nothing of importance to tell, for nothing of
+importance had been revealed to him. They had talked about
+boat-building and sailing by the hour together, and Allan had got
+some valuable hints. They had discussed (with diagrams to assist
+them, and with more valuable hints for Allan) the serious
+impending question of the launch of the yacht. On other occasions
+they had diverged to other subjects--to more of them than Allan
+could remember, on the spur of the moment. Had Midwinter said
+nothing about his relations in the flow of all this friendly
+talk? Nothing, except that they had not behaved well to him--hang
+his relations! Was he at all sensitive on the subject of his own
+odd name? Not the least in the world; he had set the example,
+like a sensible fellow, of laughing at it himself.
+
+Mr. Brock still persisted. He inquired next what Allan had seen
+in the stranger to take such a fancy to? Allan had seen in
+him--what he didn't see in people in general. He wasn't like all
+the other fellows in the neighborhood. All the other fellows were
+cut out on the same pattern. Every man of them was equally
+healthy, muscular, loud, hard-hearted, clean-skinned, and rough;
+every man of them drank the same draughts of beer, smoked the
+same short pipes all day long, rode the best horse, shot over the
+best dog, and put the best bottle of wine in England on his table
+at night; every man of them sponged himself every morning in the
+same sort of tub of cold water and bragged about it in frosty
+weather in the same sort of way; every man of them thought
+getting into debt a capital joke and betting on horse-races one
+of the most meritorious actions that a human being can perform.
+They were, no doubt, excellent fellows in their way; but the
+worst of them was, they were all exactly alike. It was a perfect
+godsend to meet with a man like Midwinter--a man who was not cut
+out on the regular local pattern, and whose way in the world had
+the one great merit (in those parts) of being a way of his own.
+
+Leaving all remonstrances for a fitter opportunity, the rector
+went back to Mrs. Armadale. He could not disguise from himself
+that Allan's mother was the person really answerable for Allan's
+present indiscretion. If the lad had seen a little less of the
+small gentry in the neighborhood, and a little more of the great
+outside world at home and abroad, the pleasure of cultivating
+Ozias Midwinter's society might have had fewer attractions for
+him.
+
+Conscious of the unsatisfactory result of his visit to the inn,
+Mr. Brock felt some anxiety about the reception of his report
+when he found himself once more in Mrs. Armadale's presence. His
+forebodings were soon realized. Try as he might to make the best
+of it, Mrs. Armadale seized on the one suspicious fact of the
+usher's silence about himself as justifying the strongest
+measures that could be taken to separate him from her son. If
+the rector refused to interfere, she declared her intention of
+writing to Ozias Midwinter with her own hand. Remonstrance
+irritated her to such a pitch that she astounded Mr. Brock by
+reverting to the forbidden subject of five years since, and
+referring him to the conversation which had passed between them
+when the advertisement had been discovered in the newspaper.
+She passionately declared that the vagabond Armadale of that
+advertisement, and the vagabond Midwinter at the village inn,
+might, for all she know to the contrary, be one and the same.
+Foreboding a serious disagreement between the mother and son
+if the mother interfered, Mr. Brock undertook to see Midwinter
+again, and to tell him plainly that he must give a proper account
+of himself, or that his intimacy with Allan must cease. The two
+concessions which he exacted from Mrs. Armadale in return were
+that she should wait patiently until the doctor reported the man
+fit to travel, and that she should be careful in the interval not
+to mention the matter in any way to her son.
+
+In a week's time Midwinter was able to drive out (with Allan for
+his coachman) in the pony chaise belonging to the inn, and in ten
+days the doctor privately reported him as fit to travel. Toward
+the close of that tenth day, Mr. Brock met Allan and his new
+friend enjoying the last gleams of wintry sunshine in one of the
+inland lanes. He waited until the two had separated, and then
+followed the usher on his way back to the inn.
+
+The rector's resolution to speak pitilessly to the purpose was in
+some danger of failing him as he drew nearer and nearer to the
+friendless man, and saw how feebly he still walked, how loosely
+his worn coat hung about him, and how heavily he leaned on his
+cheap, clumsy stick. Humanely reluctant to say the decisive words
+too precipitately, Mr. Brock tried him first with a little
+compliment on the range of his reading, as shown by the volume of
+Sophocles and the volume of Goethe which had been found in his
+bag, and asked how long he had been acquainted with German and
+Greek. The quick ear of Midwinter detected something wrong in the
+tone of Mr. Brock's voice. He turned in the darkening twilight,
+and looked suddenly and suspiciously in the rector's face.
+
+"You have something to say to me," he answered; "and it is not
+what you are saying now."
+
+There was no help for it but to accept the challenge. Very
+delicately, with many preparatory words, to which the other
+listened in unbroken silence, Mr. Brock came little by little
+nearer and nearer to the point. Long before he had really reached
+it--long before a man of no more than ordinary sensibility would
+have felt what was coming--Ozias Midwinter stood still in the
+lane, and told the rector that he need say no more.
+
+"I understand you, sir," said the usher. "Mr. Armadale has an
+ascertained position in the world; Mr. Armadale has nothing to
+conceal, and nothing to be ashamed of. I agree with you that I am
+not a fit companion for him. The best return I can make for his
+kindness is to presume on it no longer. You may depend on my
+leaving this place to-morrow morning."
+
+He spoke no word more; he would hear no word more. With a
+self-control which, at his years and with his temperament, was
+nothing less than marvelous, he civilly took off his hat, bowed,
+and returned to the inn by himself
+
+Mr. Brock slept badly that night. The issue of the interview in
+the lane had made the problem of Ozias Midwinter a harder problem
+to solve than ever.
+
+Early the next morning a letter was brought to the rector from
+the inn, and the messenger announced that the strange gentleman
+had taken his departure. The letter inclosed an open note
+addressed to Allan, and requested Allan's tutor (after first
+reading it himself) to forward it or not at his own sole
+discretion. The note was a startlingly short one; it began and
+ended in a dozen words: "Don't blame Mr. Brock; Mr. Brock is
+right. Thank you, and good-by.--O. M."
+
+The rector forwarded the note to its proper destination, as a
+matter of course, and sent a few lines to Mrs. Armadale at the
+same time to quiet her anxiety by the news of the usher's
+departure. This done, he waited the visit from his pupil, which
+would probably follow the delivery of the note, in no very
+tranquil frame of mind. There might or might not be some deep
+motive at the bottom of Midwinter's conduct; but thus far it was
+impossible to deny that he had behaved in such a manner as to
+rebuke the rector's distrust, and to justify Allan's good opinion
+of him.
+
+The morning wore on, and young Armadale never appeared. After
+looking for him vainly in the yard where the yacht was building,
+Mr. Brock went to Mrs. Armadale's house, and there heard news
+from the servant which turned his steps in the direction of the
+inn. The landlord at once acknowledged the truth: young Mr.
+Armadale had come there with an open letter in his hand, and
+had insisted on being informed of the road which his friend had
+taken. For the first time in the landlord's experience of him,
+the young gentleman was out of temper; and the girl who waited
+on the customers had stupidly mentioned a circumstance which had
+added fuel to the fire. She had acknowledged having heard Mr.
+Midwinter lock himself into his room overnight, and burst into
+a violent fit of crying. That trifling particular had set Mr.
+Armadale's face all of a flame; he had shouted and sworn; he had
+rushed into the stables; and forced the hostler to saddle him a
+horse, and had set off full gallop on the road that Ozias
+Midwinter had taken before him.
+
+After cautioning the landlord to keep Allan's conduct a secret if
+any of Mrs. Armadale's servants came that morning to the inn, Mr.
+Brock went home again, and waited anxiously to see what the day
+would bring forth.
+
+To his infinite relief his pupil appeared at the rectory late in
+the afternoon.
+
+Allan looked and spoke with a dogged determination which was
+quite new in his old friend's experience of him. Without waiting
+to be questioned, he told his story in his usual straightforward
+way. He had overtaken Midwinter on the road; and--after trying
+vainly first to induce him to return, then to find out where he
+was going to--had threatened to keep company with him for the
+rest of the day, and had so extorted the confession that he was
+going to try his luck in London. Having gained this point, Allan
+had asked next for his friend's address in London, had been
+entreated by the other not to press his request, had pressed it,
+nevertheless, with all his might, and had got the address at last
+by making an appeal to Midwinter's gratitude, for which (feeling
+heartily ashamed of himself) he had afterward asked Midwinter's
+pardon. "I like the poor fellow, and I won't give him up,"
+concluded Allan, bringing his clinched fist down with a thump on
+the rectory table. "Don't be afraid of my vexing my mother; I'll
+leave you to speak to her, Mr. Brock, at your own time and in
+your own way; and I'll just say this much more by way of bringing
+the thing to an end. Here is the address safe in my pocket-book,
+and here am I, standing firm for once on a resolution of my own.
+I'll give you and my mother time to reconsider this; and, when
+the time is up, if my friend Midwinter doesn't come to _me_, I'll
+go to my friend Midwinter."
+
+So the matter rested for the present; and such was the result of
+turning the castaway usher adrift in the world again.
+
+-------------
+
+A month passed, and brought in the new year--'51. Overleaping
+that short lapse of time, Mr. Brock paused, with a heavy heart,
+at the next event; to his mind the one mournful, the one
+memorable event of the series--Mrs. Armadale's death.
+
+The first warning of the affliction that was near at hand had
+followed close on the usher's departure in December, and had
+arisen out of a circumstance which dwelt painfully on the
+rector's memory from that time forth.
+
+But three days after Midwinter had left for London, Mr. Brock was
+accosted in the village by a neatly dressed woman, wearing a gown
+and bonnet of black silk and a red Paisley shawl, who was a total
+stranger to him, and who inquired the way to Mrs. Armadale's
+house. She put the question without raising the thick black veil
+that hung over her face. Mr. Brock, in giving her the necessary
+directions, observed that she was a remarkably elegant and
+graceful woman, and looked after her as she bowed and left him,
+wondering who Mrs. Armadale's visitor could possibly be.
+
+A quarter of an hour later the lady, still veiled as before,
+passed Mr. Brock again close to the inn. She entered the house,
+and spoke to the landlady. Seeing the landlord shortly afterward
+hurrying round to the stables, Mr. Brock asked him if the lady
+was going away. Yes; she had come from the railway in the
+omnibus, but she was going back again more creditably in a
+carriage of her own hiring, supplied by the inn.
+
+The rector proceeded on his walk, rather surprised to find his
+thoughts running inquisitively on a woman who was a stranger to
+him. When he got home again, he found the village surgeon waiting
+his return with an urgent message from Allan's mother. About an
+hour since, the surgeon had been sent for in great haste to see
+Mrs. Armadale. He had found her suffering from an alarming
+nervous attack, brought on (as the servants suspected) by an
+unexpected, and, possibly, an unwelcome visitor, who had called
+that morning. The surgeon had done all that was needful, and had
+no apprehension of any dangerous results. Finding his patient
+eagerly desirous, on recovering herself, to see Mr. Brock
+immediately, he had thought it important to humor her, and had
+readily undertaken to call at the rectory with a message to that
+effect.
+
+Looking at Mrs. Armadale with a far deeper interest in her than
+the surgeon's interest, Mr. Brock saw enough in her face, when it
+turned toward him on his entering the room, to justify instant
+and serious alarm. She allowed him no opportunity of soothing
+her; she heeded none of his inquiries. Answers to certain
+questions of her own were what she wanted, and what she was
+determined to have: Had Mr. Brock seen the woman who had presumed
+to visit her that morning? Yes. Had Allan seen her? No; Allan had
+been at work since breakfast, and was at work still, in his yard
+by the water-side.
+
+This latter reply appeared to quiet Mrs. Armadale for the moment;
+she put her next question--the most extraordinary question of the
+three--more composedly: Did the rector think Allan would object
+to leaving his vessel for the present, and to accompanying his
+mother on a journey to look out for a new house in some other
+part of England? In the greatest amazement Mr. Brock asked what
+reason there could possibly be for leaving her present residence?
+Mrs. Armadale's reason, when she gave it, only added to his
+surprise. The woman's first visit might be followed by a second;
+and rather than see her again, rather than run the risk of
+Allan's seeing her and speaking to her, Mrs. Armadale would leave
+England if necessary, and end her days in a foreign land. Taking
+counsel of his experience as a magistrate, Mr. Brock inquired if
+the woman had come to ask for money. Yes; respectably as she was
+dressed, she had described herself as being "in distress"; had
+asked for money, and had got it. But the money was of no
+importance; the one thing needful was to get away before the
+woman came again. More and more surprised, Mr. Brock ventured on
+another question: Was it long since Mrs. Armadale and her visitor
+had last met? Yes; longer than all Allan's lifetime--as long ago
+as the year before Allan was born.
+
+At that reply, the rector shifted his ground, and took counsel
+next of his experience as a friend.
+
+"Is this person," he asked, "connected in any way with the
+painful remembrances of your early life?"
+
+"Yes; with the painful remembrance of the time when I was
+married," said Mrs. Armadale. "She was associated, as a mere
+child, with a circumstance which I must think of with shame and
+sorrow to my dying day."
+
+Mr. Brock noticed the altered tone in which his old friend spoke,
+and the unwillingness with which she gave her answer.
+
+"Can you tell me more about her without referring to yourself?"
+he went on. "I am sure I can protect you, if you will only help
+me a little. Her name, for instance--you can tell me her name?"
+
+Mrs. Armadale shook her head, "The name I knew her by," she said,
+"would be of no use to you. She has been married since then; she
+told me so herself."
+
+"And without telling you her married name?"
+
+"She refused to tell it."
+
+"Do you know anything of her friends?"
+
+"Only of her friends when she was a child. They called themselves
+her uncle and aunt. They were low people, and they deserted her
+at the school on my father's estate. We never heard any more of
+them."
+
+"Did she remain under your father's care?"
+
+"She remained under my care; that is to say, she traveled with
+us. We were leaving England, just as that time, for Madeira. I
+had my father's leave to take her with me, and to train the
+wretch to be my maid--"
+
+At those words Mrs. Armadale stopped confusedly. Mr. Brock tried
+gently to lead her on. It was useless; she started up in violent
+agitation, and walked excitedly backward and forward in the room.
+
+"Don't ask me any more!" she cried out, in loud, angry tones. "I
+parted with her when she was a girl of twelve years old. I never
+saw her again, I never heard of her again, from that time to
+this. I don't know how she has discovered me, after all the years
+that have passed; I only know that she _has_ discovered me. She
+will find her way to Allan next; she will poison my son's mind
+against me. Help me to get away from her! help me to take Allan
+away before she comes back!"
+
+The rector asked no more questions; it would have been cruel to
+press her further. The first necessity was to compose her by
+promising compliance with all that she desired. The second was to
+induce her to see another medical man. Mr. Brock contrived to
+reach his end harmlessly in this latter case by reminding her
+that she wanted strength to travel, and that her own medical
+attendant might restore her all the more speedily to herself if
+he were assisted by the best professional advice. Having overcome
+her habitual reluctance to seeing strangers by this means, the
+rector at once went to Allan; and, delicately concealing what
+Mrs. Armadale had said at the interview, broke the news to him
+that his mother was seriously ill. Allan would hear of no
+messengers being sent for assistance: he drove off on the spot to
+the railway, and telegraphed himself to Bristol for medical help.
+
+On the next morning the help came, and Mr. Brock's worst fears
+were confirmed. The village surgeon had fatally misunderstood
+the case from the first, and the time was past now at which his
+errors of treatment might have been set right. The shock of the
+previous morning had completed the mischief. Mrs. Armadale's days
+were numbered.
+
+The son who dearly loved her, the old friend to whom her life
+was precious, hoped vainly to the last. In a month from the
+physician's visit all hope was over; and Allan shed the first
+bitter tears of his life at his mother's grave.
+
+She had died more peacefully than Mr. Brock had dared to hope,
+leaving all her little fortune to her son, and committing him
+solemnly to the care of her one friend on earth. The rector had
+entreated her to let him write and try to reconcile her brothers
+with her before it was too late. She had only answered sadly that
+it was too late already. But one reference escaped her in her
+last illness to those early sorrows which had weighed heavily on
+all her after-life, and which had passed thrice already, like
+shadows of evil, between the rector and herself. Even on her
+deathbed she had shrunk from letting the light fall clearly on
+the story of the past. She had looked at Allan kneeling by the
+bedside, and had whispered to Mr. Brock: "_Never let his Namesake
+come near him! Never let that Woman find him out_!" No word more
+fell from her that touched on the misfortunes which had tried her
+in the past, or on the dangers which she dreaded in the future.
+The secret which she had kept from her son and from her friend
+was a secret which she carried with her to the grave.
+
+When the last offices of affection and respect had been
+performed, Mr. Brock felt it his duty, as executor to the
+deceased lady, to write to her brothers, and to give them
+information of her death. Believing that he had to deal with
+two men who would probably misinterpret his motives if he left
+Allan's position unexplained, he was careful to remind them that
+Mrs. Armadale's son was well provided for, and that the object of
+his letter was simply to communicate the news of their sister's
+decease. The two letters were dispatched toward the middle of
+January, and by return of post the answers were received. The
+first which the rector opened was written not by the elder
+brother, but by the elder brother's only son. The young man had
+succeeded to the estates in Norfolk on his father's death, some
+little time since. He wrote in a frank and friendly spirit,
+assuring Mr. Brock that, however strongly his father might have
+been prejudiced against Mrs. Armadale, the hostile feeling had
+never extended to her son. For himself, he had only to add that
+he would be sincerely happy to welcome his cousin to Thorpe
+Ambrose whenever his cousin came that way.
+
+The second letter was a far less agreeable reply to receive
+than the first. The younger brother was still alive, and still
+resolute neither to forget nor forgive. He informed Mr. Brock
+that his deceased sister's choice of a husband, and her conduct
+to her father at the time of her marriage, had made any relations
+of affection or esteem impossible, on his side, from that time
+forth. Holding the opinions he did, it would be equally painful
+to his nephew and himself if any personal intercourse took place
+between them. He had adverted, as generally as possible, to the
+nature of the differences which had kept him apart from his late
+sister, in order to satisfy Mr. Brock's mind that a personal
+acquaintance with young Mr. Armadale was, as a matter of
+delicacy, quite out of the question and, having done this, he
+would beg leave to close the correspondence.
+
+Mr. Brock wisely destroyed the second letter on the spot, and,
+after showing Allan his cousin's invitation, suggested that he
+should go to Thorpe Ambrose as soon as he felt fit to present
+himself to strangers.
+
+Allan listened to the advice patiently enough; but he declined
+to profit by it. "I will shake hands with my cousin willingly if
+I ever meet him," he said; "but I will visit no family, and be
+a guest in no house, in which my mother has been badly treated."
+Mr. Brock remonstrated gently, and tried to put matters in their
+proper light. Even at that time--even while he was still ignorant
+of events which were then impending--Allan's strangely isolated
+position in the world was a subject of serious anxiety to his old
+friend and tutor. The proposed visit to Thorpe Ambrose opened the
+very prospect of his making friends and connections suited to him
+in rank and age which Mr. Brock most desired to see; but Allan
+was not to be persuaded; he was obstinate and unreasonable; and
+the rector had no alternative but to drop the subject.
+
+One on another the weeks passed monotonously, and Allan showed
+but little of the elasticity of his age and character in bearing
+the affliction that had made him motherless. He finished and
+launched his yacht; but his own journeymen remarked that the work
+seemed to have lost its interest for him. It was not natural to
+the young man to brood over his solitude and his grief as he was
+brooding now. As the spring advanced, Mr. Brock began to feel
+uneasy about the future, if Allan was not roused at once by
+change of scene. After much pondering, the rector decided on
+trying a trip to Paris, and on extending the journey southward
+if his companion showed an interest in Continental traveling.
+Allan's reception of the proposal made atonement for his
+obstinacy in refusing to cultivate his cousin's acquaintance;
+he was willing to go with Mr. Brock wherever Mr. Brock pleased.
+The rector took him at his word, and in the middle of March the
+two strangely assorted companions left for London on their way
+to Paris.
+
+Arrived in London, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly face to
+face with a new anxiety. The unwelcome subject of Ozias
+Midwinter, which had been buried in peace since the beginning of
+December, rose to the surface again, and confronted the rector at
+the very outset of his travels, more unmanageably than ever.
+
+Mr. Brock's position in dealing with this difficult matter had
+been hard enough to maintain when he had first meddled with it.
+He now found himself with no vantage-ground left to stand on.
+Events had so ordered it that the difference of opinion between
+Allan and his mother on the subject of the usher was entirely
+disassociated with the agitation which had hastened Mrs.
+Armadale's death. Allan's resolution to say no irritating words,
+and Mr. Brock's reluctance to touch on a disagreeable topic, had
+kept them both silent about Midwinter in Mrs. Armadale's presence
+during the three days which had intervened between that person's
+departure and the appearance of the strange woman in the village.
+In the period of suspense and suffering that had followed no
+recurrence to the subject of the usher had been possible, and
+none had taken place. Free from all mental disquietude on this
+score, Allan had stoutly preserved his perverse interest in his
+new friend. He had written to tell Midwinter of his affliction,
+and he now proposed (unless the rector formally objected to it)
+paying a visit to his friend before he started for Paris the next
+morning.
+
+What was Mr. Brock to do? There was no denying that Midwinter's
+conduct had pleaded unanswerably against poor Mrs. Armadale's
+unfounded distrust of him. If the rector, with no convincing
+reason to allege against it, and with no right to interfere but
+the right which Allan's courtesy gave him, declined to sanction
+the proposed visit, then farewell to all the old sociability and
+confidence between tutor and pupil on the contemplated tour.
+Environed by difficulties, which might have been possibly worsted
+by a less just and a less kind-hearted man, Mr. Brock said a
+cautious word or two at parting, and (with more confidence in
+Midwinter's discretion and self-denial than he quite liked to
+acknowledge, even to himself) left Allan free to take his own
+way.
+
+After whiling away an hour, during the interval of his pupil's
+absence, by a walk in the streets, the rector returned to his
+hotel, and, finding the newspaper disengaged in the coffee-room,
+sat down absently to look over it. His eye, resting idly on the
+title-page, was startled into instant attention by the very first
+advertisement that it chanced to light on at the head of the
+column. There was Allan's mysterious namesake again, figuring in
+capital letters, and associated this time (in the character of a
+dead man) with the offer of a pecuniary reward. Thus it ran:
+
+
+SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.--To parish clerks, sextons, and others.
+Twenty Pounds reward will be paid to any person who can produce
+evidence of the death of ALLAN ARMADALE, only son of the late
+Allan Armadale, of Barbadoes, and born in Trinidad in the year
+1830. Further particulars on application to Messrs. Hammick and
+Ridge, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.
+
+
+Even Mr. Brock's essentially unimaginative mind began to stagger
+superstitiously in the dark as he laid the newspaper down again.
+Little by little a vague suspicion took possession of him that
+the whole series of events which had followed the first
+appearance of Allan's namesake in the newspaper six years since
+was held together by some mysterious connection, and was tending
+steadily to some unimaginable end. Without knowing why, he began
+to feel uneasy at Allan's absence. Without knowing why, he became
+impatient to get his pupil away from England before anything else
+happened between night and morning.
+
+In an hour more the rector was relieved of all immediate anxiety
+by Allan's return to the hotel. The young man was vexed and out
+of spirits. He had discovered Midwinter's lodgings, but he had
+failed to find Midwinter himself. The only account his landlady
+could give of him was that he had gone out at his customary time
+to get his dinner at the nearest eating-house, and that he had
+not returned, in accordance with his usual regular habits, at his
+usual regular hour. Allan had therefore gone to inquire at the
+eating-house, and had found, on describing him, that Midwinter
+was well known there. It was his custom, on other days, to take
+a frugal dinner, and to sit half an hour afterward reading the
+newspaper. On this occasion, after dining, he had taken up the
+paper as usual, had suddenly thrown it aside again, and had gone,
+nobody knew where, in a violent hurry. No further information
+being attainable, Allan had left a note at the lodgings, giving
+his address at the hotel, and begging Midwinter to come and say
+good-by before his departure for Paris.
+
+The evening passed, and Allan's invisible friend never appeared.
+The morning came, bringing no obstacles with it, and Mr. Brock
+and his pupil left London. So far Fortune had declared herself at
+last on the rector's side. Ozias Midwinter, after intrusively
+rising to the surface, had conveniently dropped out of sight
+again. What was to happen next?
+
+-------------
+
+Advancing once more, by three weeks only, from past to present,
+Mr. Brock's memory took up the next event on the seventh of
+April. To all appearance, the chain was now broken at last. The
+new event had no recognizable connection (either to his mind or
+to Allan's) with any of the persons who had appeared, or any of
+the circumstances that had happened, in the by-gone time.
+
+The travelers had as yet got no further than Paris. Allan's
+spirits had risen with the change; and he had been made all the
+readier to enjoy the novelty of the scene around him by receiving
+a letter from Midwinter, containing news which Mr. Brock himself
+acknowledged promised fairly for the future. The ex-usher had
+been away on business when Allan had called at his lodgings,
+having been led by an accidental circumstance to open
+communications with his relatives on that day. The result had
+taken him entirely by surprise: it had unexpectedly secured to
+him a little income of his own for the rest of his life. His
+future plans, now that this piece of good fortune had fallen to
+his share, were still unsettled. But if Allan wished to hear what
+he ultimately decided on, his agent in London (whose direction he
+inclosed) would receive communications for him, and would furnish
+Mr. Armadale at all future times with his address.
+
+On receipt of this letter, Allan had seized the pen in his usual
+headlong way, and had insisted on Midwinter's immediately joining
+Mr. Brock and himself on their travels. The last days of March
+passed, and no answer to the proposal was received. The first
+days of April came, and on the seventh of the month there was a
+letter for Allan at last on the breakfast-table. He snatched it
+up, looked at the address, and threw the letter down again
+impatiently. The handwriting was not Midwinter's. Allan finished
+his breakfast before he cared to read what his correspondent had
+to say to him.
+
+The meal over, young Armadale lazily opened the letter. He began
+it with an expression of supreme indifference. He finished it
+with a sudden leap out of his chair, and a loud shout of
+astonishment. Wondering, as he well might, at this extraordinary
+outbreak, Mr. Brock took up the letter which Allan had tossed
+across the table to him. Before he had come to the end of it, his
+hands dropped helplessly on his knees, and the blank bewilderment
+of his pupil's expression was accurately reflected on his own
+face.
+
+If ever two men had good cause for being thrown completely off
+their balance, Allan and the rector were those two. The letter
+which had struck them both with the same shock of astonishment
+did, beyond all question, contain an announcement which, on a
+first discovery of it, was simply incredible. The news was from
+Norfolk, and was to this effect. In little more than one week's
+time death had mown down no less than three lives in the family
+at Thorpe Ambrose, and Allan Armadale was at that moment heir to
+an estate of eight thousand a year!
+
+A second perusal of the letter enabled the rector and his
+companion to master the details which had escaped them on a
+first reading.
+
+The writer was the family lawyer at Thorpe Ambrose. After
+announcing to Allan the deaths of his cousin Arthur at the age of
+twenty-five, of his uncle Henry at the age of forty-eight, and of
+his cousin John at the age of twenty-one, the lawyer proceeded to
+give a brief abstract of the terms of the elder Mr. Blanchard's
+will. The claims of male issue were, as is not unusual in such
+cases, preferred to the claims of female issue. Failing Arthur
+and his issue male, the estate was left to Henry and his issue
+male. Failing them, it went to the issue male of Henry's sister;
+and, in default of such issue, to the next heir male. As events
+had happened, the two young men, Arthur and John, had died
+unmarried, and Henry Blanchard had died, leaving no surviving
+child but a daughter. Under these circumstances, Allan was the
+next heir male pointed at by the will, and was now legally
+successor to the Thorpe Ambrose estate. Having made this
+extraordinary announcement, the lawyer requested to be favored
+with Mr. Armadale's instructions, and added, in conclusion, that
+he would be happy to furnish any further particulars that were
+desired.
+
+It was useless to waste time in wondering at an event which
+neither Allan nor his mother had ever thought of as even remotely
+possible. The only thing to be done was to go back to England at
+once. The next day found the travelers installed once more in
+their London hotel, and the day after the affair was placed in
+the proper professional hands. The inevitable corresponding and
+consulting ensued, and one by one the all-important particulars
+flowed in, until the measure of information was pronounced to be
+full.
+
+This was the strange story of the three deaths:
+
+At the time when Mr. Brock had written to Mrs. Armadale's
+relatives to announce the news of her decease (that is to say, in
+the middle of the month of January), the family at Thorpe Ambrose
+numbered five persons--Arthur Blanchard (in possession of the
+estate), living in the great house with his mother; and Henry
+Blanchard, the uncle, living in the neighborhood, a widower with
+two children, a son and a daughter. To cement the family
+connection still more closely, Arthur Blanchard was engaged to be
+married to his cousin. The wedding was to be celebrated with
+great local rejoicings in the coming summer, when the young lady
+had completed her twentieth year.
+
+The month of February had brought changes with it in the family
+position. Observing signs of delicacy in the health of his son,
+Mr. Henry Blanchard left Norfolk, taking the young man with him,
+under medical advice, to try the climate of Italy. Early in the
+ensuing month of March, Arthur Blanchard also left Thorpe
+Ambrose, for a few days only, on business which required his
+presence in London. The business took him into the City. Annoyed
+by the endless impediments in the streets, he returned westward
+by one of the river steamers, and, so returning, met his death.
+
+As the steamer left the wharf, he noticed a woman near him who
+had shown a singular hesitation in embarking, and who had been
+the last of the passengers to take her place in the vessel. She
+was neatly dressed in black silk, with a red Paisley shawl over
+her shoulders, and she kept her face hidden behind a thick veil.
+Arthur Blanchard was struck by the rare grace and elegance of her
+figure, and he felt a young man's passing curiosity to see her
+face. She neither lifted her veil nor turned her head his way.
+After taking a few steps hesitatingly backward and forward on the
+deck, she walked away on a sudden to the stern of the vessel. In
+a minute more there was a cry of alarm from the man at the helm,
+and the engines were stopped immediately. The woman had thrown
+herself overboard.
+
+The passengers all rushed to the side of the vessel to look.
+Arthur Blanchard alone, without an instant's hesitation, jumped
+into the river. He was an excellent swimmer, and he reached the
+woman as she rose again to the surface, after sinking for the
+first time. Help was at hand, and they were both brought safely
+ashore. The woman was taken to the nearest police station, and
+was soon restored to her senses, her preserver giving his name
+and address, as usual in such cases, to the inspector on duty,
+who wisely recommended him to get into a warm bath, and to send
+to his lodgings for dry clothes. Arthur Blanchard, who had never
+known an hour's illness since he was a child, laughed at the
+caution, and went back in a cab. The next day he was too ill
+to attend the examination before the magistrate. A fortnight
+afterward he was a dead man.
+
+The news of the calamity reached Henry Blanchard and his son at
+Milan, and within an hour of the time when they received it they
+were on their way back to England. The snow on the Alps had
+loosened earlier than usual that year, and the passes were
+notoriously dangerous. The father and son, traveling in their own
+carriage, were met on the mountain by the mail returning, after
+sending the letters on by hand. Warnings which would have
+produced their effect under any ordinary circumstances were now
+vainly addressed to the two Englishmen. Their impatience to be
+at home again, after the catastrophe which had befallen their
+family, brooked no delay. Bribes lavishly offered to the
+postilions, tempted them to go on. The carriage pursued its way,
+and was lost to view in the mist. When it was seen again, it was
+disinterred from the bottom of a precipice--the men, the horses,
+and the vehicle all crushed together under the wreck and ruin of
+an avalanche.
+
+So the three lives were mown down by death. So, in a clear
+sequence of events, a woman's suicide-leap into a river had
+opened to Allan Armadale the succession to the Thorpe Ambrose
+estates.
+
+Who was the woman? The man who saved her life never knew. The
+magistrate who remanded her, the chaplain who exhorted her, the
+reporter who exhibited her in print, never knew. It was recorded
+of her with surprise that, though most respectably dressed, she
+had nevertheless described herself as being "in distress." She
+had expressed the deepest contrition, but had persisted in giving
+a name which was on the face of it a false one; in telling a
+commonplace story, which was manifestly an invention; and in
+refusing to the last to furnish any clew to her friends. A lady
+connected with a charitable institution ("interested by her
+extreme elegance and beauty") had volunteered to take charge of
+her, and to bring her into a better frame of mind . The first
+day's experience of the penitent had been far from cheering, and
+the second day's experience had been conclusive. She had left the
+institution by stealth; and--though the visiting clergyman,
+taking a special interest in the case, had caused special efforts
+to be made--all search after her, from that time forth, had
+proved fruitless.
+
+While this useless investigation (undertaken at Allan's express
+desire) was in progress, the lawyers had settled the preliminary
+formalities connected with the succession to the property. All
+that remained was for the new master of Thorpe Ambrose to decide
+when he would personally establish himself on the estate of which
+he was now the legal possessor.
+
+Left necessarily to his own guidance in this matter, Allan
+settled it for himself in his usual hot-headed, generous way.
+He positively declined to take possession until Mrs. Blanchard
+and her niece (who had been permitted thus far, as a matter of
+courtesy, to remain in their old home) had recovered from the
+calamity that had befallen them, and were fit to decide for
+themselves what their future proceedings should be. A private
+correspondence followed this resolution, comprehending, on
+Allan's side, unlimited offers of everything he had to give (in
+a house which he had not yet seen), and, on the ladies' side, a
+discreetly reluctant readiness to profit by the young gentleman's
+generosity in the matter of time. To the astonishment of his
+legal advisers, Allan entered their office one morning,
+accompanied by Mr. Brock, and announced, with perfect composure,
+that the ladies had been good enough to take his own arrangements
+off his hands, and that, in deference to their convenience, he
+meant to defer establishing himself at Thorpe Ambrose till that
+day two months. The lawyers stared at Allan, and Allan, returning
+the compliment, stared at the lawyers.
+
+"What on earth are you wondering at, gentlemen?" he inquired,
+with a boyish bewilderment in his good-humored blue eyes. "Why
+shouldn't I give the ladies their two months, if the ladies want
+them? Let the poor things take their own time, and welcome. My
+rights? and my position? Oh, pooh! pooh! I'm in no hurry to be
+squire of the parish; it's not in my way. What do I mean to do
+for the two months? What I should have done anyhow, whether the
+ladies had stayed or not; I mean to go cruising at sea. That's
+what _I_ like! I've got a new yacht at home in Somersetshire--a
+yacht of my own building. And I'll tell you what, sir," continued
+Allan, seizing the head partner by the arm in the fervor of his
+friendly intentions, "you look sadly in want of a holiday in the
+fresh air, and you shall come along with me on the trial trip of
+my new vessel. And your partners, too, if they like. And the head
+clerk, who is the best fellow I ever met with in my life. Plenty
+of room--we'll all shake down together on the floor, and we'll
+give Mr. Brock a rug on the cabin table. Thorpe Ambrose be
+hanged! Do you mean to say, if you had built a vessel yourself
+(as I have), you would go to any estate in the three kingdoms,
+while your own little beauty was sitting like a duck on the water
+at home, and waiting for you to try her? You legal gentlemen are
+great hands at argument. What do you think of that argument? I
+think it's unanswerable--and I'm off to Somersetshire to-morrow."
+
+With those words, the new possessor of eight thousand a year
+dashed into the head clerk's office, and invited that functionary
+to a cruise on the high seas, with a smack on the shoulder which
+was heard distinctly by his masters in the next room. The firm
+looked in interrogative wonder at Mr. Brock. A client who could
+see a position among the landed gentry of England waiting for
+him, without being in a hurry to occupy it at the earliest
+possible opportunity, was a client of whom they possessed no
+previous experience.
+
+"He must have been very oddly brought up," said the lawyers to
+the rector.
+
+"Very oddly," said the rector to the lawyers.
+
+A last leap over one month more brought Mr. Brock to the present
+time--to the bedroom at Castletown, in which he was sitting
+thinking, and to the anxiety which was obstinately intruding
+itself between him and his night's rest. That anxiety was no
+unfamiliar enemy to the rector's peace of mind. It had first
+found him out in Somersetshire six months since, and it had now
+followed him to the Isle of Man under the inveterately obtrusive
+form of Ozias Midwinter.
+
+The change in Allan's future prospects had worked no
+corresponding alteration in his perverse fancy for the castaway
+at the village inn. In the midst of the consultations with the
+lawyers he had found time to visit Midwinter, and on the journey
+back with the rector there was Allan's friend in the carriage,
+returning with them to Somersetshire by Allan's own invitation.
+
+The ex-usher's hair had grown again on his shaven skull, and his
+dress showed the renovating influence of an accession of
+pecuniary means, but in all other respects the man was unchanged.
+He met Mr. Brock's distrust with the old uncomplaining
+resignation to it; he maintained the same suspicious silence on
+the subject of his relatives and his early life; he spoke of
+Allan's kindness to him with the same undisciplined fervor of
+gratitude and surprise. "I have done what I could, sir," he said
+to Mr. Brock, while Allan was asleep in the railway carriage. "I
+have kept out of Mr. Armadale's way, and I have not even answered
+his last letter to me. More than that is more than I can do. I
+don't ask you to consider my own feeling toward the only human
+creature who has never suspected and never ill-treated me. I can
+resist my own feeling, but I can't resist the young gentleman
+himself. There's not another like him in the world. If we are to
+be parted again, it must be his doing or yours--not mine. The
+dog's master has whistled," said this strange man, with a
+momentary outburst of the hidden passion in him, and a sudden
+springing of angry tears in his wild brown eyes, "and it is hard,
+sir, to blame the dog when the dog comes."
+
+Once more Mr. Brock's humanity got the better of Mr. Brock's
+caution. He determined to wait, and see what the coming days of
+social intercourse might bring forth.
+
+The days passed; the yacht was rigged and fitted for sea; a
+cruise was arranged to the Welsh coast--and Midwinter the Secret
+was the same Midwinter still. Confinement on board a little
+vessel of five-and-thirty tons offered no great attraction to a
+man of Mr. Brock's time of life. But he sailed on the trial trip
+of the yacht nevertheless, rather than trust Allan alone with his
+new friend.
+
+Would the close companionship of the three on their cruise tempt
+the man into talking of his own affairs? No; he was ready enough
+on other subjects, especially if Allan led the way to them. But
+not a word escaped him about himself. Mr. Brock tried him with
+questions about his recent inheritance, and was answered as he
+had been answered once already at the Somersetshire inn. It was
+a curious coincidence, Midwinter admitted, that Mr. Armadale's
+prospects and his own prospects should both have unexpectedly
+changed for the better about the same time. But there the
+resemblance ended. It was no large fortune that had fallen
+into his lap, though it was enough for his wants. It had not
+reconciled him with his relations, for the money had not come to
+him as a matter of kindness, but as a matter of right. As for the
+circumstance which had led to his communicating with his family,
+it was not worth mentioning, seeing that the temporary renewal of
+intercourse which had followed had produced no friendly results.
+Nothing had come of it but the money--and, with the money, an
+anxiety which troubled him sometimes, when he woke in the small
+hours of the morning.
+
+At those last words he became suddenly silent, as if for once his
+well-guarded tongue had betrayed him.
+
+Mr. Brock seized the opportunity, and bluntly asked him what the
+nature of the anxiety might be. Did it relate to money? No; it
+related to a Letter which had been waiting for him for many
+years. Had he received the letter? Not yet; it had been left
+under charge of one of the partners in the firm which had managed
+the business of his inheritance for him; the partner had been
+absent from England; and the letter, locked up among his own
+private papers, could not be got at till he returned. He was
+expected back toward the latter part of that present May, and,
+if Midwinter could be sure where the cruise would take them to
+at the close of the month, he thought he would write and have
+the letter forwarded. Had he any family reasons to be anxious
+about it? None that he knew of; he was curious to see what had
+been waiting for him for many years, and that was all. So he
+answered the rector's questions, with his tawny face turned away
+over the low bulwark of the yacht, and his fishing-line dragging
+in his supple brown hands.
+
+Favored by wind and weather, the little vessel had done wonders
+on her trial trip. Before the period fixed for the duration of
+the cruise had half expired, the yacht was as high up on the
+Welsh coast as Holyhead; and Allan, eager for adventure in
+unknown regions, had declared boldly for an extension of the
+voyage northward to the Isle of Man. Having ascertained from
+reliable authority that the weather really promised well for a
+cruise in that quarter, and that, in the event of any unforeseen
+necessity for return, the railway was accessible by the steamer
+from Douglas to Liverpool, Mr. Brock agreed to his pupil's
+proposal. By that night's post he wrote to Allan's lawyers and
+to his own rectory, indicating Douglas in the Isle of Man as
+the next address to which letters might be forwarded. At the
+post-office he met Midwinter, who had just dropped a letter into
+the box. Remembering what he had said on board the yacht, Mr.
+Brock concluded that they had both taken the same precaution,
+and had ordered their correspondence to be forwarded to the same
+place.
+
+Late the next day they set sail for the Isle of Man.
+
+For a few hours all went well; but sunset brought with it the
+signs of a coming change. With the darkness the wind rose to a
+gale, and the question whether Allan and his journeymen had or
+had not built a stout sea-boat was seriously tested for the
+first time. All that night, after trying vainly to bear up for
+Holyhead, the little vessel kept the sea, and stood her trial
+bravely. The next morning the Isle of Man was in view, and the
+yacht was safe at Castletown. A survey by daylight of hull and
+rigging showed that all the damage done might be set right again
+in a week's time. The cruising party had accordingly remained at
+Castletown, Allan being occupied in superintending the repairs,
+Mr. Brock in exploring the neighborhood, and Midwinter in making
+daily pilgrimages on foot to Douglas and back to inquire for
+letters.
+
+The first of the cruising party who received a letter was Allan.
+"More worries from those everlasting lawyers," was all he said,
+when he had read the letter, and had crumpled it up in his
+pocket. The rector's turn came next, before the week's sojourn at
+Castletown had expired. On the fifth day he found a letter from
+Somersetshire waiting for him at the hotel. It had been brought
+there by Midwinter, and it contained news which entirely
+overthrew all Mr. Brock's holiday plans. The clergyman who had
+undertaken to do duty for him in his absence had been
+unexpectedly summoned home again; and Mr. Brock had no choice
+(the day of the week being Friday) but to cross the next morning
+from Douglass to Liverpool, and get back by railway on Saturday
+night in time for Sunday's service.
+
+Having read his letter, and resigned himself to his altered
+circumstances as patiently as he might, the rector passed next to
+a question that pressed for serious consideration in its turn.
+Burdened with his heavy responsibility toward Allan, and
+conscious of his own undiminished distrust of Allan's new friend,
+how was he to act, in the emergency that now beset him, toward
+the two young men who had been his companions on the cruise?
+
+Mr. Brock had first asked himself that awkward question on the
+Friday afternoon, and he was still trying vainly to answer it,
+alone in his own room, at one o'clock on the Saturday morning. It
+was then only the end of May, and the residence of the ladies at
+Thorpe Ambrose (unless they chose to shorten it of their own
+accord) would not expire till the middle of June. Even if the
+repairs of the yacht had been completed (which was not the case),
+there was no possible pretense for hurrying Allan back to
+Somersetshire. But one other alternative remained--to leave him
+where he was. In other words, to leave him, at the turning-point
+of his life, under the sole influence of a man whom he had first
+met with as a castaway at a village inn, and who was still, to
+all practical purposes, a total stranger to him.
+
+In despair of obtaining any better means of enlightenment to
+guide his decision, Mr. Brock reverted to the impression which
+Midwinter had produced on his own mind in the familiarity of the
+cruise.
+
+Young as he was, the ex-usher had evidently lived a varied life.
+He could speak of books like a man who had really enjoyed them;
+he could take his turn at the helm like a sailor who knew his
+duty; he could cook, and climb the rigging, and lay the cloth for
+dinner, with an odd delight in the exhibition of his own
+dexterity. The display of these, and other qualities like them,
+as his spirits rose with the cruise, had revealed the secret of
+his attraction for Allan plainly enough. But had all disclosures
+rested there? Had the man let no chance light in on his character
+in the rector's presence? Very little; and that little did not
+set him forth in a morally alluring aspect. His way in the world
+had lain evidently in doubtful places; familiarity with the small
+villainies of vagabonds peeped out of him now and then; and, more
+significant still, he habitually slept the light, suspicious
+sleep of a man who has been accustomed to close his eyes in doubt
+of the company under the same roof with him. Down to the very
+latest moment of the rector's experience of him--down to that
+present Friday night--his conduct had been persistently secret
+and unaccountable to the very last. After bringing Mr. Brock's
+letter to the hotel, he had mysterious disappeared from the house
+without leaving any message for his companions, and without
+letting anybody see whether he had or had not received a letter
+himself. At nightfall he had come back stealthily in the
+darkness, had been caught on the stairs by Allan, eager to tell
+him of the change in the rector's plans, had listened to the news
+without a word of remark! and had ended by sulkily locking
+himself into his own room. What was there in his favor to set
+against such revelations of his character as these--against his
+wandering eyes, his obstinate reserve with the rector, his
+ominous silence on the subject of family and friends? Little or
+nothing: the sum of all his merits began and ended with his
+gratitude to Allan.
+
+
+Mr. Brock left his seat on the side of the bed, trimmed his
+candle, and, still lost in his own thoughts, looked out absently
+at the night. The change of place brought no new ideas with it.
+His retrospect over his own past life had amply satisfied him
+that his present sense of responsibility rested on no merely
+fanciful grounds, and, having brought him to that point, had left
+him there, standing at the window, and seeing nothing but the
+total darkness in his own mind faithfully reflected by the total
+darkness of the night.
+
+"If I only had a friend to apply to!" thought the rector. "If I
+could only find some one to help me in this miserable place!"
+
+At the moment when the aspiration crossed his mind, it was
+suddenly answered by a low knock at the door, and a voice said
+softly in the passage outside, "Let me come in."
+
+After an instant's pause to steady his nerves, Mr. Brock opened
+the door, and found himself, at one o'clock in the morning,
+standing face to face on the threshold of his own bedroom with
+Ozias Midwinter.
+
+"Are you ill?" asked the rector, as soon as his astonishment
+would allow him to speak.
+
+"I have come here to make a clean breast of it!" was the strange
+answer. "Will you let me in?"
+
+With those words he walked into the room, his eyes on the ground,
+his lips ashy pale, and his hand holding something hidden behind
+him.
+
+"I saw the light under your door," he went on, without looking
+up, and without moving his hand, "and I know the trouble on your
+mind which is keeping you from your rest. You are going away
+to-morrow morning, and you don't like leaving Mr. Armadale alone
+with a stranger like me."
+
+Startled as he was, Mr. Brock saw the serious necessity of being
+plain with a man who had come at that time, and had said those
+words to him.
+
+"You have guessed right," he answered. "I stand in the place of a
+father to Allan Armadale, and I am naturally unwilling to leave
+him, at his age, with a man whom I don't know."
+
+Ozias Midwinter took a step forward to the table. His wandering
+eyes rested on the rector's New Testament, which was one of the
+objects lying on it.
+
+"You have read that Book, in the years of a long life, to many
+congregations," he said. "Has it taught you mercy to your
+miserable fellow-creatures?"
+
+Without waiting to be answered, he looked Mr. Brock in the face
+for the first time, and brought his hidden hand slowly into view.
+
+"Read that," he said; "and, for Christ's sake, pity me when you
+know who I am."
+
+He laid a letter of many pages on the table. It was the letter
+that Mr. Neal had posted at Wildbad nineteen years since.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE MAN REVEALED.
+
+THE first cool breathings of the coming dawn fluttered through
+the open window as Mr. Brock read the closing lines of the
+Confession. He put it from him in silence, without looking up.
+The first shock of discovery had struck his mind, and had passed
+away again. At his age, and with his habits of thought, his grasp
+was not strong enough to hold the whole revelation that had
+fallen on him. All his heart, when he closed the manuscript, was
+with the memory of the woman who had been the beloved friend of
+his later and happier life; all his thoughts were busy with the
+miserable secret of her treason to her own father which the
+letter had disclosed.
+
+He was startled out of the narrow limits of his own little grief
+by the vibration of the table at which he sat, under a hand that
+was laid on it heavily. The instinct of reluctance was strong in
+him; but he conquered it, and looked up. There, silently
+confronting him in the mixed light of the yellow candle flame and
+the faint gray dawn, stood the castaway of the village inn--the
+inheritor of the fatal Armadale name.
+
+Mr. Brock shuddered as the terror of the present time and the
+darker terror yet of the future that might be coming rushed back
+on him at the sight of the man's face. The man saw it, and spoke
+first.
+
+"Is my father's crime looking at you out of my eyes?" he asked.
+"Has the ghost of the drowned man followed me into the room?"
+
+The suffering and the passion that he was forcing back shook the
+hand that he still kept on the table, and stifled the voice in
+which he spoke until it sank to a whisper.
+
+"I have no wish to treat you otherwise than justly and kindly,"
+answered Mr. Brock. "Do me justice on my side, and believe that I
+am incapable of cruelly holding you responsible for your father's
+crime."
+
+The reply seemed to compose him. He bowed his head in silence,
+and took up the confession from the table.
+
+"Have you read this through?" he asked, quietly.
+
+"Every word of it, from first to last."
+
+"Have I dealt openly with you so far. Has Ozias Midwinter--"
+
+"Do you still call yourself by that name," interrupted Mr. Brock,
+"now your true name is known to me?"
+
+"Since I have read my father's confession," was the answer, "I
+like my ugly alias better than ever. Allow me to repeat the
+question which I was about to put to you a minute since: Has
+Ozias Midwinter done his best thus far to enlighten Mr. Brock?"
+
+The rector evaded a direct reply. "Few men in your position," he
+said, "would have had the courage to show me that letter."
+
+"Don't be too sure, sir, of the vagabond you picked up at the inn
+till you know a little more of him than you know now. You have
+got the secret of my birth, but you are not in possession yet of
+the story of my life. You ought to know it, and you shall know
+it, before you leave me alone with Mr. Armadale. Will you wait,
+and rest a little while, or shall I tell it you now?"
+
+"Now," said Mr. Brock, still as far away as ever from knowing the
+real character of the man before him.
+
+Everything Ozias Midwinter said, everything Ozias Midwinter did,
+was against him. He had spoken with a sardonic indifference,
+almost with an insolence of tone, which would have repelled the
+sympathies of any man who heard him. And now, instead of placing
+himself at the table, and addressing his story directly to the
+rector, he withdrew silently and ungraciously to the window-seat.
+There he sat, his face averted, his hands mechanically turning
+the leaves of his father's letter till he came to the last. With
+his eyes fixed on the closing lines of the manuscript, and with
+a strange mixture of recklessness and sadness in his voice, he
+began his promised narrative in these words:
+
+
+"The first thing you know of me," he said, "is what my father's
+confession has told you already. He mentions here that I was a
+child, asleep on his breast, when he spoke his last words in this
+world, and when a stranger's hand wrote them down for him at his
+deathbed. That stranger's name, as you may have noticed, is
+signed on the cover--'Alexander Neal, Writer to the Signet,
+Edinburgh.' The first recollection I have is of Alexander Neal
+beating me with a horsewhip (I dare say I deserved it), in the
+character of my stepfather."
+
+"Have you no recollection of your mother at the same time?" asked
+Mr. Brock.
+
+"Yes; I remember her having shabby old clothes made up to fit me,
+and having fine new frocks bought for her two children by her
+second husband. I remember the servants laughing at me in my old
+things, and the horsewhip finding its way to my shoulders again
+for losing my temper and tearing my shabby clothes. My next
+recollection gets on to a year or two later. I remember myself
+locked up in a lumber-room, with a bit of bread and a mug of
+water, wondering what it was that made my mother and my
+stepfather seem to hate the very sight of me. I never settled
+that question till yesterday, and then I solved the mystery,
+when my father's letter was put into my hands. My mother knew
+what had really happened on board the French timber-ship, and my
+stepfather knew what had really happened, and they were both well
+aware that the shameful secret which they would fain have kept
+from every living creature was a secret which would be one day
+revealed to _me_. There was no help for it--the confession was in
+the executor's hands, and there was I, an ill-conditioned brat,
+with my mother's negro blood in my face, and my murdering
+father's passions in my heart, inheritor of their secret in spite
+of them! I don't wonder at the horsewhip now, or the shabby old
+clothes, or the bread and water in the lumber-room. Natural
+penalties all of them, sir, which the child was beginning to pay
+already for the father's sin."
+
+Mr. Brock looked at the swarthy, secret face, still obstinately
+turned away from him. "Is this the stark insensibility of a
+vagabond," he asked himself, "or the despair, in disguise, of
+a miserable man?"
+
+"School is my next recollection," the other went on--"a cheap
+place in a lost corner of Scotland. I was left there, with a bad
+character to help me at starting. I spare you the story of the
+master's cane in the schoolroom, and the boys' kicks in the
+playground. I dare say there was ingrained ingratitude in my
+nature; at any rate, I ran away. The first person who met me
+asked my name. I was too young and too foolish to know the
+importance of concealing it, and, as a matter of course, I was
+taken back to school the same evening. The result taught me a
+lesson which I have not forgotten since. In a day or two more,
+like the vagabond I was, I ran away for the second time. The
+school watch-dog had had his instructions, I suppose: he stopped
+me before I got outside the gate. Here is his mark, among the
+rest, on the back of my hand. His master's marks I can't show
+you; they are all on my back. Can you believe in my perversity?
+There was a devil in me that no dog could worry out. I ran away
+again as soon as I left my bed, and this time I got off. At
+nightfall I found myself (with a pocketful of the school oatmeal)
+lost on a moor. I lay down on the fine soft heather, under the
+lee of a great gray rock. Do you think I felt lonely? Not I!
+I was away from the master's cane, away from my schoolfellows'
+kicks, away from my mother, away from my stepfather; and I lay
+down that night under my good friend the rock, the happiest boy
+in all Scotland!"
+
+Through the wretched childhood which that one significant
+circumstance disclosed, Mr. Brock began to see dimly how little
+was really strange, how little really unaccountable, in the
+character of the man who was now speaking to him.
+
+"I slept soundly," Midwinter continued, "under my friend the
+rock. When I woke in the morning, I found a sturdy old man with a
+fiddle sitting on one side of me, and two performing dogs on the
+other. Experience had made me too sharp to tell the truth when
+the man put his first questions. He didn't press them; he gave me
+a good breakfast out of his knapsack, and he let me romp with the
+dogs. 'I'll tell you what,' he said, when he had got my
+confidence in this manner, 'you want three things, my man: you
+want a new father, a new family, and a new name. I'll be your
+father. I'll let you have the dogs for your brothers; and, if
+you'll promise to be very careful of it, I'll give you my own
+name into the bargain. Ozias Midwinter, Junior, you have had a
+good breakfast; if you want a good dinner, come along with me!'
+He got up, the dogs trotted after him, and I trotted after the
+dogs. Who was my new father? you will ask. A half-breed gypsy,
+sir; a drunkard, a ruffian, and a thief--and the best friend I
+ever had! Isn't a man your friend who gives you your food, your
+shelter, and your education? Ozias Midwinter taught me to dance
+the Highland fling, to throw somersaults, to walk on stilts, and
+to sing songs to his fiddle. Sometimes we roamed the country,
+and performed at fairs. Sometimes we tried the large towns, and
+enlivened bad company over its cups. I was a nice, lively little
+boy of eleven years old, and bad company, the women especially,
+took a fancy to me and my nimble feet. I was vagabond enough to
+like the life. The dogs and I lived together, ate, and drank, and
+slept together. I can't think of those poor little four-footed
+brothers of mine, even now, without a choking in the throat. Many
+is the beating we three took together; many is the hard day's
+dancing we did together; many is the night we have slept
+together, and whimpered together, on the cold hill-side. I'm not
+trying to distress you, sir; I'm only telling you the truth. The
+life with all its hardships was a life that fitted me, and the
+half-breed gypsy who gave me his name, ruffian as he was, was a
+ruffian I liked."
+
+"A man who beat you!" exclaimed Mr. Brock, in astonishment.
+
+"Didn't I tell you just now, sir, that I lived with the dogs? and
+did you ever hear of a dog who liked his master the worse for
+beating him? Hundreds of thousands of miserable men, women, and
+children would have liked that man (as I liked him) if he had
+always given them what he always gave me--plenty to eat. It was
+stolen food mostly, and my new gypsy father was generous with it.
+He seldom laid the stick on us when he was sober; but it diverted
+him to hear us yelp when he was drunk. He died drunk, and enjoyed
+his favorite amusement with his last breath. One day (when I had
+been two years in his service), after giving us a good dinner
+out on the moor, he sat down with his back against a stone, and
+called us up to divert himself with his stick. He made the dogs
+yelp first, and then he called to me. I didn't go very willingly;
+he had been drinking harder than usual, and the more he drank
+the better he liked his after-dinner amusement. He was in high
+good-humor that day, and he hit me so hard that he toppled over,
+in his drunken state, with the force of his own blow. He fell
+with his face in a puddle, and lay there without moving. I and
+the dogs stood at a distance, and looked at him: we thought he
+was feigning, to get us near and have another stroke at us. He
+feigned so long that we ventured up to him at last. It took me
+some time to pull him over; he was a heavy man. When I did get
+him on his back, he was dead. We made all the outcry we could;
+but the dogs were little, and I was little, and the place was
+lonely; and no help came to us. I took his fiddle and his stick;
+I said to my two brothers, 'Come along, we must get our own
+living now;' and we went away heavy-hearted, and left him on the
+moor. Unnatural as it may seem to you, I was sorry for him. I
+kept his ugly name through all my after-wanderings, and I have
+enough of the old leaven left in me to like the sound of it
+still. Midwinter or Armadale, never mind my name now, we will
+talk of that afterward; you must know the worst of me first."
+
+"Why not the best of you?" said Mr. Brock, gently.
+
+"Thank you, sir; but I am here to tell the truth. We will get on,
+if you please, to the next chapter in my story. The dogs and I
+did badly, after our master's death; our luck was against us. I
+lost one of my little brothers--the best performer of the two; he
+was stolen, and I never recovered him. My fiddle and my stilts
+were taken from me next, by main force, by a tramp who was
+stronger than I. These misfortunes drew Tommy and me--I beg your
+pardon, sir, I mean the dog--closer together than ever.
+
+I think we had some kind of dim foreboding on both sides that we
+had not done with our misfortunes yet; anyhow, it was not very
+long before we were parted forever. We were neither of us thieves
+(our master had been satisfied with teaching us to dance); but we
+both committed an invasion of the rights of property, for all
+that. Young creatures, even when they are half starved, cannot
+resist taking a run sometimes on a fine morning. Tommy and I
+could not resist taking a run into a gentleman's plantation; the
+gentleman preserved his game; and the gentleman's keeper knew his
+business. I heard a gun go off; you can guess the rest. God
+preserve me from ever feeling such misery again as I felt when I
+lay down by Tommy, and took him, dead and bloody, in my arms! The
+keeper attempted to part us; I bit him, like the wild animal I
+was. He tried the stick on me next; he might as well have tried
+it on one of the trees. The noise reached the ears of two young
+ladies riding near the place--daughters of the gentleman on whose
+property I was a trespasser. They were too well brought up to
+lift their voices against the sacred right of preserving game,
+but they were kind-hearted girls, and they pitied me, and took me
+home with them. I remember the gentlemen of the house (keen
+sportsmen all of them) roaring with laughter as I went by the
+windows, crying, with my little dead dog in my arms. Don't
+suppose I complain of their laughter; it did me good service; it
+roused the indignation of the two ladies. One of them took me
+into her own garden, and showed me a place where I might bury my
+dog under the flowers, and be sure that no other hands should
+ever disturb him again. The other went to her father, and
+persuaded him to give the forlorn little vagabond a chance in
+the house, under one of the upper servants. Yes! you have been
+cruising in company with a man who was once a foot-boy. I saw you
+look at me, when I amused Mr. Armadale by laying the cloth on
+board the yacht. Now you know why I laid it so neatly, and forgot
+nothing. It has been my good fortune to see something of society;
+I have helped to fill its stomach and black its boots. My
+experience of the servants' hall was not a long one. Before I had
+worn out my first suit of livery, there was a scandal in the
+house. It was the old story; there is no need to tell it over
+again for the thousandth time. Loose money left on a table, and
+not found there again; all the servants with characters to appeal
+to except the foot-boy, who had been rashly taken on trial. Well!
+well! I was lucky in that house to the last; I was not prosecuted
+for taking what I had not only never touched, but never even
+seen: I was only turned out. One morning I went in my old clothes
+to the grave where I had buried Tommy. I gave the place a kiss;
+I said good-by to my little dead dog; and there I was, out in the
+world again, at the ripe age of thirteen years!"
+
+"In that friendless state, and at that tender age," said Mr.
+Brock, "did no thought cross your mind of going home again?"
+
+"I went home again, sir, that very night--I slept on the
+hill-side. What other home had I? In a day or two's time I
+drifted back to the large towns and the bad company, the great
+open country was so lonely to me, now I had lost the dogs! Two
+sailors picked me up next. I was a handy lad, and I got a
+cabin-boy's berth on board a coasting-vessel. A cabin-boy's
+berth means dirt to live in, offal to eat, a man's work on a
+boy's shoulders, and the rope's-end at regular intervals. The
+vessel touched at a port in the Hebrides. I was as ungrateful as
+usual to my best benefactors; I ran away again. Some women found
+me, half dead of starvation, in the northern wilds of the Isle of
+Skye. It was near the coast and I took a turn with the fishermen
+next. There was less of the rope's-end among my new masters; but
+plenty of exposure to wind and weather, and hard work enough to
+have killed a boy who was not a seasoned tramp like me. I fought
+through it till the winter came, and then the fishermen turned me
+adrift again. I don't blame them; food was scarce, and mouths
+were many. With famine staring the whole community in the face,
+why should they keep a boy who didn't belong to them? A great
+city was my only chance in the winter-time; so I went to Glasgow,
+and all but stepped into the lion's mouth as soon as I got there.
+I was minding an empty cart on the Broomielaw, when I heard my
+stepfather's voice on the pavement side of the horse by which I
+was standing. He had met some person whom he knew, and, to my
+terror and surprise, they were talking about me. Hidden behind
+the horse, I heard enough of their conversation to know that I
+had narrowly escaped discovery before I went on board the
+coasting-vessel. I had met at that time with another vagabond boy
+of my own age; we had quarreled and parted. The day after, my
+stepfather's inquiries were made in that very district, and it
+became a question with him (a good personal description being
+unattainable in either case) which of the two boys he should
+follow. One of them, he was informed, was known as "Brown," and
+the other as "Midwinter." Brown was just the common name which
+a cunning runaway boy would be most likely to assume; Midwinter,
+just the remarkable name which he would be most likely to avoid.
+The pursuit had accordingly followed Brown, and had allowed me
+to escape. I leave you to imagine whether I was not doubly and
+trebly determined to keep my gypsy master's name after that.
+But my resolution did not stop here. I made up my mind to leave
+the country altogether. After a day or two's lurking about the
+outward-bound vessels in port, I found out which sailed first,
+and hid myself on board. Hunger tried hard to force me out before
+the pilot had left; but hunger was not new to me, and I kept my
+place. The pilot was out of the vessel when I made my appearance
+on deck, and there was nothing for it but to keep me or throw me
+overboard. The captain said (I have no doubt quite truly) that he
+would have preferred throwing me overboard; but the majesty of
+the law does sometimes stand the friend even of a vagabond like
+me. In that way I came back to a sea-life. In that way I learned
+enough to make me handy and useful (as I saw you noticed) on
+board Mr. Armadale's yacht. I sailed more than one voyage, in
+more than one vessel, to more than one part of the world, and I
+might have followed the sea for life, if I could only have kept
+my temper under every provocation that could be laid on it. I had
+learned a great deal; but, not having learned that, I made the
+last part of my last voyage home to the port of Bristol in irons;
+and I saw the inside of a prison for the first time in my life,
+on a charge of mutinous conduct to one of my officers. You have
+heard me with extraordinary patience, sir, and I am glad to tell
+you, in return, that we are not far now from the end of my story.
+You found some books, if I remember right, when you searched my
+luggage at the Somersetshire inn?"
+
+Mr. Brock answered in the affirmative.
+
+"Those books mark the next change in my life--and the last,
+before I took the usher's place at the school. My term of
+imprisonment was not a long one. Perhaps my youth pleaded for me;
+perhaps the Bristol magistrates took into consideration the time
+I had passed in irons on board ship. Anyhow, I was just turned
+seventeen when I found myself out on the world again. I had no
+friends to receive me; I had no place to go to. A sailor's life,
+after what had happened, was a life I recoiled from in disgust.
+I stood in the crowd on the bridge at Bristol, wondering what I
+should do with my freedom now I had got it back. Whether I had
+altered in the prison, or whether I was feeling the change in
+character that comes with coming manhood, I don't know; but the
+old reckless enjoyment of the old vagabond life seemed quite worn
+out of my nature. An awful sense of loneliness kept me wandering
+about Bristol, in horror of the quiet country, till after
+nightfall. I looked at the lights kindling in the parlor windows,
+with a miserable envy of the happy people inside. A word of
+advice would have been worth something to me at that time. Well!
+I got it: a policeman advised me to move on. He was quite right;
+what else could I do? I looked up at the sky, and there was my
+old friend of many a night's watch at sea, the north star. 'All
+points of the compass are alike to me,' I thought to myself;
+'I'll go _your_ way.' Not even the star would keep me company
+that night. It got behind a cloud, and left me alone in the rain
+and darkness. I groped my way to a cart-shed, fell asleep, and
+dreamed of old times, when I served my gypsy master and lived
+with the dogs. God! what I would have given when I woke to have
+felt Tommy's little cold muzzle in my hand! Why am I dwelling on
+these things? Why don't I get on to the end? You shouldn't
+encourage me, sir, by listening, so patiently. After a week more
+of wandering, without hope to help me, or prospects to look to,
+I found myself in the streets of Shrewsbury, staring in at the
+windows of a book-seller's shop. An old man came to the shop
+door, looked about him, and saw me. 'Do you want a job?' he
+asked. 'And are you not above doing it cheap?' The prospect of
+having something to do, and some human creature to speak a word
+to, tempted me, and I did a day's dirty work in the book-seller's
+warehouse for a shilling. More work followed at the same rate.
+In a week I was promoted to sweep out the shop and put up the
+shutters. In no very long time after, I was trusted to carry the
+books out; and when quarter-day came, and the shop-man left, I
+took his place. Wonderful luck! you will say; here I had found my
+way to a friend at last. I had found my way to one of the most
+merciless misers in England; and I had risen in the little world
+of Shrewsbury by the purely commercial process of underselling
+all my competitors. The job in the warehouse had been declined
+at the price by every idle man in the town, and I did it. The
+regular porter received his weekly pittance under weekly protest.
+I took two shillings less, and made no complaint. The shop-man
+gave warning on the ground that he was underfed as well as
+underpaid. I received half his salary, and lived contentedly on
+his reversionary scraps. Never were two men so well suited to
+each other as that book-seller and I. _His_ one object in life
+was to find somebody who would work for him at starvation wages.
+_My_ one object in life was to find somebody who would give me an
+asylum over my head. Without a single sympathy in common--without
+a vestige of feeling of any sort, hostile or friendly, growing up
+between us on either side--without wishing each other good-night
+when we parted on the house stairs, or good-morning when we met
+at the shop counter, we lived alone in that house, strangers from
+first to last, for two whole years. A dismal existence for a lad
+of my age, was it not? You are a clergyman and a scholar--surely
+you can guess what made the life endurable to me?"
+
+Mr. Brock remembered the well-worn volumes which had been found
+in the usher's bag. "The books made it endurable to you," he
+said.
+
+The eyes of the castaway kindled with a new light.
+
+"Yes!" he said, "the books--the generous friends who met me
+without suspicion--the merciful masters who never used me ill!
+The only years of my life that I can look back on with something
+like pride are the years I passed in the miser's house. The only
+unalloyed pleasure I have ever tasted is the pleasure that I
+found for myself on the miser's shelves. Early and late, through
+the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the
+fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught. There
+were few customers to serve, for the books were mostly of the
+solid and scholarly kind. No responsibilities rested on me, for
+the accounts were kept by my master, and only the small sums of
+money were suffered to pass through my hands. He soon found out
+enough of me to know that my honesty was to be trusted, and that
+my patience might be counted on, treat me as he might. The one
+insight into _his_ character which I obtained, on my side,
+widened the distance between us to its last limits. He was a
+confirmed opium-eater in secret--a prodigal in laudanum, though a
+miser in all besides. He never confessed his frailty, and I never
+told him I had found it out. He had his pleasure apart from me,
+and I had my pleasure apart from _him_. Week after week, month
+after month, there we sat, without a friendly word ever passing
+between us--I, alone with my book at the counter; he, alone with
+his ledger in the parlor, dimly visible to me through the dirty
+window-pane of the glass door, sometimes poring over his figures,
+sometimes lost and motionless for hours in the ecstasy of his
+opium trance. Time passed, and made no impression on us; the
+seasons of two years came and went, and found us still unchanged.
+One morning, at the opening of the third year, my master did not
+appear, as usual, to give me my allowance for breakfast. I went
+upstairs, and found him helpless in his bed. He refused to trust
+me with the keys of the cupboard, or to let me send for a doctor.
+I bought a morsel of bread, and went back to my books, with no
+more feeling for _him_ (I honestly confess it) than he would have
+had for _me_ under the same circumstances. An hour or two later I
+was roused from my reading by an occasional customer of ours, a
+retired medical man. He went upstairs. I was glad to get rid of
+him and return to my books. He came down again, and disturbed me
+once more. 'I don't much like you, my lad,' he said; 'but I think
+it my duty to say that you will soon have to shift for yourself.
+You are no great favorite in the town, and you may have some
+difficulty in finding a new place. Provide yourself with a
+written character from your master before it is too late.' He
+spoke to me coldly. I thanked him coldly on my side, and got my
+character the same day. Do you think my master let me have it for
+nothing? Not he! He bargained with me on his deathbed. I was his
+creditor for a month's salary, and he wouldn't write a line of my
+testimonial until I had first promised to forgive him the debt.
+Three days afterward he died, enjoying to the last the happiness
+of having overreached his shop-man. 'Aha!' he whispered, when the
+doctor formally summoned me to take leave of him, 'I got you
+cheap!' Was Ozias Midwinter's stick as cruel as that? I think
+not. Well! there I was, out on the world again, but surely with
+better prospects this time. I had taught myself to read Latin,
+Greek, and German; and I had got my written character to speak
+for me. All useless! The doctor was quite right; I was not liked
+in the town. The lower order of the people despised me for
+selling my services to the miser at the miser's price. As for
+the better classes, I did with them (God knows how!) what I have
+always done with everybody except Mr. Armadale--I produced a
+disagreeable impression at first sight; I couldn't mend it
+afterward; and there was an end of me in respectable quarters. It
+is quite likely I might have spent all my savings, my puny little
+golden offspring of two years' miserable growth, but for a school
+advertisement which I saw in a local paper. The heartlessly mean
+terms that were offered encouraged me to apply; and I got the
+place. How I prospered in it, and what became of me next, there
+is no need to tell you. The thread of my story is all wound off;
+my vagabond life stands stripped of its mystery; and you know the
+worst of me at last."
+
+
+A moment of silence followed those closing words. Midwinter rose
+from the window-seat, and came back to the table with the letter
+from Wildbad in his hand.
+
+"My father's confession has told you who I am; and my own
+confession has told you what my life has been," he said,
+addressing Mr. Brock, without taking the chair to which the
+rector pointed. "I promised to make a clean breast of it when I
+first asked leave to enter this room. Have I kept my word?"
+
+"It is impossible to doubt it," replied Mr. Brock. "You have
+established your claim on my confidence and my sympathy. I should
+be insensible, indeed, if I could know what I now know of your
+childhood and your youth, and not feel something of Allan's
+kindness for Allan's friend."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Midwinter, simply and gravely.
+
+He sat down opposite Mr. Brook at the table for the first time.
+
+"In a few hours you will have left this place," he proceeded. "If
+I can help you to leave it with your mind at ease, I will. There
+is more to be said between us than we have said up to this time.
+My future relations with Mr. Armadale are still left undecided;
+and the serious question raised by my father's letter is a
+question which we have neither of us faced yet."
+
+He paused, and looked with a momentary impatience at the candle
+still burning on the table, in the morning light. The struggle to
+speak with composure, and to keep his own feelings stoically out
+of view, was evidently growing harder and harder to him.
+
+"It may possibly help your decision," he went on, "if I tell you
+how I determined to act toward Mr. Armadale--in the matter of the
+similarity of our names--when I first read this letter, and when
+I had composed myself sufficiently to be able to think at all."
+He stopped, and cast a second impatient look at the lighted
+candle. "Will you excuse the odd fancy of an odd man?" he asked,
+with a faint smile. "I want to put out the candle: I want to
+speak of the new subject, in the new light."
+
+He extinguished the candle as he spoke, and let the first
+tenderness of the daylight flow uninterruptedly into the room.
+
+"I must once more ask your patience," he resumed, "if I return
+for a moment to myself and my circumstances. I have already told
+you that my stepfather made an attempt to discover me some years
+after I had turned my back on the Scotch school. He took that
+step out of no anxiety of his own, but simply as the agent of my
+father's trustees. In the exercise of their discretion, they had
+sold the estates in Barbadoes (at the time of the emancipation of
+the slaves, and the ruin of West Indian property) for what the
+estates would fetch. Having invested the proceeds, they were
+bound to set aside a sum for my yearly education. This
+responsibility obliged them to make the attempt to trace me--a
+fruitless attempt, as you already know. A little later (as I have
+been since informed) I was publicly addressed by an advertisement
+in the newspapers, which I never saw. Later still, when I was
+twenty-one, a second advertisement appeared (which I did see)
+offering a reward for evidence of my death. If I was alive, I had
+a right to my half share of the proceeds of the estates on coming
+of age; if dead, the money reverted to my mother. I went to the
+lawyers, and heard from them what I have just told you. After
+some difficulty in proving my identity--and after an interview
+with my stepfather, and a message from my mother, which has
+hopelessly widened the old breach between us--my claim was
+allowed; and my money is now invested for me in the funds, under
+the name that is really my own."
+
+Mr. Brock drew eagerly nearer to the table. He saw the end now to
+which the speaker was tending
+
+"Twice a year," Midwinter pursued, "I must sign my own name to
+get my own income. At all other times, and under all other
+circumstances, I may hide my identity under any name I please. As
+Ozias Midwinter, Mr. Armadale first knew me; as Ozias Midwinter
+he shall know me to the end of my days. Whatever may be the
+result of this interview--whether I win your confidence or
+whether I lose it--of one thing you may feel sure: your pupil
+shall never know the horrible secret which I have trusted to your
+keeping. This is no extraordinary resolution; for, as you know
+already, it costs me no sacrifice of feeling to keep my assumed
+name. There is nothing in my conduct to praise; it comes
+naturally out of the gratitude of a thankful man. Review the
+circumstances for yourself, sir, and set my own horror of
+revealing them to Mr. Armadale out of the question. If the story
+of the names is ever told, there can be no limiting it to the
+disclosure of my father's crime; it must go back to the story of
+Mrs. Armadale's marriage. I have heard her son talk of her; I
+know how he loves her memory. As God is my witness, he shall
+never love it less dearly through _me_!"
+
+Simply as the words were spoken, they touched the deepest
+sympathies in the rector's nature: they took his thoughts back to
+Mrs. Armadale's deathbed. There sat the man against whom she had
+ignorantly warned him in her son's interests; and that man, of
+his own free-will, had laid on himself the obligation of
+respecting her secret for her son's sake! The memory of his own
+past efforts to destroy the very friendship out of which this
+resolution had sprung rose and reproached Mr. Brock. He held out
+his hand to Midwinter for the first time. "In her name, and in
+her son's name," he said, warmly, "I thank you."
+
+Without replying, Midwinter spread the confession open before him
+on the table.
+
+"I think I have said all that it was my duty to say," he began,
+"before we could approach the consideration of this letter.
+Whatever may have appeared strange in my conduct toward you and
+toward Mr. Armadale may be now trusted to explain itself. You can
+easily imagine the natural curiosity and surprise that I must
+have felt (ignorant as I then was of the truth) when the sound of
+Mr. Armadale's name first startled me as the echo of my own. You
+will readily understand that I only hesitated to tell him I was
+his namesake, because I hesitated to damage my position--in your
+estimation, if not in his--by confessing that I had come among
+you under an assumed name. And, after all that you have just
+heard of my vagabond life and my low associates, you will hardly
+wonder at the obstinate silence I maintained about myself, at a
+time when I did not feel the sense of responsibility which my
+father's confession has laid on me. We can return to these small
+personal explanations, if you wish it, at another time; they
+cannot be suffered to keep us from the greater interests which we
+must settle before you leave this place. We may come now--" His
+voice faltered, and he suddenly turned his face toward the
+window, so as to hide it from the rector's view. "We may come
+now," he repeated, his hand trembling visibly as it held the
+page, "to the murder on board the timber-ship, and to the warning
+that has followed me from my father's grave."
+
+Softly--as if he feared they might reach Allan, sleeping in the
+neighboring room--he read the last terrible words which the
+Scotchman's pen had written at Wildbad, as they fell from his
+father's lips:
+
+"Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if the widow still lives.
+Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to the
+marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And, more than
+all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own. Offend
+your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has
+connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you,
+if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from
+him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between
+you; be ungrateful; be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent
+to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof
+and breathe the same air with that man. Never let the two Allan
+Armadales meet in this world; never, never, never!"
+
+After reading those sentences, he pushed the manuscript from him,
+without looking up. The fatal reserve which he had been in a fair
+way of conquering but a few minutes since, possessed itself of
+him once more. Again his eyes wandered; again his voice sank in
+tone. A stranger who had heard his story, and who saw him now,
+would have said, "His look is lurking, his manner is bad; he is,
+every inch of him, his father's son."
+
+"I have a question to ask you," said Mr. Brock, breaking the
+silence between them, on his side. "Why have you just read that
+passage in your father's letter?"
+
+"To force me into telling you the truth," was the answer. "You
+must know how much there is of my father in me before you trust
+me to be Mr. Armadale's friend. I got my letter yesterday, in the
+morning. Some inner warning troubled me, and I went down on the
+sea-shore by myself before I broke the seal. Do you believe the
+dead can come back to the world they once lived in? I believe my
+father came back in that bright morning light, through the glare
+of that broad sunshine and the roar of that joyful sea, and
+watched me while I read. When I got to the words that you have
+just heard, and when I knew that the very end which he had died
+dreading was the end that had really come, I felt the horror that
+had crept over him in his last moments creeping over me. I
+struggled against myself, as _he_ would have had me struggle. I
+tried to be all that was most repellent to my own gentler nature;
+I tried to think pitilessly of putting the mountains and the seas
+between me and the man who bore my name. Hours passed before I
+could prevail on myself to go back and run the risk of meeting
+Allan Armadale in this house. When I did get back, and when he
+met me at night on the stairs, I thought I was looking him in
+the face as _my_ father looked _his_ father in the face when the
+cabin door closed between them. Draw your own conclusions, sir.
+Say, if you like, that the inheritance of my father's heathen
+belief in fate is one of the inheritances he has left to me. I
+won't dispute it; I won't deny that all through yesterday _his_
+superstition was _my_ superstition. The night came before I could
+find my way to calmer and brighter thoughts. But I did find my
+way. You may set it down in my favor that I lifted myself at last
+above the influence of this horrible letter. Do you know what
+helped me?"
+
+"Did you reason with yourself?"
+
+"I can't reason about what I feel."
+
+"Did you quiet your mind by prayer?"
+
+"I was not fit to pray."
+
+"And yet something guided you to the better feeling and the truer
+view?"
+
+"Something did."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"My love for Allan Armadale."
+
+He cast a doubting, almost a timid look at Mr. Brock as he gave
+that answer, and, suddenly leaving the table, went back to the
+window-seat.
+
+"Have I no right to speak of him in that way?" he asked, keeping
+his face hidden from the rector. "Have I not known him long
+enough; have I not done enough for him yet? Remember what my
+experience of other men had been when I first saw his hand held
+out to me--when I first heard his voice speaking to me in my
+sick-room. What had I known of strangers' hands all through my
+childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to threaten and
+to strike me. His hand put my pillow straight, and patted me on
+the shoulder, and gave me my food and drink. What had I known of
+other men's voices, when I was growing up to be a man myself? I
+had only known them as voices that jeered, voices that cursed,
+voices that whispered in corners with a vile distrust. _His_
+voice said to me, 'Cheer up, Midwinter! we'll soon bring you
+round again. You'll be strong enough in a week to go out for a
+drive with me in our Somersetshire lanes.' Think of the gypsy's
+stick; think of the devils laughing at me when I went by their
+windows with my little dead dog in my arms; think of the master
+who cheated me of my month's salary on his deathbed--and ask your
+own heart if the miserable wretch whom Allan Armadale has treated
+as his equal and his friend has said too much in saying that he
+loves him? I do love him! It _will_ come out of me; I can't keep
+it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my
+life--yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his
+kindness has made it a happy one--I tell you I would give my
+life--"
+
+The next words died away on his lips; the hysterical passion
+rose, and conquered him. He stretched out one of his hands with
+a wild gesture of entreaty to Mr. Brock; his head sank on the
+window-sill and he burst into tears.
+
+Even then the hard discipline of the man's life asserted itself.
+He expected no sympathy, he counted on no merciful human respect
+for human weakness. The cruel necessity of self-suppression was
+present to his mind, while the tears were pouring over his
+cheeks. "Give me a minute," he said, faintly. "I'll fight it down
+in a minute; I won't distress you in this way again."
+
+True to his resolution, in a minute he had fought it down. In a
+minute more he was able to speak calmly.
+
+"We will get back, sir, to those better thoughts which have
+brought me from my room to yours," he resumed. "I can only repeat
+that I should never have torn myself from the hold which this
+letter fastened on me, if I had not loved Allan Armadale with all
+that I have in me of a brother's love. I said to myself, 'If the
+thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving
+him is wrong!' That was some hours since, and I am in the same
+mind still. I can't believe--I won't believe--that a friendship
+which has grown out of nothing but kindness on one side, and
+nothing but gratitude on the other, is destined to lead to an
+evil end. Judge, you who are a clergyman, between the dead
+father, whose word is in these pages, and the living son, whose
+word is now on his lips! What is it appointed me to do, now that
+I am breathing the same air, and living under the same roof with
+the son of the man whom my father killed--to perpetuate my
+father's crime by mortally injuring him, or to atone for my
+father's crime by giving him the devotion of my whole life? The
+last of those two faiths is my faith, and shall be my faith,
+happen what may. In the strength of that better conviction, I
+have come here to trust you with my father's secret, and to
+confess the wretched story of my own life. In the strength of
+that better conviction, I can face you resolutely with the one
+plain question, which marks the one plain end of all that I have
+come here to say. Your pupil stands at the starting-point of his
+new career, in a position singularly friendless; his one great
+need is a companion of his own age on whom he can rely. The time
+has come, sir, to decide whether I am to be that companion or
+not. After all you have heard of Ozias Midwinter, tell me
+plainly, will you trust him to be Allan Armadale's friend?"
+
+Mr. Brock met that fearlessly frank question by a fearless
+frankness on his side.
+
+"I believe you love Allan," he said, "and I believe you have
+spoken the truth. A man who has produced that impression on me
+is a man whom I am bound to trust. I trust you."
+
+Midwinter started to his feet, his dark face flushing deep; his
+eyes fixed brightly and steadily, at last, on the rector's face.
+"A light!" he exclaimed, tearing the pages of his father's
+letter, one by one, from the fastening that held them. "Let us
+destroy the last link that holds us to the horrible past! Let us
+see this confession a heap of ashes before we part!"
+
+"Wait!" said Mr. Brock. "Before you burn it, there is a reason
+for looking at it once more."
+
+The parted leaves of the manuscript dropped from Midwinter's
+hands. Mr. Brock took them up, and sorted them carefully until
+he found the last page.
+
+"I view your father's superstition as you view it," said the
+rector. "But there is a warning given you here, which you will
+do well (for Allan's sake and for your own sake) not to neglect.
+The last link with the past will not be destroyed when you have
+burned these pages. One of the actors in this story of treachery
+and murder is not dead yet. Read those words."
+
+He pushed the page across the table, with his finger on one
+sentence. Midwinter's agitation misled him. He mistook the
+indication, and read, "Avoid the widow of the man I killed,
+if the widow still lives."
+
+"Not that sentence," said the rector. "The next."
+
+Midwinter read it: "Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the
+way to the marriage, if the maid is still in her service."
+
+"The maid and the mistress parted," said Mr. Brock, "at the time
+of the mistress's marriage. The maid and the mistress met again
+at Mrs. Armadale's residence in Somersetshire last year. I myself
+met the woman in the village, and I myself know that her visit
+hastened Mrs. Armadale's death. Wait a little, and compose
+yourself; I see I have startled you."
+
+He waited as he was bid, his color fading away to a gray paleness
+and the light in his clear brown eyes dying out slowly. What the
+rector had said had produced no transient impression on him;
+there was more than doubt, there was alarm in his face, as he sat
+lost in his own thought. Was the struggle of the past night
+renewing itself already? Did he feel the horror of his hereditary
+superstition creeping over him again?
+
+"Can you put me on my guard against her?" he asked, after a long
+interval of silence. "Can you tell me her name?"
+
+"I can only tell you what Mrs. Armadale told me," answered Mr.
+Brock. "The woman acknowledged having been married in the long
+interval since she and her mistress had last met. But not a word
+more escaped her about her past life. She came to Mrs. Armadale
+to ask for money, under a plea of distress. She got the money,
+and she left the house, positively refusing, when the question
+was put to her, to mention her married name."
+
+"You saw her yourself in the village. What was she like?"
+
+"She kept her veil down. I can't tell you."
+
+"You can tell me what you _did_ see?"
+
+"Certainly. I saw, as she approached me, that she moved very
+gracefully, that she had a beautiful figure, and that she was a
+little over the middle height. I noticed, when she asked me the
+way to Mrs. Armadale's house, that her manner was the manner of
+a lady, and that the tone of her voice was remarkably soft and
+winning. Lastly, I remembered afterward that she wore a thick
+black veil, a black bonnet, a black silk dress, and a red Paisley
+shawl. I feel all the importance of your possessing some better
+means of identifying her than I can give you. But unhappily--"
+
+He stopped. Midwinter was leaning eagerly across the table, and
+Midwinter's hand was laid suddenly on his arm.
+
+"Is it possible that you know the woman?" asked Mr. Brock,
+surprised at the sudden change in his manner.
+
+"No."
+
+"What have I said, then, that has startled you so?"
+
+"Do you remember the woman who threw herself from the river
+steamer?" asked the other--"the woman who caused that succession
+of deaths which opened Allan Armadale's way to the Thorpe Ambrose
+estate?"
+
+"I remember the description of her in the police report,"
+answered the rector.
+
+"_That_ woman," pursued Midwinter, "moved gracefully, and had a
+beautiful figure. _That_ woman wore a black veil, a black bonnet,
+a black silk gown, and a red Paisley shawl--" He stopped,
+released his hold of Mr. Brock's arm, and abruptly resumed his
+chair. "Can it be the same?" he said to himself in a whisper.
+"_Is_ there a fatality that follows men in the dark? And is it
+following _us_ in that woman's footsteps?"
+
+If the conjecture was right, the one event in the past which had
+appeared to be entirely disconnected with the events that had
+preceded it was, on the contrary, the one missing link which
+made the chain complete. Mr. Brock's comfortable common sense
+instinctively denied that startling conclusion. He looked at
+Midwinter with a compassionate smile.
+
+"My young friend," he said, kindly, "have you cleared your mind
+of all superstition as completely as you think? Is what you have
+just said worthy of the better resolution at which you arrived
+last night?"
+
+Midwinter's head drooped on his breast; the color rushed back
+over his face; he sighed bitterly.
+
+"You are beginning to doubt my sincerity," he said. "I can't
+blame you."
+
+"I believe in your sincerity as firmly as ever," answered Mr.
+Brock. "I only doubt whether you have fortified the weak places
+in your nature as strongly as you yourself suppose. Many a man
+has lost the battle against himself far oftener than you have
+lost it yet, and has nevertheless won his victory in the end.
+I don't blame you, I don't distrust you. I only notice what has
+happened, to put you on your guard against yourself. Come! come!
+Let your own better sense help you; and you will agree with me
+that there is really no evidence to justify the suspicion that
+the woman whom I met in Somersetshire, and the woman who
+attempted suicide in London, are one and the same. Need an old
+man like me remind a young man like you that there are thousands
+of women in England with beautiful figures--thousands of women
+who are quietly dressed in black silk gowns and red Paisley
+shawls?"
+
+Midwinter caught eagerly at the suggestion; too eagerly, as it
+might have occurred to a harder critic on humanity than Mr.
+Brock.
+
+"You are quite right, sir," he said, "and I am quite wrong. Tens
+of thousands of women answer the description, as you say. I have
+been wasting time on my own idle fancies, when I ought to have
+been carefully gathering up facts. If this woman ever attempts to
+find her way to Allan, I must be prepared to stop her." He began
+searching restlessly among the manuscript leaves scattered about
+the table, paused over one of the pages, and examined it
+attentively. 'This helps me to something positive," he went on;
+"this helps me to a knowledge of her age. She was twelve at the
+time of Mrs. Armadale's marriage; add a year, and bring her to
+thirteen; add Allan's age (twenty-two), and we make her a woman
+of five-and-thirty at the present time. I know her age; and I
+know that she has her own reasons for being silent about her
+married life. This is something gained at the outset, and it may
+lead, in time, to something more." He looked up brightly again at
+Mr. Brock. "Am I in the right way now, sir? Am I doing my best to
+profit by the caution which you have kindly given me?"
+
+"You are vindicating your own better sense," answered the rector,
+encouraging him to trample down his own imagination, with an
+Englishman's ready distrust of the noblest of the human
+faculties. "You are paving the way for your own happier life."
+
+"Am I?" said the other, thoughtfully.
+
+He searched among the papers once more, and stopped at another of
+the scattered pages.
+
+"The ship!" he exclaimed, suddenly, his color changing again, and
+his manner altering on the instant.
+
+"What ship?" asked the rector.
+
+"The ship in which the deed was done," Midwinter answered, with
+the first signs of impatience that he had shown yet. "The ship in
+which my father's murderous hand turned the lock of the cabin
+door."
+
+"What of it?" said Mr. Brock.
+
+He appeared not to hear the question; his eyes remained fixed
+intently on the page that he was reading.
+
+"A French vessel, employed in the timber trade," he said, still
+speaking to himself--"a French vessel, named _La Grace de Dieu_.
+If my father's belief had been the right belief--if the fatality
+had been following me, step by step, from my father's grave, in
+one or other of my voyages, I should have fallen in with that
+ship." He looked up again at Mr. Brock. "I am quite sure about
+it now," he said. "Those women are two, and not one."
+
+Mr. Brock shook his head.
+
+"I am glad you have come to that conclusion," he said. "But I
+wish you had reached it in some other way."
+
+Midwinter started passionately to his feet, and, seizing on the
+pages of the manuscript with both hands, flung them into the
+empty fireplace.
+
+"For God's sake let me burn it!" he exclaimed. "As long as there
+is a page left, I shall read it. And, as long as I read it, my
+father gets the better of me, in spite of myself!"
+
+Mr. Brock pointed to the match-box. In another moment the
+confession was in flames. When the fire had consumed the last
+morsel of paper, Midwinter drew a deep breath of relief.
+
+"I may say, like Macbeth: 'Why, so, being gone, I am a man
+again!'" he broke out with a feverish gayety. "You look fatigued,
+sir; and no wonder," he added, in a lower tone. "I have kept you
+too long from your rest--I will keep you no longer. Depend on my
+remembering what you have told me; depend on my standing between
+Allan and any enemy, man or woman, who comes near him. Thank you,
+Mr. Brock; a thousand thousand times, thank you! I came into this
+room the most wretched of living men; I can leave it now as happy
+as the birds that are singing outside!"
+
+As he turned to the door, the rays of the rising sun streamed
+through the window, and touched the heap of ashes lying black in
+the black fireplace. The sensitive imagination of Midwinter
+kindled instantly at the sight.
+
+"Look!" he said, joyously. "The promise of the Future shining
+over the ashes of the Past!"
+
+An inexplicable pity for the man, at the moment of his life when
+he needed pity least, stole over the rector's heart when the door
+had closed, and he was left by himself again.
+
+"Poor fellow! " he said, with an uneasy surprise at his own
+compassionate impulse. "Poor fellow!"
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+DAY AND NIGHT
+
+The morning hours had passed; the noon had come and gone; and Mr.
+Brock had started on the first stage of his journey home.
+
+After parting from the rector in Douglas Harbor, the two young
+men had returned to Castletown, and had there separated at the
+hotel door, Allan walking down to the waterside to look after his
+yacht, and Midwinter entering the house to get the rest that he
+needed after a sleepless night.
+
+He darkened his room; he closed his eyes, but no sleep came to
+him. On this first day of the rector's absence, his sensitive
+nature extravagantly exaggerated the responsibility which he now
+held in trust for Mr. Brock. A nervous dread of leaving Allan by
+himself, even for a few hours only, kept him waking and doubting,
+until it became a relief rather than a hardship to rise from the
+bed again, and, following in Allan's footsteps, to take the way
+to the waterside which led to the yacht.
+
+The repairs of the little vessel were nearly completed. It was a
+breezy, cheerful day; the land was bright, the water was blue,
+the quick waves leaped crisply in the sunshine, the men were
+singing at their work. Descending to the cabin, Midwinter
+discovered his friend busily occupied in attempting to set the
+place to rights. Habitually the least systematic of mortals,
+Allan now and then awoke to an overwhelming sense of the
+advantages of order, and on such occasions a perfect frenzy of
+tidiness possessed him. He was down on his knees, hotly and
+wildly at work, when Midwinter looked in on him; and was fast
+reducing the neat little world of the cabin to its original
+elements of chaos, with a misdirected energy wonderful to see.
+
+"Here's a mess!" said Allan, rising composedly on the horizon of
+his own accumulated litter. "Do you know, my dear fellow, I begin
+to wish I had let well alone!"
+
+Midwinter smiled, and came to his friend's assistance with the
+natural neat-handedness of a sailor.
+
+The first object that he encountered was Allan's dressing-case,
+turned upside down, with half the contents scattered on the
+floor, and with a duster and a hearth-broom lying among them.
+Replacing the various objects which formed the furniture of the
+dressing-case one by one, Midwinter lighted unexpectedly on a
+miniature portrait, of the old-fashioned oval form, primly framed
+in a setting of small diamonds.
+
+"You don't seem to set much value on this," he said. "What is
+it?"
+
+Allan bent over him, and looked at the miniature. "It belonged to
+my mother," he answered; "and I set the greatest value on it. It
+is a portrait of my father."
+
+Midwinter put the miniature abruptly, into Allan's hands, and
+withdrew to the opposite side of the cabin.
+
+"You know best where the things ought to be put in your own
+dressing-case," he said, keeping his back turned on Allan. "I'll
+make the place tidy on this side of the cabin, and you shall
+make the place tidy on the other."
+
+He began setting in order the litter scattered about him on the
+cabin table and on the floor. But it seemed as if fate had
+decided that his friend's personal possessions should fall into
+his hands that morning, employ them where he might. One among the
+first objects which he took up was Allan's tobacco jar, with the
+stopper missing, and with a letter (which appeared by the bulk of
+it to contain inclosures) crumpled into the mouth of the jar in
+the stopper's place.
+
+"Did you know that you had put this here?" he asked. "Is the
+letter of any importance?"
+
+Allan recognized it instantly. It was the first of the little
+series of letters which had followed the cruising party to the
+Isle of Man--the letter which young Armadale had briefly referred
+to as bringing him "more worries from those everlasting lawyers,"
+and had then dismissed from further notice as recklessly as
+usual.
+
+"This is what comes of being particularly careful," said Allan;
+"here is an instance of my extreme thoughtfulness. You may not
+think it but I put the letter there on purpose. Every time I went
+to the jar, you know, I was sure to see the letter; and every
+time I saw the letter, I was sure to say to myself, 'This must be
+answered.' There's nothing to laugh at; it was a perfectly
+sensible arrangement, if I could only have remembered where I put
+the jar. Suppose I tie a knot in my pocket-handkerchief this
+time? You have a wonderful memory, my dear fellow. Perhaps you'll
+remind me in the course of the day, in case I forget the knot
+next."
+
+Midwinter saw his first chance, since Mr. Brock's departure, of
+usefully filling Mr. Brock's place.
+
+"Here is your writing-case," he said; "why not answer the letter
+at once? If you put it away again, you may forget it again."
+
+"Very true," returned Allan. "But the worst of it is, I can't
+quite make up my mind what answer to write. I want a word of
+advice. Come and sit down here, and I'll tell you all about it."
+
+With his loud boyish laugh--echoed by Midwinter, who caught the
+infection of his gayety--he swept a heap of miscellaneous
+incumbrances off the cabin sofa, and made room for his friend
+and himself to take their places. In the high flow of youthful
+spirits, the two sat down to their trifling consultation over a
+letter lost in a tobacco jar. It was a memorable moment to both
+of them, lightly as they thought of it at the time. Before they
+had risen again from their places, they had taken the first
+irrevocable step together on the dark and tortuous road of their
+future lives.
+
+Reduced to plain facts, the question on which Allan now required
+his friend's advice may be stated as follows:
+
+While the various arrangements connected with the succession to
+Thorpe Ambrose were in progress of settlement, and while the new
+possessor of the estate was still in London, a question had
+necessarily arisen relating to the person who should be appointed
+to manage the property. The steward employed by the Blanchard
+family had written, without loss of time, to offer his services.
+Although a perfectly competent and trustworthy man, he failed to
+find favor in the eyes of the new proprietor. Acting, as usual,
+on his first impulses, and resolved, at all hazards, to install
+Midwinter as a permanent inmate at Thorpe Ambrose, Allan had
+determined that the steward's place was the place exactly fitted
+for his friend, for the simple reason that it would necessarily
+oblige his friend to live with him on the estate. He had
+accordingly written to decline the proposal made to him without
+consulting Mr. Brock, whose disapproval he had good reason to
+fear; and without telling Midwinter, who would probably (if a
+chance were allowed him of choosing) have declined taking a
+situation which his previous training had by no means fitted him
+to fill.
+
+Further correspondence had followed this decision, and had raised
+two new difficulties which looked a little embarrassing on the
+face of them, but which Allan, with the assistance of his lawyer,
+easily contrived to solve. The first difficulty, of examining the
+outgoing steward's books, was settled by sending a professional
+accountant to Thorpe Ambrose; and the second difficulty, of
+putting the steward's empty cottage to some profitable use
+(Allan's plans for his friend comprehending Midwinter's residence
+under his own roof), was met by placing the cottage on the list
+of an active house agent in the neighboring county town. In this
+state the arrangements had been left when Allan quitted London.
+He had heard and thought nothing more of the matter, until a
+letter from his lawyers had followed him to the Isle of Man,
+inclosing two proposals to occupy the cottage, both received on
+the same day, and requesting to hear, at his earliest
+convenience, which of the two he was prepared to accept.
+
+Finding himself, after having conveniently forgotten the subject
+for some days past, placed face to face once more with the
+necessity for decision, Allan now put the two proposals into
+his friend's hands, and, after a rambling explanation of the
+circumstances of the case, requested to be favored with a word
+of advice. Instead of examining the proposals, Midwinter
+unceremoniously put them aside, and asked the two very natural
+and very awkward questions of who the new steward was to be,
+and why he was to live in Allan's house?
+
+"I'll tell you who, and I'll tell you why, when we get to Thorpe
+Ambrose," said Allan. "In the meantime we'll call the steward X.
+Y. Z., and we'll say he lives with me, because I'm devilish
+sharp, and I mean to keep him under my own eye. You needn't look
+surprised. I know the man thoroughly well; he requires a good
+deal of management. If I offered him the steward's place
+beforehand, his modesty would get in his way, and he would say
+'No.' If I pitch him into it neck and crop, without a word of
+warning and with nobody at hand to relieve him of the situation,
+he'll have nothing for it but to consult my interests, and say
+'Yes.' X. Y. Z. is not at all a bad fellow, I can tell you.
+You'll see him when we go to Thorpe Ambrose; and I rather think
+you and he will get on uncommonly well together."
+
+The humorous twinkle in Allan's eye, the sly significance in
+Allan's voice, would have betrayed his secret to a prosperous
+man. Midwinter was as far from suspecting it as the carpenters
+who were at work above them on the deck of the yacht.
+
+"Is there no steward now on the estate?" he asked, his face
+showing plainly that he was far from feeling satisfied with
+Allan's answer. "Is the business neglected all this time?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort!" returned Allan. "The business is going
+with 'a wet sheet and a flowing sea, and a wind that follows
+free.' I'm not joking; I'm only metaphorical. A regular
+accountant has poked his nose into the books, and a steady-going
+lawyer's clerk attends at the office once a week. That doesn't
+look like neglect, does it? Leave the new steward alone for the
+present, and just tell me which of those two tenants you would
+take, if you were in my place."
+
+Midwinter opened the proposals, and read them attentively.
+
+The first proposal was from no less a person than the solicitor
+at Thorpe Ambrose, who had first informed Allan at Paris of the
+large fortune that had fallen into his hands. This gentleman
+wrote personally to say that he had long admired the cottage,
+which was charmingly situated within the limits of the Thorpe
+Ambrose grounds. He was a bachelor, of studious habits, desirous
+of retiring to a country seclusion after the wear and tear of
+his business hours; and he ventured to say that Mr. Armadale, in
+accepting him as a tenant, might count on securing an unobtrusive
+neighbor, and on putting the cottage into responsible and careful
+hands.
+
+The second proposal came through the house agent, and proceeded
+from a total stranger. The tenant who offered for the cottage, in
+this case, was a retired officer in the army--one Major Milroy.
+His family merely consisted of an invalid wife and an only
+child--a young lady. His references were unexceptionable; and he,
+too, was especially anxious to secure the cottage, as the perfect
+quiet of the situation was exactly what was required by Mrs.
+Milroy in her feeble state of health.
+
+"Well, which profession shall I favor?" asked Allan. "The army or
+the law?"
+
+"There seems to me to be no doubt about it," said Midwinter.
+"The lawyer has been already in correspondence with you; and the
+lawyer's claim is, therefore, the claim to be preferred."
+
+"I knew you would say that. In all the thousands of times I
+have asked other people for advice, I never yet got the advice
+I wanted. Here's this business of letting the cottage as an
+instance. I'm all on the other side myself. I want to have the
+major."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Young Armadale laid his forefinger on that part of the agent's
+letter which enumerated Major Milroy's family, and which
+contained the three words--"a young lady."
+
+"A bachelor of studious habits walking about my grounds," said
+Allan, "is not an interesting object; a young lady is. I have not
+the least doubt Miss Milroy is a charming girl. Ozias Midwinter
+of the serious countenance! think of her pretty muslin dress
+flitting about among your trees and committing trespasses on
+your property; think of her adorable feet trotting into your
+fruit-garden, and her delicious fresh lips kissing your ripe
+peaches; think of her dimpled hands among your early violets, and
+her little cream-colored nose buried in your blush-roses. What
+does the studious bachelor offer me in exchange for the loss of
+all this? He offers me a rheumatic brown object in gaiters and
+a wig. No! no! Justice is good, my dear friend; but, believe me,
+Miss Milroy is better."
+
+"Can you be serious about any mortal thing, Allan?"
+
+"I'll try to be, if you like. I know I ought to take the lawyer;
+but what can I do if the major's daughter keeps running in my
+head?"
+
+Midwinter returned resolutely to the just and sensible view of
+the matter, and pressed it on his friend's attention with all the
+persuasion of which he was master. After listening with exemplary
+patience until he had done, Allan swept a supplementary
+accumulation of litter off the cabin table, and produced from his
+waistcoat pocket a half-crown coin.
+
+"I've got an entirely new idea," he said. "Let's leave it to
+chance."
+
+The absurdity of the proposal--as coming from a landlord--was
+irresistible. Midwinter's gravity deserted him.
+
+"I'll spin," continued Allan, "and you shall call. We must give
+precedence to the army, of course; so we'll say Heads, the major;
+Tails, the lawyer. One spin to decide. Now, then, look out!"
+
+He spun the half-crown on the cabin table.
+
+"Tails!" cried Midwinter, humoring what he believed to be one of
+Allan's boyish jokes.
+
+The coin fell on the table with the Head uppermost.
+
+"You don't mean to say you are really in earnest!" said
+Midwinter, as the other opened his writing-case and dipped his
+pen in the ink.
+
+"Oh, but I am, though!" replied Allan. "Chance is on my side,
+and Miss Milroy's; and you're outvoted, two to one. It's no use
+arguing. The major has fallen uppermost, and the major shall
+have the cottage. I won't leave it to the lawyers; they'll only
+be worrying me with more letters. I'll write myself."
+
+He wrote his answers to the two proposals, literally in two
+minutes. One to the house agent: "Dear sir, I accept Major
+Milroy's offer; let him come in when he pleases. Yours truly,
+Allan Armadale." And one to the lawyer: "Dear sir, I regret that
+circumstances prevent me from accepting your proposal. Yours
+truly," etc. "People make a fuss about letter-writing," Allan
+remarked, when he had done. "_I_ find it easy enough."
+
+He wrote the addresses on his two notes, and stamped them for
+the post, whistling gayly. While he had been writing, he had not
+noticed how his friend was occupied. When he had done, it struck
+him that a sudden silence had fallen on the cabin; and, looking
+up, he observed that Midwinter's whole attention was strangely
+concentrated on the half crown as it lay head uppermost on the
+table. Allan suspended his whistling in astonishment.
+
+"What on earth are you doing?" he asked.
+
+"I was only wondering," replied Midwinter.
+
+"What about?" persisted Allan.
+
+"I was wondering," said the other, handing him back the
+half-crown, "whether there is such a thing as chance."
+
+Half an hour later the two notes were posted; and Allan, whose
+close superintendence of the repairs of the yacht had hitherto
+allowed him but little leisure time on shore, had proposed to
+while away the idle hours by taking a walk in Castletown. Even
+Midwinter's nervous anxiety to deserve Mr. Brock's confidence in
+him could detect nothing objectionable in this harmless proposal,
+and the young men set forth together to see what they could make
+of the metropolis of the Isle of Man.
+
+It is doubtful if there is a place on the habitable globe which,
+regarded as a sight-seeing investment offering itself to the
+spare attention of strangers, yields so small a percentage of
+interest in return as Castletown. Beginning with the waterside,
+there was an inner harbor to see, with a drawbridge to let
+vessels through; an outer harbor, ending in a dwarf lighthouse;
+a view of a flat coast to the right, and a view of a flat coast
+to the left. In the central solitudes of the city, there was a
+squat gray building called "the castle"; also a memorial pillar
+dedicated to one Governor Smelt, with a flat top for a statue,
+and no statue standing on it; also a barrack, holding the
+half-company of soldiers allotted to the island, and exhibiting
+one spirit-broken sentry at its lonely door. The prevalent color
+of the town was faint gray. The few shops open were parted at
+frequent intervals by other shops closed and deserted in despair.
+The weary lounging of boatmen on shore was trebly weary here; the
+youth of the district smoked together in speechless depression
+under the lee of a dead wall; the ragged children said
+mechanically: "Give us a penny," and before the charitable
+hand could search the merciful pocket, lapsed away again in
+misanthropic doubt of the human nature they addressed. The
+silence of the grave overflowed the churchyard, and filled this
+miserable town. But one edifice, prosperous to look at, rose
+consolatory in the desolation of these dreadful streets.
+Frequented by the students of the neighboring "College of King
+William," this building was naturally dedicated to the uses of a
+pastry-cook's shop. Here, at least (viewed through the friendly
+medium of the window), there was something going on for a
+stranger to see; for here, on high stools, the pupils of the
+college sat, with swinging legs and slowly moving jaws, and,
+hushed in the horrid stillness of Castletown, gorged their pastry
+gravely, in an atmosphere of awful silence.
+
+"Hang me if I can look any longer at the boys and the tarts!"
+said Allan, dragging his friend away from the pastry-cook's shop.
+"Let's try if we can't find something else to amuse us in the
+next street."
+
+The first amusing object which the next street presented was a
+carver-and-gilder's shop, expiring feebly in the last stage of
+commercial decay. The counter inside displayed nothing to view
+but the recumbent head of a boy, peacefully asleep in the
+unbroken solitude of the place. In the window were exhibited to
+the passing stranger three forlorn little fly-spotted frames; a
+small posting-bill, dusty with long-continued neglect, announcing
+that the premises were to let; and one colored print, the last of
+a series illustrating the horrors of drunkenness, on the fiercest
+temperance principles. The composition--representing an empty
+bottle of gin, an immensely spacious garret, a perpendicular
+Scripture reader, and a horizontal expiring family--appealed to
+public favor, under the entirely unobjectionable title of "The
+Hand of Death." Allan's resolution to extract amusement from
+Castletown by main force had resisted a great deal, but it failed
+him at this stage of the investigations. He suggested trying an
+excursion to some other place. Midwinter readily agreeing, they
+went back to the hotel to make inquiries.
+
+Thanks to the mixed influence of Allan's ready gift of
+familiarity, and total want of method in putting his questions,
+a perfect deluge of information flowed in on the two strangers,
+relating to every subject but the subject which had actually
+brought them to the hotel. They made various interesting
+discoveries in connection with the laws and constitution of the
+Isle of Man, and the manners and customs of the natives. To
+Allan's delight, the Manxmen spoke of England as of a well-known
+adjacent island, situated at a certain distance from the central
+empire of the Isle of Man. It was further revealed to the two
+Englishmen that this happy little nation rejoiced in laws of its
+own, publicly proclaimed once a year by the governor and the two
+head judges, grouped together on the top of an ancient mound,
+in fancy costumes appropriate to the occasion. Possessing this
+enviable institution, the island added to it the inestimable
+blessing of a local parliament, called the House of Keys, an
+assembly far in advance of the other parliament belonging to the
+neighboring island, in this respect--that the members dispensed
+with the people, and solemnly elected each other. With these
+and many more local particulars, extracted from all sorts and
+conditions of men in and about the hotel, Allan whiled away the
+weary time in his own essentially desultory manner, until the
+gossip died out of itself, and Midwinter (who had been speaking
+apart with the landlord) quietly recalled him to the matter in
+hand. The finest coast scenery in the island was said to be to
+the westward and the southward, and there was a fishing town
+in those regions called Port St. Mary, with a hotel at which
+travelers could sleep. If Allan's impressions of Castletown still
+inclined him to try an excursion to some other place, he had only
+to say so, and a carriage would be produced immediately. Allan
+jumped at the proposal, and in ten minutes more he and Midwinter
+were on their way to the western wilds of the island.
+
+With trifling incidents, the day of Mr. Brock's departure had
+worn on thus far. With trifling incidents, in which not even
+Midwinter's nervous watchfulness could see anything to distrust,
+it was still to proceed, until the night came--a night which one
+at least of the two companions was destined to remember to the
+end of his life.
+
+Before the travelers had advanced two miles on their road, an
+accident happened. The horse fell, and the driver reported that
+the animal had seriously injured himself. There was no
+alternative but to send for another carriage to Castletown,
+or to get on to Port St. Mary on foot.
+
+Deciding to walk, Midwinter and Allan had not gone far before
+they were overtaken by a gentleman driving alone in an open
+chaise. He civilly introduced himself as a medical man, living
+close to Port St. Mary, and offered seats in his carriage. Always
+ready to make new acquaintances, Allan at once accepted the
+proposal. He and the doctor (whose name was ascertained to be
+Hawbury) became friendly and familiar before they had been five
+minutes in the chaise together; Midwinter, sitting behind them,
+reserved and silent, on the back seat. They separated just
+outside Port St. Mary, before Mr. Hawbury's house, Allan
+boisterously admiring the doctor's neat French windows and pretty
+flower-garden and lawn, and wringing his hand at parting as if
+they had known each other from boyhood upward. Arrived in Port
+St. Mary, the two friends found themselves in a second Castletown
+on a smaller scale. But the country round, wild, open, and hilly,
+deserved its reputation. A walk brought them well enough on with
+the day--still the harmless, idle day that it had been from the
+first--to see the evening near at hand. After waiting a little to
+admire the sun, setting grandly over hill, and heath, and crag,
+and talking, while they waited, of Mr. Brock and his long journey
+home, they returned to the hotel to order their early supper.
+Nearer and nearer the night, and the adventure which the night
+was to bring with it, came to the two friends; and still the only
+incidents that happened were incidents to be laughed at, if they
+were noticed at all. The supper was badly cooked; the
+waiting-maid was impenetrably stupid; the old-fashioned bell-rope
+in the coffee-room had come down in Allan's hands, and, striking
+in its descent a painted china shepherdess on the chimney-piece,
+had laid the figure in fragments on the floor. Events as trifling
+as these were still the only events that had happened, when the
+twilight faded, and the lighted candles were brought into the
+room.
+
+Finding Midwinter, after the double fatigue of a sleepless night
+and a restless day, but little inclined for conversation, Allan
+left him resting on the sofa, and lounged into the passage of the
+hotel, on the chance of discovering somebody to talk to. Here
+another of the trivial incidents of the day brought Allan and Mr.
+Hawbury together again, and helped--whether happily or not, yet
+remained to be seen--to strengthen the acquaintance between them
+on either side.
+
+The "bar" of the hotel was situated at one end of the passage,
+and the landlady was in attendance there, mixing a glass of
+liquor for the doctor, who had just looked in for a little
+gossip. On Allan's asking permission to make a third in the
+drinking and the gossiping, Mr. Hawbury civilly handed him the
+glass which the landlady had just filled. It contained cold
+brandy-and-water. A marked change in Allan's face, as he suddenly
+drew back and asked for whisky instead, caught the doctor's
+medical eye. "A case of nervous antipathy," said Mr. Hawbury,
+quietly taking the glass away again. The remark obliged Allan to
+acknowledge that he had an insurmountable loathing (which he was
+foolish enough to be a little ashamed of mentioning) to the smell
+and taste of brandy. No matter with what diluting liquid the
+spirit was mixed, the presence of it, instantly detected by his
+organs of taste and smell, turned him sick and faint if the drink
+touched his lips. Starting from this personal confession, the
+talk turned on antipathies in general; and the doctor
+acknowledged, on his side, that he took a professional interest
+in the subject, and that he possessed a collection of curious
+cases at home, which his new acquaintance was welcome to look at,
+if Allan had nothing else to do that evening, and if he would
+call, when the medical work of the day was over, in an hour's
+time.
+
+Cordially accepting the invitation (which was extended to
+Midwinter also, if he cared to profit by it), Allan returned to
+the coffee-room to look after his friend. Half asleep and half
+awake, Midwinter was still stretched on the sofa, with the local
+newspaper just dropping out of his languid hand.
+
+"I heard your voice in the passage," he said, drowsily. "Whom
+were you talking to?"
+
+"The doctor," replied Allan. "I am going to smoke a cigar with
+him, in an hour's time. Will you come too?"
+
+Midwinter assented with a weary sigh. Always shyly unwilling to
+make new acquaintances, fatigue increased the reluctance he now
+felt to become Mr. Hawbury's guest. As matters stood, however,
+there was no alternative but to go; for, with Allan's
+constitutional imprudence, there was no safely trusting him alone
+anywhere, and more especially in a stranger's house. Mr. Brock
+would certainly not have left his pupil to visit the doctor
+alone; and Midwinter was still nervously conscious that he
+occupied Mr. Brock's place.
+
+"What shall we do till it's time to go?" asked Allan, looking
+about him. "Anything in this?" he added, observing the fallen
+newspaper, and picking it up from the floor.
+
+"I'm too tired to look. If you find anything interesting, read
+it out," said Midwinter, thinking that the reading might help to
+keep him awake.
+
+Part of the newspaper, and no small part of it, was devoted to
+extracts from books recently published in London. One of the
+works most largely laid under contribution in this manner was of
+the sort to interest Allan: it was a highly spiced narrative of
+Traveling Adventures in the wilds of Australia. Pouncing on an
+extract which described the sufferings of the traveling-party,
+lost in a trackless wilderness, and in danger of dying by thirst,
+Allan announced that he had found something to make his friend's
+flesh creep, and began eagerly to read the passage aloud.
+
+Resolute not to sleep, Midwinter followed the progress of the
+adventure, sentence by sentence, without missing a word. The
+consultation of the lost travelers, with death by thirst staring
+them in the face; the resolution to press on while their strength
+lasted; the fall of a heavy shower, the vain efforts made to
+catch the rainwater, the transient relief experienced by sucking
+their wet clothes; the sufferings renewed a few hours after; the
+night advance of the strongest of the party, leaving the weakest
+behind; the following a flight of birds when morning dawned; the
+discovery by the lost men of the broad pool of water that saved
+their lives--all this Midwinter's fast-failing attention mastered
+painfully, Allan's voice growing fainter and fainter on his ear
+with every sentence that was read. Soon the next words seemed to
+drop away gently, and nothing but the slowly sinking sound of the
+voice was left. Then the light in the room darkened gradually,
+the sound dwindled into delicious silence, and the last waking
+impressions of the weary Midwinter came peacefully to an end.
+
+The next event of which he was conscious was a sharp ringing at
+the closed door of the hotel. He started to his feet, with the
+ready alacrity of a man whose life has accustomed him to wake at
+the shortest notice. An instant's look round showed him that the
+room was empty, and a glance at his watch told him that it was
+close on midnight. The noise made by the sleepy servant in
+opening the door, and the tread the next moment of quick
+footsteps in the passage, filled him with a sudden foreboding of
+something wrong. As he hurriedly stepped forward to go out and
+make inquiry, the door of the coffee-room opened, and the doctor
+stood before him.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you," said Mr. Hawbury. "Don't be alarmed;
+there's nothing wrong."
+
+"Where is my friend?" asked Midwinter.
+
+"At the pier head," answered the doctor. "I am, to a certain
+extent, responsible for what he is doing now; and I think some
+careful person, like yourself, ought to be with him."
+
+The hint was enough for Midwinter. He and the doctor set out for
+the pier immediately, Mr. Hawbury mentioning on the way the
+circumstances under which he had come to the hotel.
+
+Punctual to the appointed hour Allan had made his appearance at
+the doctor's house, explaining that he had left his weary friend
+so fast asleep on the sofa that he had not had the heart to wake
+him. The evening had passed pleasantly, and the conversation had
+turned on many subjects, until, in an evil hour, Mr. Hawbury had
+dropped a hint which showed that he was fond of sailing, and that
+he possessed a pleasure-boat of his own in the harbor. Excited on
+the instant by his favorite topic, Allan had left his host no
+hospitable alternative but to take him to the pier head and show
+him the boat. The beauty of the night and the softness of the
+breeze had done the rest of the mischief; they had filled Allan
+with irresistible longings for a sail by moonlight. Prevented
+from accompanying his guest by professional hindrances which
+obliged him to remain on shore, the doctor, not knowing what else
+to do, had ventured on disturbing Midwinter, rather than take the
+responsibility of allowing Mr. Armadale (no matter how well he
+might be accustomed to the sea) to set off on a sailing trip at
+midnight entirely by himself.
+
+The time taken to make this explanation brought Midwinter and the
+doctor to the pier head. There, sure enough, was young Armadale
+in the boat, hoisting the sail, and singing the sailor's
+"Yo-heave-ho!" at the top of his voice.
+
+"Come along, old boy!" cried Allan. "You're just in time for a
+frolic by moonlight!"
+
+Midwinter suggested a frolic by daylight, and an adjournment to
+bed in the meantime.
+
+"Bed!" cried Allan, on whose harum-scarum high spirits Mr.
+Hawbury's hospitality had certainly not produced a sedative
+effect. "Hear him, doctor! one would think he was ninety! Bed,
+you drowsy old dormouse! Look at that, and think of bed if you
+can!"
+
+He pointed to the sea. The moon was shining in the cloudless
+heaven; the night-breeze blew soft and steady from the land; the
+peaceful waters rippled joyfully in the silence and the glory of
+the night. Midwinter turned to the doctor with a wise resignation
+to circumstances: he had seen enough to satisfy him that all
+words of remonstrance would be words simply thrown away.
+
+"How is the tide?" he asked.
+
+Mr. Hawbury told him.
+
+"Are there oars in the boat?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I am well used to the sea," said Midwinter, descending the pier
+steps. "You may trust me to take care of my friend, and to take
+care of the boat."
+
+"Good-night, doctor!" shouted Allan. "Your whisky-and-water is
+delicious--your boat's a little beauty--and you're the best
+fellow I ever met in my life!"
+
+The doctor laughed and waved his hand, and the boat glided out
+from the harbor, with Midwinter at the helm.
+
+As the breeze then blew, they were soon abreast of the westward
+headland, bounding the Bay of Poolvash, and the question was
+started whether they should run out to sea or keep along the
+shore. The wisest proceeding, in the event of the wind failing
+them, was to keep by the land. Midwinter altered the course of
+the boat, and they sailed on smoothly in a south-westerly
+direction, abreast of the coast.
+
+Little by little the cliffs rose in height, and the rocks, massed
+wild and jagged, showed rifted black chasms yawning deep in their
+seaward sides. Off the bold promontory called Spanish Head,
+Midwinter looked ominously at his watch. But Allan pleaded hard
+for half an hour more, and for a glance at the famous channel of
+the Sound, which they were now fast nearing, and of which he had
+heard some startling stories from the workmen employed on his
+yacht. The new change which Midwinter's compliance with this
+request rendered it necessary to make in the course of the boat
+brought her close to the wind; and revealed, on one side, the
+grand view of the southernmost shores of the Isle of Man, and,
+on the other, the black precipices of the islet called the Calf,
+separated from the mainland by the dark and dangerous channel of
+the Sound.
+
+Once more Midwinter looked at his watch. "We have gone far
+enough," he said. "Stand by the sheet!"
+
+"Stop!" cried Allan, from the bows of the boat. "Good God! here's
+a wrecked ship right ahead of us!"
+
+Midwinter let the boat fall off a little, and looked where the
+other pointed.
+
+There, stranded midway between the rocky boundaries on either
+side of the Sound--there, never again to rise on the living
+waters from her grave on the sunken rock; lost and lonely in the
+quiet night; high, and dark, and ghostly in the yellow moonshine,
+lay the Wrecked Ship.
+
+"I know the vessel," said Allan, in great excitement. "I heard
+my workmen talking of her yesterday. She drifted in here, on a
+pitch-dark night, when they couldn't see the lights; a poor old
+worn-out merchantman, Midwinter, that the ship-brokers have
+bought to break up. Let's run in and have a look at her."
+
+Midwinter hesitated. All the old sympathies of his sea-life
+strongly inclined him to follow Allan's suggestion; but the wind
+was falling light, and he distrusted the broken water and the
+swirling currents of the channel ahead. "This is an ugly place
+to take a boat into when you know nothing about it," he said.
+
+"Nonsense!" returned Allan. "It's as light as day, and we float
+in two feet of water."
+
+Before Midwinter could answer, the current caught the boat, and
+swept them onward through the channel straight toward the wreck.
+
+"Lower the sail," said Midwinter, quietly, "and ship the oars. We
+are running down on her fast enough now, whether we like it or
+not."
+
+Both well accustomed to the use of the oar, they brought the
+course of the boat under sufficient control to keep her on the
+smoothest side of the channel--the side which was nearest to the
+Islet of the Calf. As they came swiftly up with the wreck,
+Midwinter resigned his oar to Allan; and, watching his
+opportunity, caught a hold with the boat-hook on the fore-chains
+of the vessel. The next moment they had the boat safely in hand,
+under the lee of the wreck.
+
+The ship's ladder used by the workmen hung over the fore-chains.
+Mounting it, with the boat's rope in his teeth, Midwinter secured
+one end, and lowered the other to Allan in the boat. "Make that
+fast," he said, "and wait till I see if it's all safe on board."
+With those words, he disappeared behind the bulwark.
+
+"Wait?" repeated Allan, in the blankest astonishment at his
+friend's excessive caution. "What on earth does he mean? I'll be
+hanged if I wait. Where one of us goes, the other goes too!"
+
+He hitched the loose end of the rope round the forward thwart of
+the boat, and, swinging himself up the ladder, stood the next
+moment on the deck. "Anything very dreadful on board?" he
+inquired sarcastically, as he and his friend met.
+
+Midwinter smiled. "Nothing whatever," he replied. "But I couldn't
+be sure that we were to have the whole ship to ourselves till I
+got over the bulwark and looked about me."
+
+Allan took a turn on the deck, and surveyed the wreck critically
+from stem to stern.
+
+"Not much of a vessel," he said; "the Frenchmen generally build
+better ships than this."
+
+Midwinter crossed the deck, and eyed Allan in a momentary
+silence.
+
+"Frenchmen?" he repeated, after an interval. "Is this vessel
+French?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"The men I have got at work on the yacht told me. They know all
+about her."
+
+Midwinter came a little nearer. His swarthy face began to look,
+to Allan's eyes, unaccountably pale in the moonlight.
+
+"Did they mention what trade she was engaged in?"
+
+"Yes; the timber trade."
+
+As Allan gave that answer, Midwinter's lean brown hand clutched
+him fast by the shoulder, and Midwinter's teeth chattered in his
+head like the teeth of a man struck by a sudden chill.
+
+"Did they tell you her name?" he asked, in a voice that dropped
+suddenly to a whisper.
+
+"They did, I think. But it has slipped my memory.--Gently, old
+fellow; these long claws of yours are rather tight on my
+shoulder."
+
+"Was the name--?" He stopped, removed his hand, and dashed away
+the great drops that were gathering on his forehead. "Was the
+name _La Grace de Dieu_?"
+
+"How the deuce did you come to know it? That's the name, sure
+enough. _La Grace de Dieu_."
+
+At one bound, Midwinter leaped on the bulwark of the wreck.
+
+"The boat!" he cried, with a scream of horror that rang far and
+wide through the stillness of the night, and brought Allan
+instantly to his side.
+
+The lower end of the carelessly hitched rope was loose on the
+water, and ahead, in the track of the moonlight, a small black
+object was floating out of view. The boat was adrift.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE PAST.
+
+One stepping back under the dark shelter of the bulwark, and
+one standing out boldly in the yellow light of the moon, the
+two friends turned face to face on the deck of the timber-ship,
+and looked at each other in silence. The next moment Allan's
+inveterate recklessness seized on the grotesque side of the
+situation by main force. He seated himself astride on the
+bulwark, and burst out boisterously into his loudest and
+heartiest laugh.
+
+"All my fault," he said; "but there's no help for it now. Here we
+are, hard and fast in a trap of our own setting; and there goes
+the last of the doctor's boat! Come out of the dark, Midwinter;
+I can't half see you there, and I want to know what's to be done
+next."
+
+Midwinter neither answered nor moved. Allan left the bulwark,
+and, mounting the forecastle, looked down attentively at the
+waters of the Sound.
+
+"One thing is pretty certain," he said. "With the current on that
+side, and the sunken rocks on this, we can't find our way out of
+the scrape by swimming, at any rate. So much for the prospect at
+this end of the wreck. Let's try how things look at the other.
+Rouse up, messmate!" he called out, cheerfully, as he passed
+Midwinter. "Come and see what the old tub of a timber-ship has
+got to show us astern." He sauntered on, with his hands in his
+pockets, humming the chorus of a comic song.
+
+His voice had produced no apparent effect on his friend; but, at
+the light touch of his hand in passing, Midwinter started, and
+moved out slowly from the shadow of the bulwark. "Come along!"
+cried Allan, suspending his singing for a moment, and glancing
+back. Still, without a word of answer, the other followed. Thrice
+he stopped before he reached the stern end of the wreck: the
+first time, to throw aside his hat, and push back his hair from
+his forehead and temples; the second time, reeling, giddy, to
+hold for a moment by a ring-bolt close at hand; the last time
+(though Allan was plainly visible a few yards ahead), to look
+stealthily behind him, with the furtive scrutiny of a man who
+believes that other footsteps are following him in the dark.
+"Not yet!" he whispered to himself, with eyes that searched the
+empty air. "I shall see him astern, with his hand on the lock of
+the cabin door."
+
+The stern end of the wreck was clear of the ship-breakers'
+lumber, accumulated in the other parts of the vessel. Here, the
+one object that rose visible on the smooth surface of the deck
+was the low wooden structure which held the cabin door and roofed
+in the cabin stairs. The wheel-house had been removed, the
+binnacle had been removed, but the cabin entrance, and all that
+had belonged to it, had been left untouched. The scuttle was on,
+and the door was closed.
+
+On gaining the after-part of the vessel, Allan walked straight to
+the stern, and looked out to sea over the taffrail. No such thing
+as a boat was in view anywhere on the quiet, moon-brightened
+waters. Knowing Midwinter's sight to be better than his own, he
+called out, "Come up here, and see if there's a fisherman within
+hail of us." Hearing no reply, he looked back. Midwinter had
+followed him as far as the cabin, and had stopped there. He
+called again in a louder voice, and beckoned impatiently.
+Midwinter had heard the call, for he looked up, but still he
+never stirred from his place. There he stood, as if he had
+reached the utmost limits of the ship and could go no further.
+
+Allan went back and joined him. It was not easy to discover what
+he was looking at, for he kept his face turned away from the
+moonlight; but it seemed as if his eyes were fixed, with a
+strange expression of inquiry, on the cabin door. "What is there
+to look at there?" Allan asked. "Let's see if it's locked." As he
+took a step forward to open the door, Midwinter's hand seized him
+suddenly by the coat collar and forced him back. The moment
+after, the hand relaxed without losing its grasp, and trembled
+violently, like the hand of a man completely unnerved.
+
+"Am I to consider myself in custody?" asked Allan, half
+astonished and half amused. "Why in the name of wonder do you
+keep staring at the cabin door? Any suspicious noises below? It's
+no use disturbing the rats--if that's what you mean--we haven't
+got a dog with us. Men? Living men they can't be; for they would
+have heard us and come on deck. Dead men? Quite impossible! No
+ship's crew could be drowned in a land-locked place like this,
+unless the vessel broke up under them--and here's the vessel as
+steady as a church to speak for herself. Man alive, how your hand
+trembles! What is there to scare you in that rotten old cabin?
+What are you shaking and shivering about? Any company of the
+supernatural sort on board? Mercy preserve us! (as the old women
+say) do you see a ghost?"
+
+"_I see two_!" answered the other, driven headlong into speech
+and action by a maddening temptation to reveal the truth. "Two!"
+he repeated, his breath bursting from him in deep, heavy gasps,
+as he tried vainly to force back the horrible words. "The ghost
+of a man like you, drowning in the cabin! And the ghost of a man
+like me, turning the lock of the door on him!"
+
+Once more young Armadale's hearty laughter rang out loud and long
+through the stillness of the night.
+
+"Turning the lock of the door, is he?" said Allan, as soon as his
+merriment left him breath enough to speak. "That's a devilish
+unhandsome action, Master Midwinter, on the part of your ghost.
+The least I can do, after that, is to let mine out of the cabin,
+and give him the run of the ship."
+
+With no more than a momentary exertion of his superior strength,
+he freed himself easily from Midwinter's hold. "Below there!" he
+called out, gayly, as he laid his strong hand on the crazy lock,
+and tore open the cabin door. "Ghost of Allan Armadale, come on
+deck!" In his terrible ignorance of the truth, he put his head
+into the doorway and looked down, laughing, at the place where
+his murdered father had died. "Pah!" he exclaimed, stepping back
+suddenly, with a shudder of disgust. "The air is foul already;
+and the cabin is full of water."
+
+It was true. The sunken rocks on which the vessel lay wrecked had
+burst their way through her lower timbers astern, and the water
+had welled up through the rifted wood. Here, where the deed had
+been done, the fatal parallel between past and present was
+complete. What the cabin had been in the time of the fathers,
+that the cabin was now in the time of the sons.
+
+Allan pushed the door to again with his foot, a little surprised
+at the sudden silence which appeared to have fallen on his friend
+from the moment when he had laid his hand on the cabin lock. When
+he turned to look, the reason of the silence was instantly
+revealed. Midwinter had dropped on the deck. He lay senseless
+before the cabin door; his face turned up, white and still, to
+the moonlight, like the face of a dead man.
+
+In a moment Allan was at his side. He looked uselessly round the
+lonely limits of the wreck, as he lifted Midwinter's head on his
+knee, for a chance of help, where all chance was ruthlessly cut
+off. "What am I to do?" he said to himself, in the first impulse
+of alarm. "Not a drop of water near, but the foul water in the
+cabin." A sudden recollection crossed his memory, the florid
+color rushed back over his face, and he drew from his pocket a
+wicker-covered flask. "God bless the doctor for giving me this
+before we sailed!" he broke out, fervently, as he poured down
+Midwinter's throat some drops of the raw whisky which the flask
+contained. The stimulant acted instantly on the sensitive system
+of the swooning man. He sighed faintly, and slowly opened his
+eyes. "Have I been dreaming?" he asked, looking up vacantly in
+Allan's face. His eyes wandered higher, and encountered the
+dismantled masts of the wreck rising weird and black against the
+night sky. He shuddered at the sight of them, and hid his face on
+Allan's knee. "No dream!" he murmured to himself, mournfully. "Oh
+me, no dream!"
+
+"You have been overtired all day," said Allan, "and this infernal
+adventure of ours has upset you. Take some more whisky, it's sure
+to do you good. Can you sit by yourself, if I put you against the
+bulwark, so?"
+
+"Why by myself? Why do you leave me?" asked Midwinter.
+
+Allan pointed to the mizzen shrouds of the wreck, which were
+still left standing. "You are not well enough to rough it here
+till the workmen come off in the morning," he said. "We must find
+our way on shore at once, if we can. I am going up to get a good
+view all round, and see if there's a house within hail of us."
+
+Even in the moment that passed while those few words were spoken,
+Midwinter's eyes wandered back distrustfully to the fatal cabin
+door. "Don't go near it!" he whispered. "Don't try to open it,
+for God's sake!"
+
+"No, no," returned Allan, humoring him. "When I come down from
+the rigging, I'll come back here." He said the words a little
+constrainedly, noticing, for the first time while he now spoke,
+an underlying distress in Midwinter's face, which grieved and
+perplexed him. "You're not angry with me?" he said, in his
+simple, sweet-tempered way. "All this is my fault, I know; and I
+was a brute and a fool to laugh at you, when I ought to have seen
+you were ill. I am so sorry, Midwinter. Don't be angry with me!"
+
+Midwinter slowly raised his head. His eyes rested with a mournful
+interest, long and tender, on Allan's anxious face.
+
+"Angry?" he repeated, in his lowest, gentlest tones. "Angry with
+_ you_?--Oh, my poor boy, were you to blame for being kind to me
+when I was ill in the old west-country inn? And was I to blame
+for feeling your kindness thankfully? Was it our fault that we
+never doubted each other, and never knew that we were traveling
+together blindfold on the way that was to lead us here? The cruel
+time is coming, Allan, when we shall rue the day we ever met.
+Shake hands, brother, on the edge of the precipice--shake hands
+while we are brothers still!"
+
+Allan turned away quickly, convinced that his mind had not yet
+recovered the shock of the fainting fit. "Don't forget the
+whisky!" he said, cheerfully, as he sprang into the rigging, and
+mounted to the mizzen-top.
+
+It was past two, the moon was waning, and the darkness that comes
+before dawn was beginning to gather round the wreck. Behind
+Allan, as he now stood looking out from the elevation of the
+mizzen-top, spread the broad and lonely sea. Before him were the
+low, black, lurking rocks, and the broken waters of the channel,
+pouring white and angry into the vast calm of the westward ocean
+beyond. On the right hand, heaved back grandly from the
+water-side, were the rocks and precipices, with their little
+table-lands of grass between; the sloping downs, and
+upward-rolling heath solitudes of the Isle of Man. On the left
+hand rose the craggy sides of the Islet of the Calf, here rent
+wildly into deep black chasms, there lying low under long
+sweeping acclivities of grass and heath. No sound rose, no light
+was visible, on either shore. The black lines of the topmost
+masts of the wreck looked shadowy and faint in the darkening
+mystery of the sky; the land breeze had dropped; the small
+shoreward waves fell noiseless: far or near, no sound was audible
+but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water ahead, pouring
+through the awful hush of silence in which earth and ocean waited
+for the coming day.
+
+Even Allan's careless nature felt the solemn influence of the
+time. The sound of his own voice startled him when he looked down
+and hailed his friend on deck
+
+"I think I see one house," he said. "Here-away, on the mainland
+to the right." He looked again, to make sure, at a dim little
+patch of white, with faint white lines behind it, nestling low
+in a grassy hollow, on the main island. "It looks like a stone
+house and inclosure," he resumed. "I'll hail it, on the chance."
+He passed his arm round a rope to steady himself, made a
+speaking-trumpet of his hands, and suddenly dropped them again
+without uttering a sound. "It's so awfully quiet," he whispered
+to himself. "I'm half afraid to call out." He looked down again
+on deck. "I shan't startle you, Midwinter, shall I?" he said,
+with an uneasy laugh. He looked once more at the faint white
+object, in the grassy hollow. "It won't do to have come up here
+for nothing," he thought, and made a speaking-trumpet of his
+hands again. This time he gave the hail with the whole power of
+his lungs. "On shore there!" he shouted, turning his face to the
+main island. "Ahoy-hoy-hoy!"
+
+The last echoes of his voice died away and were lost. No sound
+answered him but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water
+ahead.
+
+He looked down again at his friend, and saw the dark figure of
+Midwinter rise erect, and pace the deck backward and forward,
+never disappearing out of sight of the cabin when it retired
+toward the bows of the wreck, and never passing beyond the cabin
+when it returned toward the stern. "He is impatient to get away,"
+thought Allan; "I'll try again." He hailed the land once more,
+and, taught by previous experience, pitched his voice in its
+highest key.
+
+This time another sound than the sound of the bubbling water
+answered him. The lowing of frightened cattle rose from the
+building in the grassy hollow, and traveled far and drearily
+through the stillness of the morning air. Allan waited and
+listened. If the building was a farmhouse the disturbance among
+the beasts would rouse the men. If it was only a cattle-stable,
+nothing more would happen. The lowing of the frightened brutes
+rose and fell drearily, the minutes passed, and nothing happened.
+
+"Once more!" said Allan, looking down at the restless figure
+pacing beneath him. For the third time he hailed the land. For
+the third time he waited and listened.
+
+In a pause of silence among the cattle, he heard behind him,
+on the opposite shore of the channel, faint and far among the
+solitudes of the Islet of the Calf, a sharp, sudden sound, like
+the distant clash of a heavy door-bolt drawn back. Turning at
+once in the new direction, he strained his eyes to look for a
+house. The last faint rays of the waning moonlight trembled here
+and there on the higher rocks, and on the steeper pinnacles of
+ground, but great strips of darkness lay dense and black over
+all the land between; and in that darkness the house, if house
+there were, was lost to view.
+
+"I have roused somebody at last," Allan called out,
+encouragingly, to Midwinter, still walking to and fro on the
+deck, strangely indifferent to all that was passing above and
+beyond him. "Look out for the answering, hail!" And with his face
+set toward the islet, Allan shouted for help.
+
+The shout was not answered, but mimicked with a shrill, shrieking
+derision, with wilder and wilder cries, rising out of the deep
+distant darkness, and mingling horribly the expression of a human
+voice with the sound of a brute's. A sudden suspicion crossed
+Allan's mind, which made his head swim and turned his hand cold
+as it held the rigging. In breathless silence he looked toward
+the quarter from which the first mimicry of his cry for help had
+come. After a moment's pause the shrieks were renewed, and the
+sound of them came nearer. Suddenly a figure, which seemed the
+figure of a man, leaped up black on a pinnacle of rock, and
+capered and shrieked in the waning gleam of the moonlight. The
+screams of a terrified woman mingled with the cries of the
+capering creature on the rock. A red spark flashed out in the
+darkness from a light kindled in an invisible window. The hoarse
+shouting of a man's voice in anger was heard through the noise.
+A second black figure leaped up on the rock, struggled with the
+first figure, and disappeared with it in the darkness. The cries
+grew fainter and fainter, the screams of the woman were stilled,
+the hoarse voice of the man was heard again for a moment, hailing
+the wreck in words made unintelligible by the distance, but in
+tones plainly expressive of rage and fear combined. Another
+moment, and the clang of the door-bolt was heard again, the red
+spark of light was quenched in darkness, and all the islet lay
+quiet in the shadows once more. The lowing of the cattle on the
+main-land ceased, rose again, stopped. Then, cold and cheerless
+as ever, the eternal bubbling of the broken water welled up
+through the great gap of silence--the one sound left, as the
+mysterious stillness of the hour fell like a mantle from the
+heavens, and closed over the wreck.
+
+Allan descended from his place in the mizzen-top, and joined his
+friend again on deck.
+
+"We must wait till the ship-breakers come off to their work," he
+said, meeting Midwinter halfway in the course of his restless
+walk. "After what has happened, I don't mind confessing that
+I've had enough of hailing the land. Only think of there being
+a madman in that house ashore, and of my waking him! Horrible,
+wasn't it?"
+
+Midwinter stood still for a moment, and looked at Allan, with
+the perplexed air of a man who hears circumstances familiarly
+mentioned to which he is himself a total stranger. He appeared,
+if such a thing had been possible, to have passed over entirely
+without notice all that had just happened on the Islet of the
+Calf.
+
+"Nothing is horrible _out_ of this ship," he said. "Everything
+is horrible _in_ it."
+
+Answering in those strange words, he turned away again, and went
+on with his walk.
+
+Allan picked up the flask of whisky lying on the deck near him,
+and revived his spirits with a dram. "Here's one thing on board
+that isn't horrible," he retorted briskly, as he screwed on the
+stopper of the flask; "and here's another," he added, as he took
+a cigar from his case and lit it. "Three o'clock!" he went on,
+looking at his watch, and settling himself comfortably on deck
+with his back against the bulwark. "Daybreak isn't far off; we
+shall have the piping of the birds to cheer us up before long.
+I say, Midwinter, you seem to have quite got over that unlucky
+fainting fit. How you do keep walking! Come here and have a
+cigar, and make yourself comfortable. What's the good of tramping
+backward and forward in that restless way?"
+
+"I am waiting," said Midwinter.
+
+"Waiting! What for?"
+
+"For what is to happen to you or to me--or to both of us--before
+we are out of this ship."
+
+"With submission to your superior judgment, my dear fellow, I
+think quite enough has happened already. The adventure will do
+very well as it stands now; more of it is more than I want." He
+took another dram of whisky, and rambled on, between the puffs
+of his cigar, in his usual easy way. "I've not got your fine
+imagination, old boy; and I hope the next thing that happens will
+be the appearance of the workmen's boat. I suspect that queer
+fancy of yours has been running away with you while you were down
+here all by yourself. Come, now, what were you thinking of while
+I was up in the mizzen-top frightening the cows?"
+
+Midwinter suddenly stopped. "Suppose I tell you?" he said.
+
+"Suppose you do?"
+
+The torturing temptation to reveal the truth, roused once already
+by his companion's merciless gayety of spirit, possessed itself
+of Midwinter for the second time. He leaned back in the dark
+against the high side of the ship, and looked down in silence at
+Allan's figure, stretched comfortably on the deck. "Rouse him,"
+the fiend whispered, subtly, "from that ignorant self-possession
+and that pitiless repose. Show him the place where the deed was
+done; let him know it with your knowledge, and fear it with your
+dread. Tell him of the letter you burned, and of the words no
+fire can destroy which are living in your memory now. Let him see
+your mind as it was yesterday, when it roused your sinking faith
+in your own convictions, to look back on your life at sea, and to
+cherish the comforting remembrance that, in all your voyages, you
+had never fallen in with this ship. Let him see your mind as it
+is now, when the ship has got you at the turning-point of your
+new life, at the outset of your friendship with the one man of
+all men whom your father warned you to avoid. Think of those
+death-bed words, and whisper them in his ear, that he may think
+of them, too: 'Hide yourself from him under an assumed name.
+Put the mountains and the seas between you; be ungrateful, be
+unforgiving; be all that is most repellent to your own gentler
+nature, rather than live under the same roof and breathe the
+same air with that man.'" So the tempter counseled. So, like
+a noisome exhalation from the father's grave, the father's
+influence rose and poisoned the mind of the son.
+
+The sudden silence surprised Allan; he looked back drowsily over
+his shoulder. "Thinking again!" he exclaimed, with a weary yawn.
+
+Midwinter stepped out from the shadow, and came nearer to Allan
+than he had come yet. "Yes," he said, "thinking of the past and
+the future."
+
+"The past and the future?" repeated Allan, shifting himself
+comfortably into a new position. "For my part, I'm dumb about the
+past. It's a sore subject with me: the past means the loss of the
+doctor's boat. Let's talk about the future. Have you been taking
+a practical view? as dear old Brock calls it. Have you been
+considering the next serious question that concerns us both when
+we get back to the hotel--the question of breakfast?"
+
+After an instant's hesitation, Midwinter took a step nearer. "I
+have been thinking of your future and mine," he said; "I have
+been thinking of the time when your way in life and my way in
+life will be two ways instead of one."
+
+"Here's the daybreak!" cried Allan. "Look up at the masts;
+they're beginning to get clear again already. I beg your pardon.
+What were you saying?"
+
+Midwinter made no reply. The struggle between the hereditary
+superstition that was driving him on, and the unconquerable
+affection for Allan that was holding him back, suspended the
+next words on his lips. He turned aside his face in speechless
+suffering. "Oh, my father!" he thought, "better have killed me
+on that day when I lay on your bosom, than have let me live for
+this."
+
+"What's that about the future?" persisted Allan. "I was looking
+for the daylight; I didn't hear."
+
+Midwinter controlled himself, and answered: "You have treated me
+with your usual kindness," he said, "in planning to take me with
+you to Thorpe Ambrose. I think, on reflection, I had better not
+intrude myself where I am not known and not expected." His voice
+faltered, and he stopped again. The more he shrank from it, the
+clearer the picture of the happy life that he was resigning rose
+on his mind.
+
+Allan's thoughts instantly reverted to the mystification about
+the new steward which he had practiced on his friend when they
+were consulting together in the cabin of the yacht. "Has he
+been turning it over in his mind?" wondered Allan; "and is he
+beginning at last to suspect the truth? I'll try him.--Talk as
+much nonsense, my dear fellow, as you like," he rejoined, "but
+don't forget that you are engaged to see me established at
+Thorpe Ambrose, and to give me your opinion of the new
+steward."
+
+Midwinter suddenly stepped forward again, close to Allan.
+
+"I am not talking about your steward or your estate," he burst
+out passionately; "I am talking about myself. Do you hear?
+Myself! I am not a fit companion for you. You don't know who
+I am." He drew back into the shadowy shelter of the bulwark as
+suddenly as he had come out from it. "O God! I can't tell him,"
+he said to himself, in a whisper.
+
+For a moment, and for a moment only, Allan was surprised. "Not
+know who you are?" Even as he repeated the words, his easy
+goodhumor got the upper-hand again. He took up the whisky flask,
+and shook it significantly. "I say," he resumed, "how much of the
+doctor's medicine did you take while I was up in the mizzen-top?"
+
+The light tone which he persisted in adopting stung Midwinter to
+the last pitch of exasperation. He came out again into the light,
+and stamped his foot angrily on the deck. "Listen to me!" he
+said. "You don't know half the low things I have done in my
+lifetime. I have been a tradesman's drudge; I have swept out the
+shop and put up the shutters; I have carried parcels through the
+street, and waited for my master's money at his customers'
+doors."
+
+"I have never done anything half as useful," returned Allan,
+composedly. "Dear old boy, what an industrious fellow you have
+been in your time!"
+
+"I've been a vagabond and a blackguard in my time," returned the
+other, fiercely; "I've been a street tumbler, a tramp, a gypsy's
+boy! I've sung for half-pence with dancing dogs on the high-road!
+I've worn a foot-boy's livery, and waited at table! I've been a
+common sailors' cook, and a starving fisherman's
+Jack-of-all-trades! What has a gentleman in your position in
+common with a man in mine? Can you take _me_ into the society at
+Thorpe Ambrose? Why, my very name would be a reproach to you.
+Fancy the faces of your new neighbors when their footmen announce
+Ozias Midwinter and Allan Armadale in the same breath!" He burst
+into a harsh laugh, and repeated the two names again, with a
+scornful bitterness of emphasis which insisted pitilessly on the
+marked contrast between them.
+
+Something in the sound of his laughter jarred painfully even on
+Allan's easy nature. He raised himself on the deck and spoke
+seriously for the first time. "A joke's a joke, Midwinter," he
+said, "as long as you don't carry it too far. I remember your
+saying something of the same sort to me once before when I was
+nursing you in Somersetshire. You forced me to ask you if I
+deserved to be kept at arms-length by _you_ of all the people in
+the world. Don't force me to say so again. Make as much fun of me
+as you please, old fellow, in any other way. _That_ way hurts
+me."
+
+Simple as the words were, and simply as they had been spoken,
+they appeared to work an instant revolution in Midwinter's mind.
+His impressible nature recoiled as from some sudden shock.
+Without a word of reply, he walked away by himself to the forward
+part of the ship. He sat down on some piled planks between the
+masts, and passed his hand over his head in a vacant, bewildered
+way. Though his father's belief in fatality was his own belief
+once more--though there was no longer the shadow of a doubt in
+his mind that the woman whom Mr. Brock had met in Somersetshire,
+and the woman who had tried to destroy herself in London, were
+one and the same--though all the horror that mastered him when
+he first read the letter from Wildbad had now mastered him again,
+Allan's appeal to their past experience of each other had come
+home to his heart, with a force more irresistible than the force
+of his superstition itself. In the strength of that very
+superstition, he now sought the pretext which might encourage him
+to sacrifice every less generous feeling to the one predominant
+dread of wounding the sympathies of his friend. "Why distress
+him?" he whispered to himself. "We are not the end here: there
+is the Woman behind us in the dark. Why resist him when the
+mischief's done, and the caution comes too late? What _is_ to be
+_will_ be. What have I to do with the future? and what has he?"
+
+He went back to Allan, sat down by his side, and took his hand.
+"Forgive me," he said, gently; "I have hurt you for the last
+time." Before it was possible to reply, he snatched up the whisky
+flask from the deck. "Come!" he exclaimed, with a sudden effort
+to match his friend's cheerfulness, "you have been trying the
+doctor's medicine, why shouldn't I?"
+
+Allan was delighted. "This is something like a change for the
+better," he said; "Midwinter is himself again. Hark! there are
+the birds. Hail, smiling morn! smiling morn!" He sang the words
+of the glee in his old, cheerful voice, and clapped Midwinter on
+the shoulder in his old, hearty way. "How did you manage to clear
+your head of those confounded megrims? Do you know you were quite
+alarming about something happening to one or other of us before
+we were out of this ship?"
+
+"Sheer nonsense!" returned Midwinter, contemptuously. "I don't
+think my head has ever been quite right since that fever; I've
+got a bee in my bonnet, as they say in the North. Let's talk of
+something else. About those people you have let the cottage to?
+I wonder whether the agent's account of Major Milroy's family is
+to be depended on? There might be another lady in the household
+besides his wife and his daughter."
+
+"Oho!" cried Allan, "_you're_ beginning to think of nymphs among
+the trees, and flirtations in the fruit-garden, are you? Another
+lady, eh? Suppose the major's family circle won't supply another?
+We shall have to spin that half-crown again, and toss up for
+which is to have the first chance with Miss Milroy."
+
+For once Midwinter spoke as lightly and carelessly as Allan
+himself. "No, no," he said, "the major's landlord has the first
+claim to the notice of the major's daughter. I'll retire into the
+background, and wait for the next lady who makes her appearance
+at Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+"Very good. I'll have an address to the women of Norfolk posted
+in the park to that effect," said Allan. "Are you particular to
+a shade about size or complexion? What's your favorite age?"
+
+Midwinter trifled with his own superstition, as a man trifles
+with the loaded gun that may kill him, or with the savage animal
+that may maim him for life. He mentioned the age (as he had
+reckoned it himself) of the woman in the black gown and the red
+Paisley shawl.
+
+"Five-and-thirty," he said.
+
+As the words passed his lips, his factitious spirits deserted
+him. He left his seat, impenetrably deaf to all Allan's efforts
+at rallying him on his extraordinary answer, and resumed his
+restless pacing of the deck in dead silence. Once more the
+haunting thought which had gone to and fro with him in the hour
+of darkness went to and fro with him now in the hour of daylight.
+
+Once more the conviction possessed itself of his mind that
+something was to happen to Allan or to himself before they left
+the wreck.
+
+Minute by minute the light strengthened in the eastern sky; and
+the shadowy places on the deck of the timber-ship revealed their
+barren emptiness under the eye of day. As the breeze rose again,
+the sea began to murmur wakefully in the morning light. Even the
+cold bubbling of the broken water changed its cheerless note,
+and softened on the ear as the mellowing flood of daylight poured
+warm over it from the rising sun. Midwinter paused near the
+forward part of the ship, and recalled his wandering attention
+to the passing time. The cheering influences of the hour were
+round him, look where he might. The happy morning smile of
+the summer sky, so brightly merciful to the old and weary earth,
+lavished its all-embracing beauty even on the wreck. The dew that
+lay glittering on the inland fields lay glittering on the deck,
+and the worn and rusted rigging was gemmed as brightly as the
+fresh green leaves on shore. Insensibly, as he looked round,
+Midwinter's thoughts reverted to the comrade who had shared with
+him the adventure of the night. He returned to the after-part
+of the ship, spoke to Allan as he advanced. Receiving no answer,
+he approached the recumbent figure and looked closer at it. Left
+to his own resources, Allan had let the fatigues of the night
+take their own way with him. His head had sunk back; his hat had
+fallen off; he lay stretched at full length on the deck of the
+timber-ship, deeply and peacefully asleep.
+
+Midwinter resumed his walk; his mind lost in doubt; his own past
+thoughts seeming suddenly to have grown strange to him. How
+darkly his forebodings had distrusted the coming time, and how
+harmlessly that time had come! The sun was mounting in the
+heavens, the hour of release was drawing nearer and nearer,
+and of the two Armadales imprisoned in the fatal ship, one was
+sleeping away the weary time, and the other was quietly watching
+the growth of the new day.
+
+The sun climbed higher; the hour wore on. With the latent
+distrust of the wreck which still clung to him, Midwinter looked
+inquiringly on either shore for signs of awakening human life.
+The land was still lonely. The smoke wreaths that were soon to
+rise from cottage chimneys had not risen yet.
+
+After a moment's thought he went back again to the after-part of
+the vessel, to see if there might be a fisherman's boat within
+hail astern of them. Absorbed for the moment by the new idea, he
+passed Allan hastily, after barely noticing that he still lay
+asleep. One step more would have brought him to the taffrail,
+when that step was suspended by a sound behind him, a sound like
+a faint groan. He turned, and looked at the sleeper on the deck.
+He knelt softly, and looked closer.
+
+"It has come!" he whispered to himself. "Not to _me_--but to
+_him_."
+
+It had come, in the bright freshness of the morning; it had come,
+in the mystery and terror of a Dream. The face which Midwinter
+had last seen in perfect repose was now the distorted face of a
+suffering man. The perspiration stood thick on Allan's forehead,
+and matted his curling hair. His partially opened eyes showed
+nothing but the white of the eyeball gleaming blindly. His
+outstretched hands scratched and struggled on the deck. From
+moment to moment he moaned and muttered helplessly; but the words
+that escaped him were lost in the grinding and gnashing of his
+teeth. There he lay--so near in the body to the friend who bent
+over him; so far away in the spirit, that the two might have been
+in different worlds--there he lay, with the morning sunshine on
+his face, in the torture of his dream.
+
+One question, and one only, rose in the mind of the man who was
+looking at him. What had the fatality which had imprisoned him in
+the wreck decreed that he should see?
+
+Had the treachery of Sleep opened the gates of the grave to that
+one of the two Armadales whom the other had kept in ignorance of
+the truth? Was the murder of the father revealing itself to the
+son--there, on the very spot where the crime had been committed
+--in the vision of a dream?
+
+With that question overshadowing all else in his mind, the son of
+the homicide knelt on the deck, and looked at the son of the man
+whom his father's hand had slain.
+
+The conflict between the sleeping body and the waking mind was
+strengthening every moment. The dreamer's helpless groaning for
+deliverance grew louder; his hands raised themselves, and
+clutched at the empty air. Struggling with the all-mastering
+dread that still held him, Midwinter laid his hand gently on
+Allan's forehead. Light as the touch was, there were mysterious
+sympathies in the dreaming man that answered it. His groaning
+ceased, and his hands dropped slowly. There was an instant of
+suspense and Midwinter looked closer. His breath just fluttered
+over the sleeper's face. Before the next breath had risen to his
+lips, Allan suddenly sprang up on his knees--sprang up, as if the
+call of a trumpet had rung on his ear, awake in an instant.
+
+"You have been dreaming," said Midwinter, as the other looked at
+him wildly, in the first bewilderment of waking.
+
+Allan's eyes began to wander about the wreck, at first vacantly,
+then with a look of angry surprise. "Are we here still?" he said,
+as Midwinter helped him to his feet. "Whatever else I do on board
+this infernal ship," he added, after a moment, "I won't go to
+sleep again!"
+
+As he said those words, his friend's eyes searched his face in
+silent inquiry. They took a turn together on the deck.
+
+"Tell me your dream," said Midwinter, with a strange tone of
+suspicion in his voice, and a strange appearance of abruptness in
+his manner.
+
+"I can't tell it yet," returned Allan. "Wait a little till I'm my
+own man again."
+
+They took another turn on the deck. Midwinter stopped, and spoke
+once more.
+
+"Look at me for a moment, Allan," he said.
+
+There was something of the trouble left by the dream, and
+something of natural surprise at the strange request just
+addressed to him, in Allan's face, as he turned it full on the
+speaker; but no shadow of ill-will, no lurking lines of distrust
+anywhere. Midwinter turned aside quickly, and hid, as he best
+might, an irrepressible outburst of relief.
+
+"Do I look a little upset?" asked Allan, taking his arm, and
+leading him on again. "Don't make yourself nervous about me if I
+do. My head feels wild and giddy, but I shall soon get over it."
+
+For the next few minutes they walked backward and forward in
+silence, the one bent on dismissing the terror of the dream from
+his thoughts, the other bent on discovering what the terror of
+the dream might be. Relieved of the dread that had oppressed it,
+the superstitious nature of Midwinter had leaped to its next
+conclusion at a bound. What if the sleeper had been visited by
+another revelation than the revelation of the Past? What if the
+dream had opened those unturned pages in the book of the Future
+which told the story of his life to come? The bare doubt that it
+might be so strengthened tenfold Midwinter's longing to penetrate
+the mystery which Allan's silence still kept a secret from him.
+
+"Is your head more composed?" he asked. "Can you tell me your
+dream now?"
+
+While he put the question, a last memorable moment in the
+Adventure of the Wreck was at hand.
+
+They had reached the stern, and were just turning again when
+Midwinter spoke. As Allan opened his lips to answer, he looked
+out mechanically to sea. Instead of replying, he suddenly ran to
+the taffrail, and waved his hat over his head, with a shout of
+exultation.
+
+Midwinter joined him, and saw a large six-oared boat pulling
+straight for the channel of the Sound. A figure, which they both
+thought they recognized, rose eagerly in the stern-sheets and
+returned the waving of Allan's hat. The boat came nearer, the
+steersman called to them cheerfully, and they recognized the
+doctor's voice.
+
+"Thank God you're both above water!" said Mr. Hawbury, as they
+met him on the deck of the timber-ship. "Of all the winds of
+heaven, which wind blew you here?"
+
+He looked at Midwinter as he made the inquiry, but it was Allan
+who told him the story of the night, and Allan who asked the
+doctor for information in return. The one absorbing interest
+in Midwinter's mind--the interest of penetrating the mystery of
+the dream--kept him silent throughout. Heedless of all that was
+said or done about him, he watched Allan, and followed Allan,
+like a dog, until the time came for getting down into the boat.
+Mr. Hawbury's professional eye rested on him curiously, noting
+his varying color, and the incessant restlessness of his hands.
+"I wouldn't change nervous systems with that man for the largest
+fortune that could be offered me," thought the doctor as he took
+the boat's tiller, and gave the oarsmen their order to push off
+from the wreck.
+
+Having reserved all explanations on his side until they were
+on their way back to Port St. Mary, Mr. Hawbury next addressed
+himself to the gratification of Allan's curiosity. The
+circumstances which had brought him to the rescue of his two
+guests of the previous evening were simple enough. The lost boat
+had been met with at sea by some fishermen of Port Erin, on the
+western side of the island, who at once recognized it as the
+doctor's property, and at once sent a messenger to make inquiry,
+at the doctor's house. The man's statement of what had happened
+had naturally alarmed Mr. Hawbury for the safety of Allan and his
+friend. He had immediately secured assistance, and, guided by the
+boatman's advice, had made first for the most dangerous place on
+the coast--the only place, in that calm weather, in which an
+accident could have happened to a boat sailed by experienced
+men--the channel of the Sound. After thus accounting for his
+welcome appearance on the scene, the doctor hospitably insisted
+that his guests of the evening should be his guests of the
+morning as well. It would still be too early when they got back
+for the people at the hotel to receive them, and they would find
+bed and breakfast at Mr. Hawbury's house.
+
+At the first pause in the conversation between Allan and the
+doctor, Midwinter, who had neither joined in the talk nor
+listened to the talk, touched his friend on the arm. "Are you
+better?" he asked, in a whisper. "Shall you soon be composed
+enough to tell me what I want to know?"
+
+Allan's eyebrows contracted impatiently; the subject of the
+dream, and Midwinter's obstinacy in returning to it, seemed to be
+alike distasteful to him. He hardly answered with his usual good
+humor. "I suppose I shall have no peace till I tell you," he
+said, "so I may as well get it over at once."
+
+"No!" returned Midwinter, with a look at the doctor and his
+oarsmen. "Not where other people can hear it--not till you and I
+are alone."
+
+"If you wish to see the last, gentlemen, of your quarters for the
+night," interposed the doctor, "now is your time! The coast will
+shut the vessel out in a minute more."
+
+In silence on the one side and on the other, the two Armadales
+looked their last at the fatal ship. Lonely and lost they had
+found the wreck in the mystery of the summer night; lonely and
+lost they left the wreck in the radiant beauty of the summer
+morning.
+
+An hour later the doctor had seen his guests established in their
+bedrooms, and had left them to take their rest until the
+breakfast hour arrived.
+
+Almost as soon as his back was turned, the doors of both rooms
+opened softly, and Allan and Midwinter met in the passage.
+
+"Can you sleep after what has happened?" asked Allan.
+
+Midwinter shook his head. "You were coming to my room, were you
+not?" he said. "What for?"
+
+"To ask you to keep me company. What were you coming to _my_ room
+for?"
+
+"To ask you to tell me your dream."
+
+"Damn the dream! I want to forget all about it."
+
+"And _I_ want to know all about it."
+
+Both paused; both refrained instinctively from saying more. For
+the first time since the beginning of their friendship they were
+on the verge of a disagreement, and that on the subject of the
+dream. Allan's good temper just stopped them on the brink.
+
+"You are the most obstinate fellow alive," he said; "but if you
+will know all about it, you must know all about it, I suppose.
+Come into my room, and I'll tell you."
+
+He led the way, and Midwinter followed. The door closed and shut
+them in together.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE.
+
+When Mr. Hawbury joined his guests in the breakfast-room, the
+strange contrast of character between them which he had noticed
+already was impressed on his mind more strongly than ever. One of
+them sat at the well-spread table, hungry and happy, ranging from
+dish to dish, and declaring that he had never made such a
+breakfast in his life. The other sat apart at the window;
+his cup thanklessly deserted before it was empty, his meat left
+ungraciously half-eaten on his plate. The doctor's morning
+greeting to the two accurately expressed the differing
+impressions which they had produced on his mind.
+
+He clapped Allan on the shoulder, and saluted him with a joke. He
+bowed constrainedly to Midwinter, and said, "I am afraid you have
+not recovered the fatigues of the night."
+
+"It's not the night, doctor, that has damped his spirits," said
+Allan. "It's something I have been telling him. It is not my
+fault, mind. If I had only known beforehand that he believed in
+dreams, I wouldn't have opened my lips."
+
+"Dreams?" repeated the doctor, looking at Midwinter directly, and
+addressing him under a mistaken impression of the meaning of
+Allan's words. "With your constitution, you ought to be well used
+to dreaming by this time."
+
+"This way, doctor; you have taken the wrong turning!" cried
+Allan. "I'm the dreamer, not he. Don't look astonished; it wasn't
+in this comfortable house; it was on board that confounded
+timber-ship. The fact is, I fell asleep just before you took us
+off the wreck; and it's not to be denied that I had a very ugly
+dream. Well, when we got back here--"
+
+"Why do you trouble Mr. Hawbury about a matter that cannot
+possibly interest him?" asked Midwinter, speaking for the first
+time, and speaking very impatiently.
+
+"I beg your pardon," returned the doctor, rather sharply; "so far
+as I have heard, the matter does interest me."
+
+"That's right, doctor!" said Allan. "Be interested, I beg and
+pray; I want you to clear his head of the nonsense he has got in
+it now. What do you think? He will have it that my dream is a
+warning to me to avoid certain people; and he actually persists
+in saying that one of those people is--himself! Did you ever hear
+the like of it? I took great pains; I explained the whole thing
+to him. I said, warning be hanged; it's all indigestion! You
+don't know what I ate and drank at the doctor's supper-table; I
+do. Do you think he would listen to me? Not he. You try him next;
+you're a professional man, and he must listen to you. Be a good
+fellow, doctor, and give me a certificate of indigestion; I'll
+show you my tongue with pleasure."
+
+"The sight of your face is quite enough," said Mr. Hawbury. "I
+certify, on the spot, that you never had such a thing as an
+indigestion in your life. Let's hear about the dream, and see
+what we can make of it, if you have no objection, that is to
+say."
+
+Allan pointed at Midwinter with his fork.
+
+"Apply to my friend, there," he said; "he has got a much better
+account of it than I can give you. If you'll believe me, he took
+it all down in writing from my own lips; and he made me sign it
+at the end, as if it was my 'last dying speech and confession'
+before I went to the gallows. Out with it, old boy--I saw you put
+it in your pocket-book--out with it!"
+
+"Are you really in earnest?" asked Midwinter, producing his
+pocketbook with a reluctance which was almost offensive under the
+circumstances, for it implied distrust of the doctor in the
+doctor's own house.
+
+Mr. Hawbury's color rose. "Pray don't show it to me, if you feel
+the least unwillingness," he said, with the elaborate politeness
+of an offended man.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Allan. "Throw it over here!"
+
+Instead of complying with that characteristic request, Midwinter
+took the paper from the pocket-book, and, leaving his place,
+approached Mr. Hawbury. "I beg your pardon," he said, as he
+offered the doctor the manuscript with his own hand. His eyes
+dropped to the ground, and his face darkened, while he made the
+apology. "A secret, sullen fellow," thought the doctor, thanking
+him with formal civility; "his friend is worth ten thousand of
+him." Midwinter went back to the window, and sat down again in
+silence, with the old impenetrable resignation which had once
+puzzled Mr. Brock.
+
+"Read that, doctor," said Allan, as Mr. Hawbury opened the
+written paper. "It's not told in my roundabout way; but there's
+nothing added to it, and nothing taken away. It's exactly what I
+dreamed, and exactly what I should have written myself, if I had
+thought the thing worth putting down on paper, and if I had had
+the knack of writing--which," concluded Allan, composedly
+stirring his coffee, "I haven't, except it's letters; and I
+rattle _them_ off in no time."
+
+Mr. Hawbury spread the manuscript before him on the
+breakfast-table, and read these lines:
+
+  "ALLAN ARMADALE'S DREAM.
+
+"Early on the morning of June the first, eighteen hundred and
+fifty-one, I found myself (through circumstances which it is not
+important to mention in this place) left alone with a friend of
+mine--a young man about my own age--on board the French
+timber-ship named _La Grace de Dieu_, which ship then lay wrecked
+in the channel of the Sound between the main-land of the Isle of
+Man and the islet called the Calf. Having not been in bed the
+previous night, and feeling overcome by fatigue, I fell asleep on
+the deck of the vessel. I was in my usual good health at the
+time, and the morning was far enough advanced for the sun to have
+risen. Under these circumstances, and at that period of the day,
+I passed from sleeping to dreaming. As clearly as I can recollect
+it, after the lapse of a few hours, this was the succession of
+events presented to me by the dream:
+
+"1. The first event of which I was conscious was the appearance
+of my father. He took me silently by the hand; and we found
+ourselves in the cabin of a ship.
+
+"2. Water rose slowly over us in the cabin; and I and my father
+sank through the water together.
+
+"3. An interval of oblivion followed; and then the sense came to
+me of being left alone in the darkness.
+
+"4. I waited.
+
+"5. The darkness opened, and showed me the vision--as in a
+picture--of a broad, lonely pool, surrounded by open ground.
+Above the farther margin of the pool I saw the cloudless western
+sky, red with the light of sunset.
+
+"6. On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of a
+Woman.
+
+"7. It was the shadow only. No indication was visible to me by
+which I could identify it, or compare it with any living
+creature. The long robe showed me that it was the shadow of a
+woman, and showed me nothing more.
+
+"8. The darkness closed again--remained with me for an
+interval--and opened for the second time.
+
+"9. I found myself in a room, standing before. a long window. The
+only object of furniture or of ornament that I saw (or that I can
+now remember having seen) was a little statue placed near me. The
+window opened on a lawn and flower-garden; and the rain was
+pattering heavily against the glass.
+
+"10. I was not alone in the room. Standing opposite to me at the
+window was the Shadow of a Man.
+
+"11. I saw no more of it; I knew no more of it than I saw and
+knew of the shadow of the woman. But the shadow of the man moved.
+It stretched out its arm toward the statue; and the statue fell
+in fragments on the floor.
+
+"12. With a confused sensation in me, which was partly anger and
+partly distress, I stooped to look at the fragments. When I rose
+again, the Shadow had vanished, and I saw no more.
+
+"13. The darkness opened for the third time, and showed me the
+Shadow of the Woman and the Shadow of the Man together.
+
+"14. No surrounding scene (or none that I can now call to mind)
+was visible to me.
+
+"15. The Man-Shadow was the nearest; the Woman-Shadow stood back.
+From where she stood, there came a sound as of the pouring of a
+liquid softly. I saw her touch the shadow of the man with one
+hand, and with the other give him a glass. He took the glass, and
+gave it to me. In the moment when I put it to my lips, a deadly
+faintness mastered me from head to foot. When I came to my senses
+again, the Shadows had vanished, and the third vision was at an
+end.
+
+"16. The darkness closed over me again; and the interval of
+oblivion followed.
+
+"17. I was conscious of nothing more, till I felt the morning sun
+shine on my face, and heard my friend tell me that I had awakened
+from a dream...."
+
+
+After reading the narrative attentively to the last line (under
+which appeared Allan's signature), the doctor looked across the
+breakfast-table at Midwinter, and tapped his fingers on the
+manuscript with a satirical smile.
+
+"Many men, many opinions," he said. "I don't agree with either of
+you about this dream. Your theory," he added, looking at Allan,
+with a smile, "we have disposed of already: the supper that _you_
+can't digest is a supper which has yet to be discovered. My
+theory we will come to presently; your friend's theory claims
+attention first." He turned again to Midwinter, with his
+anticipated triumph over a man whom he disliked a little too
+plainly visible in his face and manner. "If I understand
+rightly," he went on, "you believe that this dream is a warning!
+supernaturally addressed to Mr. Armadale, of dangerous events
+that are threatening him, and of dangerous people connected with
+those events whom he would do wisely to avoid. May I inquire
+whether you have arrived at this conclusion as an habitual
+believer in dreams, or as having reasons of your own for
+attaching especial importance to this one dream in particular?"
+
+"You have stated what my conviction is quite accurately,"
+returned Midwinter, chafing under the doctor's looks and tones.
+"Excuse me if I ask you to be satisfied with that admission, and
+to let me keep my reasons to myself."
+
+"That's exactly what he said to me," interposed Allan. "I don't
+believe he has got any reasons at all."
+
+"Gently! gently!" said Mr. Hawbury. "We can discuss the subject
+without intruding ourselves into anybody's secrets. Let us come
+to my own method of dealing with the dream next. Mr. Midwinter
+will probably not be surprised to hear that I look at this matter
+from an essentially practical point of view."
+
+"I shall not be at all surprised," retorted Midwinter. "The view
+of a medical man, when he has a problem in humanity to solve,
+seldom ranges beyond the point of his dissecting-knife."
+
+The doctor was a little nettled on his side. "Our limits are not
+quite so narrow as that," he said; "but I willingly grant you
+that there are some articles of your faith in which we doctors
+don't believe. For example, we don't believe that a reasonable
+man is justified in attaching a supernatural interpretation to
+any phenomenon which comes within the range of his senses, until
+he has certainly ascertained that there is no such thing as a
+natural explanation of it to be found in the first instance."
+
+"Come; that's fair enough, I'm sure," exclaimed Allan. "He hit
+you hard with the 'dissecting-knife,' doctor; and now you have
+hit him back again with your 'natural explanation.' Let's have
+it."
+
+"By all means," said Mr. Hawbury. "Here it is. There is nothing
+at all extraordinary in my theory of dreams: it is the theory
+accepted by the great mass of my profession. A dream is the
+reproduction, in the sleeping state of the brain, of images and
+impressions produced on it in the waking state; and this
+reproduction is more or less involved, imperfect, or
+contradictory, as the action of certain faculties in the dreamer
+is controlled more or less completely by the influence of sleep.
+Without inquiring further into this latter part of the subject--a
+very curious and interesting part of it--let us take the theory,
+roughly and generally, as I have just stated it, and apply it at
+once to the dream now under consideration." He took up the
+written paper from the table, and dropped the formal tone (as of
+a lecturer addressing an audience) into which he had insensibly
+fallen. "I see one event already in this dream," he resumed,
+"which I know to be the reproduction of a waking impression
+produced on Mr. Armadale in my own presence. If he will only help
+me by exerting his memory, I don't despair of tracing back the
+whole succession of events set down here to something that he has
+said or thought, or seen or done, in the four-and-twenty hours,
+or less, which preceded his falling asleep on the deck of the
+timber-ship."
+
+"I'll exert my memory with the greatest pleasure," said Allan.
+"Where shall we start from?"
+
+"Start by telling me what you did yesterday, before I met you and
+your friend on the road to this place," replied Mr. Hawbury. "We
+will say, you got up and had your breakfast. What next?"
+
+"We took a carriage next," said Allan, "and drove from Castletown
+to Douglas to see my old friend, Mr. Brock, off by the steamer to
+Liverpool. We came back to Castletown and separated at the hotel
+door. Midwinter went into the house, and I went on to my yacht
+in the harbor. By-the-bye, doctor, remember you have promised to
+go cruising with us before we leave the Isle of Man."
+
+"Many thanks; but suppose we keep to the matter in hand. What
+next?"
+
+Allan hesitated. In both senses of the word his mind was at sea
+already.
+
+"What did you do on board the yacht?"
+
+"Oh, I know! I put the cabin to rights--thoroughly to rights.
+I give you my word of honor, I turned every blessed thing
+topsy-turvy. And my friend there came off in a shore-boat and
+helped me. Talking of boats, I have never asked you yet whether
+your boat came to any harm last night. If there's any damage
+done, I insist on being allowed to repair it."
+
+The doctor abandoned all further attempts at the cultivation of
+Allan's memory in despair.
+
+"I doubt if we shall be able to reach our object conveniently in
+this way," he said. "It will be better to take the events of the
+dream in their regular order, and to ask the questions that
+naturally suggest themselves as we go on. Here are the first two
+events to begin with. You dream that your father appears to
+you--that you and he find yourselves in the cabin of a ship--that
+the water rises over you, and that you sink in it together. Were
+you down in the cabin of the wreck, may I ask?"
+
+"I couldn't be down there," replied Allan, "as the cabin was full
+of water. I looked in and saw it, and shut the door again."
+
+"Very good," said Mr. Hawbury. "Here are the waking impressions
+clear enough, so far. You have had the cabin in your mind; and
+you have had the water in your mind; and the sound of the channel
+current (as I well know without asking) was the last sound in
+your ears when you went to sleep. The idea of drowning comes too
+naturally out of such impressions as these to need dwelling on.
+Is there anything else before we go on? Yes; there is one more
+circumstance left to account for."
+
+"The most important circumstance of all," remarked Midwinter,
+joining in the conversation, without stirring from his place at
+the window.
+
+"You mean the appearance of Mr. Armadale's father? I was just
+coming to that," answered Mr. Hawbury. "Is your father alive?"
+he added, addressing himself to Allan once more.
+
+"My father died before I was born."
+
+The doctor started. "This complicates it a little," he said. "How
+did you know that the figure appearing to you in the dream was
+the figure of your father?"
+
+Allan hesitated again. Midwinter drew his chair a little away
+from the window, and looked at the doctor attentively for the
+first time.
+
+"Was your father in your thoughts before you went to sleep?"
+pursued Mr. Hawbury. "Was there any description of him--any
+portrait of him at home--in your mind?"
+
+"Of course there was!" cried Allan, suddenly seizing the lost
+recollection. "Midwinter! you remember the miniature you found on
+the floor of the cabin when we were putting the yacht to rights?
+You said I didn't seem to value it; and I told you I did, because
+it was a portrait of my father--"
+
+"And was the face in the dream like the face in the miniature?"
+asked Mr. Hawbury.
+
+"Exactly like! I say, doctor, this is beginning to get
+interesting!"
+
+"What do you say now?" asked Mr. Hawbury, turning toward the
+window again.
+
+Midwinter hurriedly left his chair, and placed himself at the
+table with Allan. Just as he had once already taken refuge from
+the tyranny of his own superstition in the comfortable common
+sense of Mr. Brock, so, with the same headlong eagerness, with
+the same straightforward sincerity of purpose, he now took refuge
+in the doctor's theory of dreams. "I say what my friend says," he
+answered, flushing with a sudden enthusiasm; "this is beginning
+to get interesting. Go on; pray go on."
+
+The doctor looked at his strange guest more indulgently than he
+had looked yet. "You are the only mystic I have met with," he
+said, "who is willing to give fair evidence fair play. I don't
+despair of converting you before our inquiry comes to an end. Let
+us get on to the next set of events," he resumed, after referring
+for a moment to the manuscript. "The interval of oblivion which
+is described as succeeding the first of the appearances in the
+dream may be easily disposed of. It means, in plain English, the
+momentary cessation of the brain's intellectual action, while a
+deeper wave of sleep flows over it, just as the sense of being
+alone in the darkness, which follows, indicates the renewal of
+that action, previous to the reproduction of another set of
+impressions. Let us see what they are. A lonely pool, surrounded
+by an open country; a sunset sky on the further side of the pool;
+and the shadow of a woman on the near side. Very good; now for
+it, Mr. Armadale! How did that pool get into your head? The open
+country you saw on your way from Castletown to this place But we
+have no pools or lakes hereabouts; and you can have seen none
+recently elsewhere, for you came here after a cruise at sea. Must
+we fall back on a picture, or a book, or a conversation with your
+friend?"
+
+Allan looked at Midwinter. "I don't remember talking about pools
+or lakes," he said. "Do you?"
+
+Instead of answering the question, Midwinter suddenly appealed to
+the doctor.
+
+"Have you got the last number of the Manx newspaper?" he asked.
+
+The doctor produced it from the sideboard. Midwinter turned to
+the page containing those extracts from the recently published
+"Travels in Australia," which had roused Allan's, interest on the
+previous evening, and the reading of which had ended by sending
+his friend to sleep. There--in the passage describing the
+sufferings of the travelers from thirst, and the subsequent
+discovery which saved their lives--there, appearing at the climax
+of the narrative, was the broad pool of water which had figured
+in Allan's dream!
+
+"Don't put away the paper," said the doctor, when Midwinter had
+shown it to him, with the necessary explanation. "Before we are
+at the end of the inquiry, it is quite possible we may want that
+extract again. We have got at the pool. How about the sunset?
+Nothing of that sort is referred to in the newspaper extract.
+Search your memory again, Mr. Armadale; we want your waking
+impression of a sunset, if you please."
+
+Once more, Allan was at a loss for an answer; and, once more,
+Midwinter's ready memory helped him through the difficulty.
+
+"I think I can trace our way back to this impression, as I traced
+our way back to the other," he said, addressing the doctor.
+"After we got here yesterday afternoon, my friend and I took a
+long walk over the hills--"
+
+"That's it!" interposed Allan. "I remember. The sun was setting
+as we came back to the hotel for supper, and it was such a
+splendid red sky, we both stopped to look at it. And then we
+talked about Mr. Brock, and wondered how far he had got on his
+journey home. My memory may be a slow one at starting, doctor;
+but when it's once set going, stop it if you can! I haven't half
+done yet."
+
+"Wait one minute, in mercy to Mr. Midwinter's memory and mine,"
+said the doctor. "We have traced back to your waking impressions
+the vision of the open country, the pool, and the sunset. But the
+Shadow of the Woman has not been accounted for yet. Can you find
+us the original of this mysterious figure in the dream
+landscape?"
+
+Allan relapsed into his former perplexity, and Midwinter waited
+for what was to come, with his eyes fixed in breathless interest
+on the doctor's face. For the first time there was unbroken
+silence in the room. Mr. Hawbury looked interrogatively from
+Allan to Allan's friend. Neither of them answered him. Between
+the shadow and the shadow's substance there was a great gulf of
+mystery, impenetrable alike to all three of them.
+
+"Patience," said the doctor, composedly. "Let us leave the figure
+by the pool for the present and try if we can't pick her up again
+as we go on. Allow me to observe, Mr. Midwinter, that it is not
+very easy to identify a shadow; but we won't despair. This
+impalpable lady of the lake may take some consistency when we
+next meet with her."
+
+Midwinter made no reply. From that moment his interest in the
+inquiry began to flag.
+
+"What is the next scene in the dream?" pursued Mr. Hawbury,
+referring to the manuscript. "Mr. Armadale finds himself in a
+room. He is standing before a long window opening on a lawn and
+flower-garden, and the rain is pattering against the glass. The
+only thing he sees in the room is a little statue; and the only
+company he has is the Shadow of a Man standing opposite to him.
+The Shadow stretches out its arm, and the statue falls in
+fragments on the floor; and the dreamer, in anger and distress
+at the catastrophe (observe, gentlemen, that here the sleeper's
+reasoning faculty wakes up a little, and the dream passes
+rationally, for a moment, from cause to effect), stoops to look
+at the broken pieces. When he looks up again, the scene has
+vanished. That is to say, in the ebb and flow of sleep, it is the
+turn of the flow now, and the brain rests a little. What's the
+matter, Mr. Armadale? Has that restive memory of yours run away
+with you again?"
+
+"Yes," said Allan. "I'm off at full gallop. I've run the broken
+statue to earth; it's nothing more nor less than a china
+shepherdess I knocked off the mantel-piece in the hotel
+coffee-room, when I rang the bell for supper last night. I say,
+how well we get on; don't we? It's like guessing a riddle. Now,
+then, Midwinter! your turn next."
+
+"No!" said the doctor. "My turn, if you please. I claim the long
+window, the garden, and the lawn, as my property. You will find
+the long window, Mr. Armadale, in the next room. If you look out,
+you'll see the garden and lawn in front of it; and, if you'll
+exert that wonderful memory of yours, you will recollect that you
+were good enough to take special and complimentary notice of my
+smart French window and my neat garden, when I drove you and your
+friend to Port St. Mary yesterday."
+
+"Quite right," rejoined Allan; "so I did. But what about the rain
+that fell in the dream? I haven't seen a drop of rain for the
+last week."
+
+Mr. Hawbury hesitated. The Manx newspaper which had been left on
+the table caught his eye. "If we can think of nothing else," he
+said, "let us try if we can't find the idea of the rain where we
+found the idea of the pool." He looked through the extract
+carefully. "I have got it!" he exclaimed. "Here is rain described
+as having fallen on these thirsty Australian travelers, before
+they discovered the pool. Behold the shower, Mr. Armadale, which
+got into your mind when you read the extract to your friend last
+night! And behold the dream, Mr. Midwinter, mixing up separate
+waking impressions just as usual!"
+
+"Can you find the waking impression which accounts for the human
+figure at the window?" asked Midwinter; "or are we to pass over
+the Shadow of the Man as we have passed over the Shadow of the
+Woman already?"
+
+He put the question with scrupulous courtesy of manner, but with
+a tone of sarcasm in his voice which caught the doctor's ear, and
+set up the doctor's controversial bristles on the instant.
+
+"When you are picking up shells on the beach, Mr. Midwinter, you
+usually begin with the shells that lie nearest at hand," he
+rejoined. "We are picking up facts now; and those that are
+easiest to get at are the facts we will take first. Let the
+Shadow of the Man and the Shadow of the Woman pair off together
+for the present; we won't lose sight of them, I promise you. All
+in good time, my dear sir; all in good time!"
+
+He, too, was polite, and he, too, was sarcastic. The short truce
+between the opponents was at an end already. Midwinter returned
+significantly to his former place by the window. The doctor
+instantly turned his back on the window more significantly still.
+Allan, who never quarreled with anybody's opinion, and never
+looked below the surface of anybody's conduct, drummed cheerfully
+on the table with the handle of his knife. "Go on, doctor!" he
+called out; "my wonderful memory is as fresh as ever."
+
+"Is it?" said Mr. Hawbury, referring again to the narrative of
+the dream. "Do you remember what happened when you and I were
+gossiping with the landlady at the bar of the hotel last night?"
+
+"Of course I do! You were kind enough to hand me a glass of
+brandy-and-water, which the landlady had just mixed for your own
+drinking. And I was obliged to refuse it because, as I told you,
+the taste of brandy always turns me sick and faint, mix it how
+you please."
+
+"Exactly so," returned the doctor. "And here is the incident
+reproduced in the dream. You see the man's shadow and the woman's
+shadow together this time. You hear the pouring out of liquid
+(brandy from the hotel bottle, and water from the hotel jug); the
+glass is handed by the woman-shadow (the landlady) to the
+man-shadow (myself); the man-shadow hands it to you (exactly what
+I did); and the faintness (which you had previously described to
+me) follows in due course. I am shocked to identify these
+mysterious appearances, Mr. Midwinter, with such miserably
+unromantic originals as a woman who keeps a hotel, and a man who
+physics a country district. But your friend himself will tell you
+that the glass of brandy-and-water was prepared by the landlady,
+and that it reached him by passing from her hand to mine. We have
+picked up the shadows, exactly as I anticipated; and we have only
+to account now--which may be done in two words--for the manner of
+their appearance in the dream. After having tried to introduce
+the waking impression of the doctor and the landlady separately,
+in connection with the wrong set of circumstances, the dreaming
+mind comes right at the third trial, and introduces the doctor
+and the landlady together, in connection with the right set of
+circumstances. There it is in a nutshell!--Permit me to hand you
+back the manuscript, with my best thanks for your very complete
+and striking confirmation of the rational theory of dreams."
+Saying those words, Mr. Hawbury returned the written paper to
+Midwinter, with the pitiless politeness of a conquering man.
+
+"Wonderful! not a point missed anywhere from beginning to end!
+By Jupiter!" cried Allan, with the ready reverence of intense
+ignorance. "What a thing science is!"
+
+"Not a point missed, as you say," remarked the doctor,
+complacently. "And yet I doubt if we have succeeded in convincing
+your friend."
+
+"You have _not_ convinced me," said Midwinter. "But I don't
+presume on that account to say that you are wrong."
+
+He spoke quietly, almost sadly. The terrible conviction of the
+supernatural origin of the dream, from which he had tried to
+escape, had possessed itself of him again. All his interest in
+the argument was at an end; all his sensitiveness to its
+irritating influences was gone. In the case of any other man, Mr.
+Hawbury would have been mollified by such a concession as his
+adversary had now made to him; but he disliked Midwinter too
+cordially to leave him in the peaceable enjoyment of an opinion
+of his own.
+
+"Do you admit," asked the doctor, more pugnaciously than ever,
+"that I have traced back every event of the dream to a waking
+impression which preceded it in Mr. Armadale's mind?"
+
+"I have no wish to deny that you have done so," said Midwinter,
+resignedly.
+
+"Have I identified the shadows with their living originals?"
+
+"You have identified them to your own satisfaction, and to my
+friend's satisfaction. Not to mine."
+
+"Not to yours? Can _you_ identify them?"
+
+"No. I can only wait till the living originals stand revealed in
+the future."
+
+"Spoken like an oracle, Mr. Midwinter! Have you any idea at
+present of who those living originals may be?"
+
+"I have. I believe that coming events will identify the Shadow of
+the Woman with a person whom my friend has not met with yet; and
+the Shadow of the Man with myself."
+
+Allan attempted to speak. The doctor stopped him. "Let us clearly
+understand this," he said to Midwinter. "Leaving your own case
+out of the question for the moment, may I ask how a shadow, which
+has no distinguishing mark about it, is to be identified with a
+living woman whom your friend doesn't know?"
+
+Midwinter's color rose a little. He began to feel the lash of the
+doctor's logic.
+
+"The landscape picture of the dream has its distinguishing
+marks," he replied; "and in that landscape the living woman will
+appear when the living woman is first seen."
+
+"The same thing will happen, I suppose," pursued the doctor,
+"with the man-shadow which you persist in identifying with
+yourself. You will be associated in the future with a statue
+broken in your friend's presence, with a long window looking out
+on a garden, and with a shower of rain pattering against the
+glass? Do you say that?"
+
+"I say that."
+
+"And so again, I presume, with the next vision? You and the
+mysterious woman will be brought together in some place now
+unknown, and will present to Mr. Armadale some liquid yet
+unnamed, which will turn him faint?--Do you seriously tell me
+you believe this?"
+
+"I seriously tell you I believe it."
+
+"And, according to your view, these fulfillments of the dream
+will mark the progress of certain coming events, in which Mr.
+Armadale's happiness, or Mr. Armadale's safety, will be
+dangerously involved?"
+
+"That is my firm conviction."
+
+The doctor rose, laid aside his moral dissecting-knife,
+considered for a moment, and took it up again.
+
+"One last question," he said. "Have you any reason to give for
+going out of your way to adopt such a mystical view as this, when
+an unanswerably rational explanation of the dream lies straight
+before you?"
+
+"No reason," replied Midwinter, "that I can give, either to you
+or to my friend."
+
+The doctor looked at his watch with the air of a man who is
+suddenly reminded that he has been wasting his time.
+
+"We have no common ground to start from," he said; "and if we
+talk till doomsday, we should not agree. Excuse my leaving you
+rather abruptly. It is later than I thought; and my morning's
+batch of sick people are waiting for me in the surgery. I have
+convinced _your_ mind, Mr. Armadale, at any rate; so the time we
+have given to this discussion has not been altogether lost. Pray
+stop here, and smoke your cigar. I shall be at your service again
+in less than an hour." He nodded cordially to Allan, bowed
+formally to Midwinter, and quitted the room.
+
+As soon as the doctor's back was turned, Allan left his place at
+the table, and appealed to his friend, with that irresistible
+heartiness of manner which had always found its way to
+Midwinter's sympathies, from the first day when they met at the
+Somersetshire inn.
+
+"Now the sparring-match between you and the doctor is over," said
+Allan, "I have got two words to say on my side. Will you do
+something for my sake which you won't do for your own?"
+
+Midwinter's face brightened instantly. "I will do anything you
+ask me," he said.
+
+"Very well. Will you let the subject of the dream drop out of our
+talk altogether from this time forth?"
+
+"Yes, if you wish it."
+
+"Will you go a step further? Will you leave off thinking about
+the dream?"
+
+"It's hard to leave off thinking about it, Allan. But I will
+try."
+
+"That's a good fellow! Now give me that trumpery bit of paper,
+and let's tear it up, and have done with it."
+
+He tried to snatch the manuscript out of his friend's hand; but
+Midwinter was too quick for him, and kept it beyond his reach.
+
+"Come! come!" pleaded Allan. "I've set my heart on lighting my
+cigar with it."
+
+Midwinter hesitated painfully. It was hard to resist Allan; but
+he did resist him. "I'll wait a little," he said, "before you
+light your cigar with it."
+
+"How long? Till to-morrow?"
+
+"Longer."
+
+"Till we leave the Isle of Man?"
+
+"Longer."
+
+"Hang it--give me a plain answer to a plain question! How long
+_will_ you wait?"
+
+Midwinter carefully restored the paper to its place in his
+pocketbook.
+
+"I'll wait," he said, "till we get to Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+
+THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK.
+
+---------
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+LURKING MISCHIEF.
+
+1. _From Ozias Midwinter to Mr. Brock_.
+
+"Thorpe Ambrose, June 15, 1851.
+
+"DEAR MR. BROCK--Only an hour since we reached this house, just
+as the servants were locking up for the night. Allan has gone to
+bed, worn out by our long day's journey, and has left me in the
+room they call the library, to tell you the story of our journey
+to Norfolk. Being better seasoned than he is to fatigues of all
+kinds, my eyes are quite wakeful enough for writing a letter,
+though the clock on the chimney-piece points to midnight, and we
+have been traveling since ten in the morning.
+
+"The last news you had of us was news sent by Allan from the Isle
+of Man. If I am not mistaken, he wrote to tell you of the night
+we passed on board the wrecked ship. Forgive me, dear Mr. Brock,
+if I say nothing on that subject until time has helped me to
+think of it with a quieter mind. The hard fight against myself
+must all be fought over again; but I will win it yet, please God;
+I will, indeed.
+
+"There is no need to trouble you with any account of our
+journeyings about the northern and western districts of the
+island, or of the short cruises we took when the repairs of the
+yacht were at last complete. It will be better if I get on at
+once to the morning of yesterday, the fourteenth. We had come in
+with the night-tide to Douglas Harbor, and, as soon as the
+post-office was open; Allan, by my advice, sent on shore for
+letters. The messenger returned with one letter only, and the
+writer of it proved to be the former mistress of Thorpe
+Ambrose--Mrs. Blanchard.
+
+"You ought to be informed, I think, of the contents of this
+letter, for it has seriously influenced Allan's plans. He loses
+everything, sooner or later, as you know, and he has lost the
+letter already. So I must give you the substance of what Mrs.
+Blanchard wrote to him, as plainly as I can.
+
+"The first page announced the departure of the ladies from Thorpe
+Ambrose. They left on the day before yesterday, the thirteenth,
+having, after much hesitation, finally decided on going abroad,
+to visit some old friends settled in Italy, in the neighborhood
+of Florence. It appears to be quite possible that Mrs. Blanchard
+and her niece may settle there, too, if they can find a suitable
+house and grounds to let. They both like the Italian country and
+the Italian people, and they are well enough off to please
+themselves. The elder lady has her jointure, and the younger is
+in possession of all her father's fortune.
+
+"The next page of the letter was, in Allan's opinion, far from a
+pleasant page to read.
+
+"After referring, in the most grateful terms, to the kindness
+which had left her niece and herself free to leave their old home
+at their own time, Mrs. Blanchard added that Allan's considerate
+conduct had produced such a strongly favorable impression among
+the friends and dependents of the family that they were desirous
+of giving him a public reception on his arrival among them. A
+preliminary meeting of the tenants on the estate and the
+principal persons in the neighboring town had already been held
+to discuss the arrangements, and a letter might be expected
+shortly from the clergyman inquiring when it would suit Mr.
+Armadale's convenience to take possession personally and publicly
+of his estates in Norfolk.
+
+"You will now be able to guess the cause of our sudden departure
+from the Isle of Man. The first and foremost idea in your old
+pupil's mind, as soon as he had read Mrs. Blanchard's account of
+the proceedings at the meeting, was the idea of escaping the
+public reception, and the one certain way he could see of
+avoiding it was to start for Thorpe Ambrose before the
+clergyman's letter could reach him.
+
+"I tried hard to make him think a little before he acted an his
+first impulse in this matter; but he only went on packing his
+portmanteau in his own impenetrably good-humored way. In ten
+minutes his luggage was ready, and in five minutes more he had
+given the crew their directions for taking the yacht back to
+Somersetshire. The steamer to Liverpool was alongside of us in
+the harbor, and I had really no choice but to go on board with
+him or to let him go by himself. I spare you the account of our
+stormy voyage, of our detention at Liverpool, and of the trains
+we missed on our journey across the country. You know that we
+have got here safely, and that is enough. What the servants think
+of the new squire's sudden appearance among them, without a word
+of warning, is of no great consequence. What the committee for
+arranging the public reception may think of it when the news
+flies abroad to-morrow is, I am afraid, a more serious matter.
+
+"Having already mentioned the servants, I may proceed to tell
+you that the latter part of Mrs. Blanchard's letter was entirely
+devoted to instructing Allan on the subject of the domestic
+establishment which she has left behind her. It seems that all
+the servants, indoors and out (with three exceptions), are
+waiting here, on the chance that Allan will continue them in
+their places. Two of these exceptions are readily accounted for:
+Mrs. Blanchard's maid and Miss Blanchard's maid go abroad with
+their mistresses. The third exceptional case is the case of the
+upper housemaid; and here there is a little hitch. In plain
+words, the housemaid has been sent away at a moment's notice,
+for what Mrs. Blanchard rather mysteriously describes as 'levity
+of conduct with a stranger.'
+
+"I am afraid you will laugh at me, but I must confess the truth.
+I have been made so distrustful (after what happened to us in the
+Isle of Man) of even the most trifling misadventures which
+connect themselves in any way with Allan's introduction to his
+new life and prospects, that I have already questioned one of the
+men-servants here about this apparently unimportant matter of the
+housemaid's going away in disgrace.
+
+"All I can learn is that a strange man had been noticed hanging
+suspiciously about the grounds; that the housemaid was so ugly
+a woman as to render it next to a certainty that he had some
+underhand purpose to serve in making himself agreeable to her;
+and that he has not as yet been seen again in the neighborhood
+since the day of her dismissal. So much for the one servant who
+has been turned out at Thorpe Ambrose. I can only hope there is
+no trouble for Allan brewing in that quarter. As for the other
+servants who remain, Mrs. Blanchard describes them, both men and
+women, as perfectly trustworthy, and they will all, no doubt,
+continue to occupy their present places.
+
+"Having now done with Mrs. Blanchard's letter, my next duty is
+to beg you, in Allan's name and with Allan's love, to come here
+and stay with him at the earliest moment when you can leave
+Somersetshire. Although I cannot presume to think that my own
+wishes will have any special influence in determining you to
+accept this invitation, I must nevertheless acknowledge that I
+have a reason of my own for earnestly desiring to see you here.
+Allan has innocently caused me a new anxiety about my future
+relations with him, and I sorely need your advice to show me the
+right way of setting that anxiety at rest.
+
+"The difficulty which now perplexes me relates to the steward's
+place at Thorpe Ambrose. Before to-day I only knew that Allan
+had hit on some plan of his own for dealing with this matter,
+rather strangely involving, among other results, the letting
+of the cottage which was the old steward's place of abode, in
+consequence of the new steward's contemplated residence in the
+great house. A chance word in our conversation on the journey
+here led Allan into speaking out more plainly than he had spoken
+yet, and I heard to my unutterable astonishment that the person
+who was at the bottom of the whole arrangement about the steward
+was no other than myself!
+
+"It is needless to tell you how I felt this new instance of
+Allan's kindness. The first pleasure of hearing from his own lips
+that I had deserved the strongest proof he could give of his
+confidence in me was soon dashed by the pain which mixes itself
+with all pleasure--at least, with all that I have ever known.
+Never has my past life seemed so dreary to look back on as it
+seems now, when I feel how entirely it has unfitted me to take
+the place of all others that I should have liked to occupy in my
+friend's service. I mustered courage to tell him that I had none
+of the business knowledge and business experience which his
+steward ought to possess. He generously met the objection by
+telling me that I could learn; and he has promised to send to
+London for the person who has already been employed for the time
+being in the steward's office, and who will, therefore, be
+perfectly competent to teach me.
+
+"Do you, too, think I can learn? If you do, I will work day and
+night to instruct myself. But if (as I am afraid) the steward's
+duties are of far too serious a kind to be learned off-hand by a
+man so young and so inexperienced as I am, then pray hasten your
+journey to Thorpe Ambrose, and exert your influence over Allan
+personally. Nothing less will induce him to pass me over, and to
+employ a steward who is really fit to take the place. Pray, pray
+act in this matter as you think best for Allan's interests.
+Whatever disappointment I may feel, _he_ shall not see it.
+
+"Believe me, dear Mr. Brock,
+
+"Gratefuly yours,
+
+"OZIAS MIDWINTER.
+
+"P.S.--I open the envelope again to add one word more. If you
+have heard or seen anything since your return to Somersetshire of
+the woman in the black dress and the red shawl, I hope you will
+not forget, when you write, to let me know it.
+
+O. M."
+
+2. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Ladies' Toilet Repository, Diana Street, Pimlico,
+
+Wednesday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--To save the post, I write to you, after
+a long day's worry at my place of business, on the business
+letter-paper, having news since we last met which it seems
+advisable to send you at the earliest opportunity.
+
+"To begin at the beginning. After carefully considering the
+thing, I am quite sure you will do wisely with young Armadale if
+you hold your tongue about Madeira and all that happened there.
+Your position was, no doubt, a very strong one with his mother.
+You had privately helped her in playing a trick on her own
+father; you had been ungratefully dismissed, at a pitiably tender
+age, as soon as you had served her purpose; and, when you came
+upon her suddenly, after a separation of more than twenty years,
+you found her in failing health, with a grown-up son, whom she
+had kept in total ignorance of the true story of her marriage.
+
+"Have you any such advantages as these with the young gentleman
+who has survived her? If he is not a born idiot he will decline
+to believe your shocking aspersions on the memory of his mother;
+and--seeing that you have no proofs at this distance of time to
+meet him with--there is an end of your money-grubbing in the
+golden Armadale diggings. Mind, I don't dispute that the old
+lady's heavy debt of obligation, after what you did for her in
+Madeira, is not paid yet; and that the son is the next person to
+settle with you, now the mother has slipped through your fingers.
+Only squeeze him the right way, my dear, that's what I venture to
+suggest--squeeze him the right way.
+
+"And which is the right way? That question brings me to my news.
+
+"Have you thought again of that other notion of yours of trying
+your hand on this lucky young gentleman, with nothing but your
+own good looks and your own quick wits to help you? The idea hung
+on my mind so strangely after you were gone that it ended in my
+sending a little note to my lawyer, to have the will under which
+young Armadale has got his fortune examined at Doctor's Commons.
+The result turns out to be something infinitely more encouraging
+than either you or I could possibly have hoped for. After the
+lawyer's report to me, there cannot be a moment's doubt of what
+you ought to do. In two words, Lydia, take the bull by the
+horns--and marry him!
+
+"I am quite serious. He is much better worth the venture than you
+suppose. Only persuade him to make you Mrs. Armadale, and you may
+set all after-discoveries at flat defiance. As long as he lives,
+you can make your own terms with him; and, if he dies, the will
+entitles you, in spite of anything he can say or do--with
+children or without them--to an income chargeable on his estate
+of _twelve hundred a year for life_. There is no doubt about
+this; the lawyer himself has looked at the will. Of course, Mr.
+Blanchard had his son and his son's widow in his eye when he made
+the provision. But, as it is not limited to any one heir by name,
+and not revoked anywhere, it now holds as good with young
+Armadale as it would have held under other circumstances with Mr.
+Blanchard's son. What a chance for you, after all the miseries
+and the dangers you have gone through, to be mistress of Thorpe
+Ambrose, if he lives; to have an income for life, if he dies!
+Hook him, my poor dear; hook him at any sacrifice.
+
+"I dare say you will make the same objection when you read this
+which you made when we were talking about it the other day; I
+mean the objection of your age.
+
+"Now, my good creature, just listen to me. The question is--not
+whether you were five-and-thirty last birthday; we will own the
+dreadful truth, and say you were--but whether you do look, or
+don't look, your real age. My opinion on this matter ought to be,
+and is, one of the best opinions in London. I have had twenty
+years experience among our charming sex in making up battered
+old faces and wornout old figures to look like new, and I say
+positively you don't look a day over thirty, if as much. If you
+will follow my advice about dressing, and use one or two of my
+applications privately, I guarantee to put you back three years
+more. I will forfeit all the money I shall have to advance for
+you in this matter, if, when I have ground you young again in my
+wonderful mill, you look more than seven-and-twenty in any man's
+eyes living--except, of course, when you wake anxious in the
+small hours of the morning; and then, my dear, you will be old
+and ugly in the retirement of your own room, and it won't matter.
+
+"'But,' you may say, 'supposing all this, here I am, even with
+your art to help me, looking a good six years older than he is;
+and that is against me at starting.' Is it? Just think again.
+Surely, your own experience must have shown you that the
+commonest of all common weaknesses, in young fellows of this
+Armadale's age, is to fall in love with women older than
+themselves. Who are the men who really appreciate us in the bloom
+of our youth (I'm sure I have cause to speak well of the bloom of
+youth; I made fifty guineas to-day by putting it on the spotted
+shoulders of a woman old enough to be your mother)--who are the
+men, I say, who are ready to worship us when we are mere babies
+of seventeen? The gay young gentlemen in the bloom of their own
+youth? No! The cunning old wretches who are on the wrong side of
+forty.
+
+"And what is the moral of this, as the story-books say?
+
+"The moral is that the chances, with such a head as you have got
+on your shoulders, are all in your favor. If you feel your
+present forlorn position, as I believe you do; if you know what
+a charming woman (in the men's eyes) you can still be when you
+please; and if all your resolution has really come back, after
+that shocking outbreak of desperation on board the steamer
+(natural enough, I own, under the dreadful provocation laid on
+you), you will want no further persuasion from me to try this
+experiment. Only to think of how things turn out! If the other
+young booby had not jumped into the river after you, _this_ young
+booby would never have had the estate. It really looks as if fate
+had determined that you were to be Mrs. Armadale, of Thorpe
+Ambrose; and who can control his fate, as the poet says?
+
+"Send me one line to say Yes or No; and believe me your attached
+old friend,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+3. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
+
+Richmond, Thursday.
+
+'YOU OLD WRETCH--I won't say Yes or No till I have had a long,
+long look at my glass first. If you had any real regard for
+anybody but your wicked old self, you would know that the bare
+idea of marrying again (after what I have gone through) is an
+idea that makes my flesh creep.
+
+"But there can be no harm in your sending me a little more
+information while I am making up my mind. You have got twenty
+pounds of mine still left out of those things you sold for me;
+send ten pounds here for my expenses, in a post-office order, and
+use the other ten for making private inquiries at Thorpe Ambrose.
+I want to know when the two Blanchard women go away, and when
+young Armadale stirs up the dead ashes in the family fire-place.
+Are you quite sure he will turn out as easy to manage as you
+think? If he takes after his hypocrite of a mother, I can tell
+you this: Judas Iscariot has come to life again.
+
+"I am very comfortable in this lodging. There are lovely flowers
+in the garden, and the birds wake me in the morning delightfully.
+I have hired a reasonably good piano. The only man I care two
+straws about--don't be alarmed; he was laid in his grave many a
+long year ago, under the name of BEETHOVEN--keeps me company, in
+my lonely hours. The landlady would keep me company, too, if I
+would only let her. I hate women. The new curate paid a visit to
+the other lodger yesterday, and passed me on the lawn as he came
+out. My eyes have lost nothing yet, at any rate, though I _am_
+five-and-thirty; the poor man actually blushed when I looked at
+him! What sort of color do you think he would have turned, if one
+of the little birds in the garden had whispered in his ear, and
+told him the true story of the charming Miss Gwilt?
+
+"Good-by, Mother Oldershaw. I rather doubt whether I am yours, or
+anybody's, affectionately; but we all tell lies at the bottoms of
+our letters, don't we? If you are my attached old friend, I must,
+of course, be yours affectionately.
+
+"LYDIA GWILT.
+
+"P.S.--Keep your odious powders and paints and washes for the
+spotted shoulders of your customers; not one of them shall touch
+my skin, I promise you. If you really want to be useful, try and
+find out some quieting draught to keep me from grinding my teeth
+in my sleep. I shall break them one of these nights; and then
+what will become of my beauty, I wonder?"
+
+4. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Ladies' Toilet Repository, Tuesday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--It is a thousand pities your letter was not
+addressed to Mr. Armadale; your graceful audacity would have
+charmed him. It doesn't affect me; I am so well used to audacity
+in my way of life, you know. Why waste your sparkling wit, my
+love, on your own impenetrable Oldershaw? It only splutters and
+goes out. Will you try and be serious this next time? I have news
+for you from Thorpe Ambrose, which is beyond a joke, and which
+must not be trifled with.
+
+"An hour after I got your letter I set the inquiries on foot. Not
+knowing what consequences they might lead to, I thought it safest
+to begin in the dark. Instead of employing any of the people whom
+I have at my own disposal (who know you and know me), I went to
+the Private Inquiry Office in Shadyside Place, and put the matter
+in the inspector's hands, in the character of a perfect stranger,
+and without mentioning you at all. This was not the cheapest way
+of going to work, I own; but it was the safest way, which is of
+much greater consequence.
+
+"The inspector and I understood each other in ten minutes; and
+the right person for the purpose--the most harmless looking young
+man you ever saw in your life--was produced immediately. He left
+for Thorpe Ambrose an hour after I saw him. I arranged to call at
+the office on the afternoons of Saturday, Monday, and to-day for
+news. There was no news till to-day; and there I found our
+confidential agent just returned to town, and waiting to favor me
+with a full account of his trip to Norfolk.
+
+"First of all, let me quiet your mind about those two questions
+of yours; I have got answers to both the one and the other. The
+Blanchard women go away to foreign parts on the thirteenth, and
+young Armadale is at this moment cruising somewhere at sea in his
+yacht. There is talk at Thorpe Ambrose of giving him a public
+reception, and of calling a meeting of the local grandees to
+settle it all. The speechifying and fuss on these occasions
+generally wastes plenty of time, and the public reception is not
+thought likely to meet the new squire much before the end of the
+month.
+
+"If our messenger had done no more for us than this, I think he
+would have earned his money. But the harmless young man is a
+regular Jesuit at a private inquiry, with this great advantage
+over all the Popish priests I have ever seen, that he has not got
+his slyness written in his face.
+
+"Having to get his information through the female servants in the
+usual way, he addressed himself, with admirable discretion, to
+the ugliest woman in the house. 'When they are nice-looking, and
+can pick and choose,' as he neatly expressed it to me, 'they
+waste a great deal of valuable time in deciding on a sweetheart.
+When they are ugly, and haven't got the ghost of a chance of
+choosing, they snap at a sweetheart, if he comes their way, like
+a starved dog at a bone.' Acting on these excellent principles,
+our confidential agent succeeded, after certain unavoidable
+delays, in addressing himself to the upper housemaid at Thorpe
+Ambrose, and took full possession of her confidence at the
+first interview. Bearing his instructions carefully in mind,
+he encouraged the woman to chatter, and was favored, of course,
+with all the gossip of the servants' hall. The greater part of it
+(as repeated to me) was of no earthly importance. But I listened
+patiently, and was rewarded by a valuable discovery at last. Here
+it is.
+
+"It seems there is an ornamental cottage in the grounds at Thorpe
+Ambrose. For some reason unknown, young Armadale has chosen to
+let it, and a tenant has come in already. He is a poor half-pay
+major in the army, named Milroy, a meek sort of man, by all
+accounts, with a turn for occupying himself in mechanical
+pursuits, and with a domestic incumbrance in the shape of a
+bedridden wife, who has not been seen by anybody. Well, and what
+of all this? you will ask, with that sparkling impatience which
+becomes you so well. My dear Lydia, don't sparkle! The man's
+family affairs seriously concern us both, for, as ill luck will
+have it, the man has got a daughter!
+
+"You may imagine how I questioned our agent, and how our agent
+ransacked his memory, when I stumbled, in due course, on such
+a discovery as this. If Heaven is responsible for women's
+chattering tongues, Heaven be praised! From Miss Blanchard
+to Miss Blanchard's maid; from Miss Blanchard's maid to Miss
+Blanchard's aunt's maid; from Miss Blanchard's aunt's maid,
+to the ugly housemaid; from the ugly housemaid to the
+harmless-looking young man--so the stream of gossip trickled into
+the right reservoir at last, and thirsty Mother Oldershaw has
+drunk it all up.
+
+"In plain English, my dear, this is how it stands. The major's
+daughter is a minx just turned sixteen; lively and nice-looking
+(hateful little wretch!), dowdy in her dress (thank Heaven!) and
+deficient in her manners (thank Heaven again!). She has been
+brought up at home. The governess who last had charge of her left
+before her father moved to Thorpe Ambrose. Her education stands
+woefully in want of a finishing touch, and the major doesn't
+quite know what to do next. None of his friends can recommend him
+a new governess and he doesn't like the notion of sending the
+girl to school. So matters rest at present, on the major's own
+showing; for so the major expressed himself at a morning call
+which the father and daughter paid to the ladies at the great
+house.
+
+"You have now got my promised news, and you will have little
+difficulty, I think, in agreeing with me that the Armadale
+business must be settled at once, one way or the other. If, with
+your hopeless prospects, and with what I may call your family
+claim on this young fellow, you decide on giving him up, I shall
+have the pleasure of sending you the balance of your account with
+me (seven-and-twenty shillings), and shall then be free to devote
+myself entirely to my own proper business. If, on the contrary,
+you decide to try your luck at Thorpe Ambrose, then (there being
+no kind of doubt that the major's minx will set her cap at the
+young squire) I should be glad to hear how you mean to meet the
+double difficulty of inflaming Mr. Armadale and extinguishing
+Miss Milroy.
+
+"Affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW.
+
+5. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+(First Answer.)_
+
+"Richmond, Wednesday Morning.
+
+"MRS. OLDERSHAW--Send me my seven-and-twenty shillings, and
+devote yourself to your own proper business. Yours, L. G."
+
+6. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+(Second Answer.)_
+
+"Richmond, Wednesday Night.
+
+"DEAR OLD LOVE--Keep the seven-and-twenty shillings, and burn my
+other letter. I have changed my mind.
+
+"I wrote the first time after a horrible night. I write this time
+after a ride on horseback, a tumbler of claret, and the breast of
+a chicken. Is that explanation enough? Please say Yes, for I want
+to go back to my piano.
+
+"No; I can't go back yet; I must answer your question first. But
+are you really so very simple as to suppose that I don't see
+straight through you and your letter? You know that the major's
+difficulty is our opportunity as well as I do; but you want me to
+take the responsibility of making the first proposal, don't you?
+Suppose I take it in your own roundabout way? Suppose I say,
+'Pray don't ask me how I propose inflaming Mr. Armadale and
+extinguishing Miss Milroy; the question is so shockingly abrupt
+I really can't answer it. Ask me, instead, if it is the modest
+ambition of my life to become Miss Milroy's governess?' Yes, if
+you please, Mrs. Oldershaw, and if you will assist me by becoming
+my reference.
+
+"There it is for you! If some serious disaster happens (which is
+quite possible), what a comfort it will be to remember that it
+was all my fault!
+
+"Now I have done this for you, will you do something for me. I
+want to dream away the little time I am likely to have left here
+in my own way. Be a merciful Mother Oldershaw, and spare me the
+worry of looking at the Ins and Outs, and adding up the chances
+For and Against, in this new venture of mine. Think for me, in
+short, until I am obliged to think for myself.
+
+"I had better not write any more, or I shall say something savage
+that you won't like. I am in one of my tempers to-night. I want a
+husband to vex, or a child to beat, or something of that sort. Do
+you ever like to see the summer insects kill themselves in the
+candle? I do, sometimes. Good-night, Mrs. Jezebel The longer you
+can leave me here the better. The air agrees with me, and I am
+looking charmingly.
+
+"L. G."
+
+7. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Thursday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--Some persons in my situation might be a little
+offended at the tone of your last letter. But I am so fondly
+attached to you! And when I love a person, it is so very hard, my
+dear, for that person to offend me! Don't ride quite so far, and
+only drink half a tumblerful of claret next time. I say no more.
+
+"Shall we leave off our fencing-match and come to serious matters
+now? How curiously hard it always seems to be for women to
+understand each other, especially when they have got their pens
+in their hands! But suppose we try.
+
+"Well, then, to begin with: I gather from your letter that you
+have wisely decided to try the Thorpe Ambrose experiment, and to
+secure, if you can, an excellent position at starting by becoming
+a member of Major Milroy's household. If the circumstances turn
+against you, and some other woman gets the governess's place
+(about which I shall have something more to say presently), you
+will then have no choice but to make Mr. Armadale's acquaintance
+in some other character. In any case, you will want my
+assistance; and the first question, therefore, to set at rest
+between us is the question of what I am willing to do, and what
+I can do, to help you.
+
+"A woman, my dear Lydia, with your appearance, your manners, your
+abilities, and your education, can make almost any excursions
+into society that she pleases if she only has money in her pocket
+and a respectable reference to appeal to in cases of emergency.
+As to the money, in the first place. I will engage to find it,
+on condition of your remembering my assistance with adequate
+pecuniary gratitude if you win the Armadale prize. Your promise
+so to remember me, embodying the terms in plain figures, shall be
+drawn out on paper by my own lawyer, so that we can sign and
+settle at once when I see you in London.
+
+"Next, as to the reference.
+
+"Here, again, my services are at your disposal, on another
+condition. It is this: that you present yourself at Thorpe
+Ambrose, under the name to which you have returned ever since
+that dreadful business of your marriage; I mean your own maiden
+name of Gwilt. I have only one motive in insisting on this; I
+wish to run no needless risks. My experience, as confidential
+adviser of my customers, in various romantic cases of private
+embarrassment, has shown me that an assumed name is, nine times
+out of ten, a very unnecessary and a very dangerous form of
+deception. Nothing could justify your assuming a name but the
+fear of young Armadale's detecting you--a fear from which we are
+fortunately relieved by his mother's own conduct in keeping your
+early connection with her a profound secret from her son and from
+everybody.
+
+"The next, and last, perplexity to settle relates, my dear, to
+the chances for and against your finding your way, in the
+capacity of governess, into Major Milroy's house. Once inside the
+door, with your knowledge of music and languages, if you can keep
+your temper, you may be sure of keeping the place. The only
+doubt, as things are now, is whether you can get it.
+
+"In the major's present difficulty about his daughter's
+education, the chances are, I think, in favor of his advertising
+for a governess. Say he does advertise, what address will he give
+for applicants to write to?
+
+"If he gives an address in London, good-by to all chances in your
+favor at once; for this plain reason, that we shall not be able
+to pick out his advertisement from the advertisements of other
+people who want governesses, and who will give them addresses in
+London as well. If, on the other hand, our luck helps us, and he
+refers his correspondents to a shop, post-office, or what not _at
+Thorpe Ambrose_, there we have our advertiser as plainly picked
+out for us as we can wish. In this last case, I have little or no
+doubt--with me for your reference--of your finding your way into
+the major's family circle. We have one great advantage over the
+other women who will answer the advertisement. Thanks to my
+inquiries on the spot, I know Major Milroy to be a poor man; and
+we will fix the salary you ask at a figure that is sure to tempt
+him. As for the style of the letter, if you and I together can't
+write a modest and interesting application for the vacant place,
+I should like to know who can?
+
+"All this, however, is still in the future. For the present my
+advice is, stay where you are, and dream to your heart's content,
+till you hear from me again. I take in _The Times_ regularly, and
+you may trust my wary eye not to miss the right advertisement. We
+can luckily give the major time, without doing any injury to our
+own interests; for there is no fear just yet of the girl's
+getting the start of you. The public reception, as we know, won't
+be ready till near the end of the month; and we may safely trust
+young Armadale's vanity to keep him out of his new house until
+his flatterers are all assembled to welcome him.
+
+"It's odd, isn't it, to think how much depends on this half-pay
+officer's decision? For my part, I shall wake every morning now
+with the same question in my mind: If the major's advertisment
+appears, which will the major say--Thorpe Ambrose, or London?
+
+"Ever, my dear Lydia, affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ALLAN AS A LANDED GENTLEMAN.
+
+Early on the morning after his first night's rest at Thorpe
+Ambrose, Allan rose and surveyed the prospect from his bedroom
+window, lost in the dense mental bewilderment of feeling himself
+to be a stranger in his own house.
+
+The bedroom looked out over the great front door, with its
+portico, its terrace and flight of steps beyond, and, further
+still, the broad sweep of the well-timbered park to close the
+view. The morning mist nestled lightly about the distant trees;
+and the cows were feeding sociably, close to the iron fence which
+railed off the park from the drive in front of the house. "All
+mine!" thought Allan, staring in blank amazement at the prospect
+of his own possessions. "Hang me if I can beat it into my head
+yet. All mine!"
+
+He dressed, left his room, and walked along the corridor which
+led to the staircase and hall, opening the doors in succession as
+he passed them.
+
+The rooms in this part of the house were bedrooms and
+dressing-rooms, light, spacious, perfectly furnished; and all
+empty, except the one bed-chamber next to Allan's, which had been
+appropriated to Midwinter. He was still sleeping when his friend
+looked in on him, having sat late into the night writing his
+letter to Mr. Brock. Allan went on to the end of the first
+corridor, turned at right angles into a second, and, that passed,
+gained the head of the great staircase. "No romance here," he
+said to himself, looking down the handsomely carpeted stone
+stairs into the bright modern hall. "Nothing to startle
+Midwinter's fidgety nerves in this house." There was nothing,
+indeed; Allan's essentially superficial observation had not
+misled him for once. The mansion of Thorpe Ambrose (built after
+the pulling down of the dilapidated old manor-house) was barely
+fifty years old. Nothing picturesque, nothing in the slightest
+degree suggestive of mystery and romance, appeared in any part of
+it. It was a purely conventional country house--the product of
+the classical idea filtered judiciously through the commercial
+English mind. Viewed on the outer side, it presented the
+spectacle of a modern manufactory trying to look like an ancient
+temple. Viewed on the inner side, it was a marvel of luxurious
+comfort in every part of it, from basement to roof. "And quite
+right, too," thought Allan, sauntering contentedly down the
+broad, gently graduated stairs. "Deuce take all mystery and
+romance! Let's be clean and comfortable, that's what I say."
+
+Arrived in the hall, the new master of Thorpe Ambrose hesitated,
+and looked about him, uncertain which way to turn next.
+
+The four reception-rooms on the ground-floor opened into the
+hall, two on either side. Allan tried the nearest door on his
+right hand at a venture, and found himself in the drawing-room.
+Here the first sign of life appeared, under life's most
+attractive form. A young girl was in solitary possession of the
+drawing-room. The duster in her hand appeared to associate her
+with the domestic duties of the house; but at that particular
+moment she was occupied in asserting the rights of nature over
+the obligations of service. In other words, she was attentively
+contemplating her own face in the glass over the mantelpiece.
+
+"There! there! don't let me frighten you," said Allan, as the
+girl started away from the glass, and stared at him in
+unutterable confusion. "I quite agree with you, my dear; your
+face is well worth looking at. Who are you? Oh, the housemaid.
+And what's your name? Susan, eh? Come! I like your name, to begin
+with. Do you know who I am, Susan? I'm your master, though you
+may not think it. Your character? Oh, yes! Mrs. Blanchard gave
+you a capital character. You shall stop here; don't be afraid.
+And you'll be a good girl, Susan, and wear smart little caps and
+aprons and bright ribbons, and you'll look nice and pretty, and
+dust the furniture, won't you?" With this summary of a
+housemaid's duties, Allan sauntered back into the hall, and found
+more signs of life in that quarter. A man-servant appeared on
+this occasion, and bowed, as became a vassal in a linen jacket,
+before his liege lord in a wide-awake hat.
+
+"And who may you be?" asked Allan. "Not the man who let us in
+last night? Ah, I thought not. The second footman, eh? Character?
+Oh, yes; capital character. Stop here, of course. You can valet
+me, can you? Bother valeting me! I like to put on my own clothes,
+and brush them, too, when they _are_ on; and, if I only knew how
+to black my own boots, by George, I should like to do it! What
+room's this? Morning-room, eh? And here's the dining-room, of
+course. Good heavens, what a table! it's as long as my yacht, and
+longer. I say, by-the-by, what's your name? Richard, is it? Well,
+Richard, the vessel I sail in is a vessel of my own building!
+What do you think of that? You look to me just the right sort of
+man to be my steward on board. If you're not sick at sea--oh, you
+_are_ sick at sea? Well, then, we'll say nothing more about it.
+And what room is this? Ah, yes; the library, of course--more in
+Mr. Midwinter's way than mine. Mr. Midwinter is the gentleman who
+came here with me last night; and mind this, Richard, you're all
+to show him as much attention as you show me. Where are we now?
+What's this door at the back? Billiard-room and smoking-room, eh?
+Jolly. Another door! and more stairs! Where do they go to? and
+who's this coming up? Take your time, ma'am; you're not quite so
+young as you were once--take your time."
+
+The object of Allan's humane caution was a corpulent elderly
+woman of the type called "motherly." Fourteen stairs were all
+that separated her from the master of the house; she ascended
+them with fourteen stoppages and fourteen sighs. Nature, various
+in all things, is infinitely various in the female sex. There are
+some women whose personal qualities reveal the Loves and the
+Graces; and there are other women whose personal qualities
+suggest the Perquisites and the Grease Pot. This was one of the
+other women.
+
+"Glad to see you looking so well, ma'am," said Allan, when the
+cook, in the majesty of her office, stood proclaimed before him.
+"Your name is Gripper, is it? I consider you, Mrs. Gripper, the
+most valuable person in the house. For this reason, that nobody
+in the house eats a heartier dinner every day than I do.
+Directions? Oh, no; I've no directions to give. I leave all that
+to you. Lots of strong soup, and joints done with the gravy in
+them--there's my notion of good feeding, in two words. Steady!
+Here's somebody else. Oh, to be sure--the butler! Another
+valuable person. We'll go right through all the wine in the
+cellar, Mr. Butler; and if I can't give you a sound opinion after
+that, we'll persevere boldly, and go right through it again.
+Talking of wine--halloo! here are more of them coming up stairs.
+There! there! don't trouble yourselves. You've all got capital
+characters, and you shall all stop here along with me. What was I
+saying just now? Something about wine; so it was. I'll tell you
+what, Mr. Butler, it isn't every day that a new master comes to
+Thorpe Ambrose; and it's my wish that we should all start
+together on the best possible terms. Let the servants have a
+grand jollification downstairs to celebrate my arrival, and give
+them what they like to drink my health in. It's a poor heart,
+Mrs. Gripper, that never rejoices, isn't it? No; I won't look at
+the cellar now: I want to go out, and get a breath of fresh air
+before breakfast. Where's Richard? I say, have I got a garden
+here? Which side of the house is it! That side, eh? You needn't
+show me round. I'll go alone, Richard, and lose myself, if I can,
+in my own property."
+
+With those words Allan descended the terrace steps in front of
+the house, whistling cheerfully. He had met the serious
+responsibility of settling his domestic establishment to his own
+entire satisfaction. "People talk of the difficulty of managing
+their servants," thought Allan. "What on earth do they mean? I
+don't see any difficulty at all." He opened an ornamental gate
+leading out of the drive at the side of the house, and, following
+the footman's directions, entered the shrubbery that sheltered
+the Thorpe Ambrose gardens. "Nice shady sort of place for a
+cigar," said Allan, as he sauntered along with his hands in his
+pockets "I wish I could beat it into my head that it really
+belongs to _me_."
+
+The shrubbery opened on the broad expanse of a flower garden,
+flooded bright in its summer glory by the light of the morning
+sun.
+
+On one side, an archway, broken through, a wall, led into the
+fruit garden. On the other, a terrace of turf led to ground on a
+lower level, laid out as an Italian garden. Wandering past the
+fountains and statues, Allan reached another shrubbery, winding
+its way apparently to some remote part of the grounds. Thus far,
+not a human creature had been visible or audible anywhere; but,
+as he approached the end of the second shrubbery, it struck him
+that he heard something on the other side of the foliage. He
+stopped and listened. There were two voices speaking
+distinctly--an old voice that sounded very obstinate, and a young
+voice that sounded very angry.
+
+"It's no use, miss," said the old voice. "I mustn't allow it, and
+I won't allow it. What would Mr. Armadale say?"
+
+"If Mr. Armadale is the gentleman I take him for, you old brute!"
+replied the young voice, "he would say, 'Come into my garden,
+Miss Milroy, as often as you like, and take as many nosegays as
+you please.'" Allan's bright blue eyes twinkled mischievously.
+Inspired by a sudden idea, he stole softly to the end of the
+shrubbery, darted round the corner of it, and, vaulting over a
+low ring fence, found himself in a trim little paddock, crossed
+by a gravel walk. At a short distance down the wall stood a young
+lady, with her back toward him, trying to force her way past an
+impenetrable old man, with a rake in his hand, who stood
+obstinately in front of her, shaking his head.
+
+"Come into my garden, Miss Milroy, as often as you like, and take
+as many nosegays as you please," cried Allan, remorselessly
+repeating her own words.
+
+The young lady turned round, with a scream; her muslin dress,
+which she was holding up in front, dropped from her hand, and a
+prodigious lapful of flowers rolled out on the gravel walk.
+
+Before another word could be said, the impenetrable old man
+stepped forward, with the utmost composure, and entered on the
+question of his own personal interests, as if nothing whatever
+had happened, and nobody was present but his new master and
+himself.
+
+"I bid you humbly welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir," said this
+ancient of the gardens. "My name is Abraham Sage. I've been
+employed in the grounds for more than forty years; and I hope
+you'll be pleased to continue me in my place."
+
+So, with vision inexorably limited to the horizon of his own
+prospects, spoke the gardener, and spoke in vain. Allan was down
+on his knees on the gravel walk, collecting the fallen flowers,
+and forming his first impressions of Miss Milroy from the feet
+upward.
+
+She was pretty; she was not pretty; she charmed, she
+disappointed, she charmed again. Tried by recognized line and
+rule, she was too short and too well developed for her age. And
+yet few men's eyes would have wished her figure other than it
+was. Her hands were so prettily plump and dimpled that it was
+hard to see how red they were with the blessed exuberance of
+youth and health. Her feet apologized gracefully for her old and
+ill fitting shoes; and her shoulders made ample amends for the
+misdemeanor in muslin which covered them in the shape of a dress.
+Her dark-gray eyes were lovely in their clear softness of color,
+in their spirit, tenderness, and sweet good humor of expression;
+and her hair (where a shabby old garden hat allowed it to be
+seen) was of just that lighter shade of brown which gave value by
+contrast to the darker beauty of her eyes. But these attractions
+passed, the little attendant blemishes and imperfections of this
+self-contradictory girl began again. Her nose was too short, her
+mouth was too large, her face was too round and too rosy. The
+dreadful justice of photography would have had no mercy on her;
+and the sculptors of classical Greece would have bowed her
+regretfully out of their studios. Admitting all this, and more,
+the girdle round Miss Milroy's waist was the girdle of Venus
+nevertheless; and the passkey that opens the general heart was
+the key she carried, if ever a girl possessed it yet. Before
+Allan had picked up his second handful of flowers, Allan was in
+love with her.
+
+"Don't! pray don't, Mr. Armadale!" she said, receiving the
+flowers under protest, as Allan vigorously showered them back
+into the lap of her dress. "I am so ashamed! I didn't mean to
+invite myself in that bold way into your garden; my tongue ran
+away with me--it did, indeed! What can I say to excuse myself?
+Oh, Mr. Armadale, what must you think of me?"
+
+Allan suddenly saw his way to a compliment, and tossed it up to
+her forthwith, with the third handful of flowers.
+
+"I'll tell you what I think, Miss Milroy," he said, in his blunt,
+boyish way. "I think the luckiest walk I ever took in my life was
+the walk this morning that brought me here."
+
+He looked eager and handsome. He was not addressing a woman worn
+out with admiration, but a girl just beginning a woman's life;
+and it did him no harm, at any rate, to speak in the character
+of master of Thorpe Ambrose. The penitential expression on Miss
+Milroy's face gently melted away; she looked down, demure and
+smiling, at the flowers in her lap.
+
+"I deserve a good scolding," she said. "I don't deserve
+compliments, Mr. Armadale--least of all from _you_."
+
+"Oh, yes, you do!" cried the headlong Allan, getting briskly on
+his legs. "Besides, it isn't a compliment; it's true. You are the
+prettiest--I beg your pardon, Miss Milroy! _my_ tongue ran away
+with me that time."
+
+Among the heavy burdens that are laid on female human nature,
+perhaps the heaviest, at the age of sixteen, is the burden of
+gravity. Miss Milroy struggled, tittered, struggled again, and
+composed herself for the time being.
+
+The gardener, who still stood where he had stood from the first,
+immovably waiting for his next opportunity, saw it now, and
+gently pushed his personal interests into the first gap of
+silence that had opened within his reach since Allan's appearance
+on the scene.
+
+"I humbly bid you welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir," said Abraham
+Sage, beginning obstinately with his little introductory speech
+for the second time. "My name--"
+
+Before he could deliver himself of his name, Miss Milroy looked
+accidentally in the horticulturist's pertinacious face, and
+instantly lost her hold on her gravity beyond recall. Allan,
+never backward in following a boisterous example of any sort,
+joined in her laughter with right goodwill. The wise man of the
+gardens showed no surprise, and took no offense. He waited for
+another gap of silence, and walked in again gently with his
+personal interests the moment the two young people stopped to
+take breath.
+
+"I have been employed in the grounds," proceeded Abraham Sage,
+irrepressibly, "for more than forty years--"
+
+"You shall be employed in the grounds for forty more, if you'll
+only hold your tongue and take yourself off!" cried Allan, as
+soon as he could speak.
+
+"Thank you kindly, sir," said the gardener, with the utmost
+politeness, but with no present signs either of holding his
+tongue or of taking himself off.
+
+"Well?" said Allan.
+
+Abraham Sage carefully cleared his throat, and shifted his rake
+from one hand to the other. He looked down the length of his own
+invaluable implement, with a grave interest and attention,
+seeing, apparently, not the long handle of a rake, but the long
+perspective of a vista, with a supplementary personal interest
+established at the end of it. "When more convenient, sir,"
+resumed this immovable man, "I should wish respectfully to speak
+to you about my son. Perhaps it may be more convenient in the
+course of the day? My humble duty, sir, and my best thanks. My
+son is strictly sober. He is accustomed to the stables, and he
+belongs to the Church of England--without incumbrances." Having
+thus planted his offspring provisionally in his master's
+estimation, Abraham Sage shouldered his invaluable rake, and
+hobbled slowly out of view.
+
+"If that's a specimen of a trustworthy old servant," said Allan,
+"I think I'd rather take my chance of being cheated by a new one.
+_You_ shall not be troubled with him again, Miss Milroy, at any
+rate. All the flower-beds in the garden are at your disposal, and
+all the fruit in the fruit season, if you'll only come here and
+eat it."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Armadale, how very, very kind you are. How can I thank
+you?"
+
+Allan saw his way to another compliment--an elaborate compliment,
+in the shape of a trap, this time.
+
+"You can do me the greatest possible favor," he said. "You can
+assist me in forming an agreeable impression of my own grounds."
+
+"Dear me! how?" asked Miss Milroy, innocently.
+
+Allan judiciously closed the trap on the spot in these words: "By
+taking me with you, Miss Milroy, on your morning walk." He spoke,
+smiled, and offered his arm.
+
+She saw the way, on her side, to a little flirtation. She rested
+her hand on his arm, blushed, hesitated, and suddenly took it
+away again.
+
+"I don't think it's quite right, Mr. Armadale," she said,
+devoting herself with the deepest attention to her collection
+of flowers. "Oughtn't we to have some old lady here? Isn't it
+improper to take your arm until I know you a little better than
+I do now? I am obliged to ask; I have had so little instruction;
+I have seen so little of society, and one of papa's friends once
+said my manners were too bold for my age. What do _you_ think?"
+
+"I think it's a very good thing your papa's friend is not here
+now," answered the outspoken Allan; "I should quarrel with him to
+a dead certainty. As for society, Miss Milroy, nobody knows less
+about it than I do; but if we _had_ an old lady here, I must say
+myself I think she would be uncommonly in the way. Won't you?"
+concluded Allan, imploringly offering his arm for the second
+time. "Do!"
+
+Miss Milroy looked up at him sidelong from her flowers "You are
+as bad as the gardener, Mr. Armadale!" She looked down again in a
+flutter of indecision. "I'm sure it's wrong," she said, and took
+his arm the instant afterward without the slightest hesitation.
+
+They moved away together over the daisied turf of the paddock,
+young and bright and happy, with the sunlight of the summer
+morning shining cloudless over their flowery path.
+
+"And where are we going to, now?" asked Allan. "Into another
+garden?"
+
+She laughed gayly. "How very odd of you, Mr. Armadale, not to
+know, when it all belongs to you! Are you really seeing Thorpe
+Ambrose this morning for the first time? How indescribably
+strange it must feel! No, no; don't say any more complimentary
+things to me just yet. You may turn my head if you do. We haven't
+got the old lady with us; and I really must take care of myself.
+Let me be useful; let me tell you all about your own grounds. We
+are going out at that little gate, across one of the drives in
+the park, and then over the rustic bridge, and then round the
+corner of the plantation--where do you think? To where I live,
+Mr. Armadale; to the lovely little cottage that you have let to
+papa. Oh, if you only knew how lucky we thought ourselves to get
+it!'
+
+She paused, looked up at her companion, and stopped another
+compliment on the incorrigible Allan's lips.
+
+"I'll drop your arm," she said coquettishly, "if you do! We
+_were_ lucky to get the cottage, Mr. Armadale. Papa said he felt
+under an obligation to you for letting it, the day we got in. And
+_I_ said I felt under an obligation, no longer ago than last
+week."
+
+"You, Miss Milroy!" exclaimed Allan.
+
+"Yes. It may surprise you to hear it; but if you hadn't let the
+cottage to papa, I believe I should have suffered the indignity
+and misery of being sent to school."
+
+Allan's memory reverted to the half-crown that he had spun on the
+cabin-table of the yacht, at Castletown. "If she only knew that I
+had tossed up for it!" he thought, guiltily.
+
+"I dare say you don't understand why I should feel such a horror
+of going to school," pursued Miss Milroy, misinterpreting the
+momentary silence on her companion's side. "If I had gone to
+school in early life--I mean at the age when other girls go--I
+shouldn't have minded it now. But I had no such chance at the
+time. It was the time of mamma's illness and of papa's
+unfortunate speculation; and as papa had nobody to comfort him
+but me, of course I stayed at home. You needn't laugh; I was of
+some use, I can tell you. I helped papa over his trouble, by
+sitting on his knee after dinner, and asking him to tell me
+stories of all the remarkable people he had known when he was
+about in the great world, at home and abroad. Without me to amuse
+him in the evening, and his clock to occupy him in the daytime--"
+
+"His clock?" repeated Allan.
+
+"Oh, yes! I ought to have told you. Papa is an extraordinary
+mechanical genius. You will say so, too, when you see his clock.
+It's nothing like so large, of course, but it's on the model of
+the famous clock at Strasbourg. Only think, he began it when I
+was eight years old; and (though I was sixteen last birthday) it
+isn't finished yet! Some of our friends were quite surprised he
+should take to such a thing when his troubles began. But papa
+himself set that right in no time; he reminded them that Louis
+the Sixteenth took to lock-making when _his_ troubles began, and
+then everybody was perfectly satisfied." She stopped, and changed
+color confusedly. "Oh, Mr. Armadale," she said, in genuine
+embarrassment this time, "here is my unlucky tongue running away
+with me again! I am talking to you already as if I had known you
+for years! This is what papa's friend meant when he said my
+manners were too bold. It's quite true; I have a dreadful way of
+getting familiar with people, if--" She checked herself suddenly,
+on the brink of ending the sentence by saying, "if I like them."
+
+"No, no; do go on!" pleaded Allan. "It's a fault of mine to be
+familiar, too. Besides, we _must_ be familiar; we are such near
+neighbors. I'm rather an uncultivated sort of fellow, and I don't
+know quite how to say it; but I want your cottage to be jolly and
+friendly with my house, and my house to be jolly and friendly
+with your cottage. There's my meaning, all in the wrong words. Do
+go on, Miss Milroy; pray go on!"
+
+She smiled and hesitated. "I don't exactly remember where I was,"
+she replied, "I only remember I had something I wanted to tell
+you. This comes, Mr. Armadale, of my taking your arm. I should
+get on so much better, if you would only consent to walk
+separately. You won't? Well, then, will you tell me what it was I
+wanted to say? Where was I before I went wandering off to papa's
+troubles and papa's clock?"
+
+"At school!" replied Allan, with a prodigious effort of memory.
+
+"_Not_ at school, you mean," said Miss Milroy; "and all through
+_you_. Now I can go on again, which is a great comfort. I am
+quite serious, Mr. Armadale, in saying that I should have been
+sent to school, if you had said No when papa proposed for the
+cottage. This is how it happened. When we began moving in, Mrs.
+Blanchard sent us a most kind message from the great house to say
+that her servants were at our disposal, if we wanted any
+assistance. The least papa and I could do, after that, was to
+call and thank her. We saw Mrs. Blanchard and Miss Blanchard.
+Mistress was charming, and miss looked perfectly lovely in her
+mourning. I'm sure you admire her? She's tall and pale and
+graceful--quite your idea of beauty, I should think?"
+
+"Nothing like it," began Allan. "My idea of beauty at the present
+moment--"
+
+Miss Milroy felt it coming, and instantly took her hand off his
+arm.
+
+"I mean I have never seen either Mrs. Blanchard or her niece,"
+added Allan, precipitately correcting himself.
+
+Miss Milroy tempered justice with mercy, and put her hand back
+again.
+
+"How extraordinary that you should never have seen them!" she
+went on. "Why, you are a perfect stranger to everything and
+everybody at Thorpe Ambrose! Well, after Miss Blanchard and I
+had sat and talked a little while, I heard my name on Mrs.
+Blanchard's lips and instantly held my breath. She was asking
+papa if I had finished my education. Out came papa's great
+grievance directly. My old governess, you must know, left us to
+be married just before we came here, and none of our friends
+could produce a new one whose terms were reasonable. 'I'm told,
+Mrs. Blanchard, by people who understand it better than I do,'
+says papa, 'that advertising is a risk. It all falls on me,
+in Mrs. Milroy's state of health, and I suppose I must end in
+sending my little girl to school. Do you happen to know of a
+school within the means of a poor man?' Mrs. Blanchard shook her
+head; I could have kissed her on the spot for doing it. 'All my
+experience, Major Milroy,' says this perfect angel of a woman,
+'is in favor of advertising. My niece's governess was originally
+obtained by an advertisement, and you may imagine her value to us
+when I tell you she lived in our family for more than ten years.'
+I could have gone down on both my knees and worshipped Mrs.
+Blanchard then and there; and I only wonder I didn't! Papa was
+struck at the time--I could see that--and he referred to it again
+on the way home. 'Though I have been long out of the world, my
+dear,' says papa, 'I know a highly-bred woman and a sensible
+woman when I see her. Mrs. Blanchard's experience puts
+advertising in a new light; I must think about it.' He has
+thought about it, and (though he hasn't openly confessed it to
+me) I know that he decided to advertise, no later than last
+night. So, if papa thanks you for letting the cottage, Mr.
+Armadale, I thank you, too. But for you, we should never have
+known darling Mrs. Blanchard; and but for darling Mrs. Blanchard,
+I should have been sent to school."
+
+Before Allan could reply, they turned the corner of the
+plantation, and came in sight of the cottage. Description of it
+is needless; the civilized universe knows it already. It was the
+typical cottage of the drawing-master's early lessons in neat
+shading and the broad pencil touch--with the trim thatch, the
+luxuriant creepers, the modest lattice-windows, the rustic porch,
+and the wicker bird-cage, all complete.
+
+"Isn't it lovely?" said Miss Milroy. "Do come in!"
+
+"May I?" asked Allan. "Won't the major think it too early?"
+
+"Early or late, I am sure papa will be only too glad to see you."
+
+She led the way briskly up the garden path, and opened the parlor
+door. As Allan followed her into the little room, he saw, at the
+further end of it, a gentleman sitting alone at an old-fashioned
+writing-table, with his back turned to his visitor.
+
+"Papa! a surprise for you!" said Miss Milroy, rousing him from
+his occupation. "Mr. Armadale has come to Thorpe Ambrose; and I
+have brought him here to see you."
+
+The major started; rose, bewildered for the moment; recovered
+himself immediately, and advanced to welcome his young landlord,
+with hospitable, outstretched hand.
+
+A man with a larger experience of the world and a finer
+observation of humanity than Allan possessed would have seen the
+story of Major Milroy's life written in Major Milroy's face. The
+home troubles that had struck him were plainly betrayed in his
+stooping figure and his wan, deeply wrinkled cheeks, when he
+first showed himself on rising from his chair. The changeless
+influence of one monotonous pursuit and one monotonous habit of
+thought was next expressed in the dull, dreamy self-absorption of
+his manner and his look while his daughter was speaking to him.
+The moment after, when he had roused himself to welcome his
+guest, was the moment which made the self-revelation complete.
+Then there flickered in the major's weary eyes a faint reflection
+of the spirit of his happier youth. Then there passed over the
+major's dull and dreamy manner a change which told unmistakably
+of social graces and accomplishments, learned at some past time
+in no ignoble social school; a man who had long since taken his
+patient refuge from trouble in his own mechanical pursuit; a man
+only roused at intervals to know himself again for what he once
+had been. So revealed to all eyes that could read him aright,
+Major Milroy now stood before Allan, on the first morning of an
+acquaintance which was destined to be an event in Allan's life.
+
+"I am heartily glad to see you, Mr. Armadale," he said, speaking
+in the changeless quiet, subdued tone peculiar to most men whose
+occupations are of the solitary and monotonous kind. "You have
+done me one favor already by taking me as your tenant, and you
+now do me another by paying this friendly visit. If you have not
+breakfasted already, let me waive all ceremony on my side, and
+ask you to take your place at our little table."
+
+"With the greatest pleasure, Major Milroy, if I am not in the
+way," replied Allan, delighted at his reception. "I was sorry to
+hear from Miss Milroy that Mrs. Milroy is an invalid. Perhaps my
+being here unexpectedly; perhaps the sight of a strange face--"
+
+"I understand your hesitation, Mr. Armadale," said the major;
+"but it is quite unnecessary. Mrs. Milroy's illness keeps her
+entirely confined to her own room. Have we got everything we
+want on the table, my love?" he went on, changing the subject so
+abruptly that a closer observer than Allan might have suspected
+it was distasteful to him. "Will you come and make tea?"
+
+Miss Milroy's attention appeared to be already pre-engaged; she
+made no reply. While her father and Allan had been exchanging
+civilities, she had been putting the writing-table in order,
+and examining the various objects scattered on it with the
+unrestrained curiosity of a spoiled child. The moment after the
+major had spoken to her, she discovered a morsel of paper hidden
+between the leaves of the blotting-book, snatched it up, looked
+at it, and turned round instantly, with an exclamation of
+surprise.
+
+"Do my eyes deceive me, papa?" she asked. "Or were you really and
+truly writing the advertisement when I came in?"
+
+"I had just finished it," replied her father. "But, my dear, Mr.
+Armadale is here--we are waiting for breakfast."
+
+"Mr. Armadale knows all about it," rejoined Miss Milroy. "I told
+him in the garden."
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Allan. "Pray, don't make a stranger of me, major!
+If it's about the governess, I've got something (in an indirect
+sort of way) to do with it too."
+
+Major Milroy smiled. Before he could answer, his daughter, who
+had been reading the advertisement, appealed to him eagerly, for
+the second time.
+
+"Oh, papa," she said, "there's one thing here I don't like at
+all! Why do you put grandmamma's initials at the end? Why do you
+tell them to write to grandmamma's house in London?"
+
+"My dear! your mother can do nothing in this matter, as you know.
+And as for me (even if I went to London), questioning strange
+ladies about their characters and accomplishments is the last
+thing in the world that I am fit to do. Your grandmamma is on the
+spot; and your grandmamma is the proper person to receive the
+letters, and to make all the necessary inquires."
+
+"But I want to see the letters myself," persisted the spoiled
+child. "Some of them are sure to be amusing--"
+
+"I don't apologize for this very unceremonious reception of you,
+Mr. Armadale," said the major, turning to Allan, with a quaint
+and quiet humor. "It may be useful as a warning, if you ever
+chance to marry and have a daughter, not to begin, as I have
+done, by letting her have her own way."
+
+Allan laughed, and Miss Milroy persisted.
+
+"Besides," she went on, "I should like to help in choosing which
+letters we answer, and which we don't. I think I ought to have
+some voice in the selection of my own governess. Why not tell
+them, papa, to send their letters down here--to the post-office
+or the stationer's, or anywhere you like? When you and I have
+read them, we can send up the letters we prefer to grandmamma;
+and she can ask all the questions, and pick out the best
+governess, just as you have arranged already, without leaving ME
+entirely in the dark, which I consider (don't you, Mr. Armadale?)
+to be quite inhuman. Let me alter the address, papa; do, there's
+a darling!"
+
+"We shall get no breakfast, Mr. Armadale, if I don't say Yes,"
+said the major good-humoredly. "Do as you like, my dear," he
+added, turning to his daughter. "As long as it ends in your
+grandmamma's managing the matter for us, the rest is of very
+little consequence."
+
+Miss Milroy took up her father's pen, drew it through the last
+line of the advertisement, and wrote the altered address with her
+own hand as follows:
+
+"_Apply, by letter, to M., Post-office, Thorpe Ambrose,
+Norfolk_."
+
+"There!" she said, bustling to her place at the breakfast-table.
+"The advertisement may go to London now; and, if a governess
+_does_ come of it, oh, papa, who in the name of wonder will she
+be? Tea or coffee, Mr. Armadale? I'm really ashamed of having
+kept you waiting. But it is such a comfort," she added, saucily,
+"to get all one's business off one's mind before breakfast!"
+
+Father, daughter, and guest sat down together sociably at the
+little round table, the best of good neighbors and good friends
+already.
+
+
+Three days later, one of the London newsboys got _his_ business
+off his mind before breakfast. His district was Diana Street,
+Pimlico; and the last of the morning's newspapers which he
+disposed of was the newspaper he left at Mrs. Oldershaw's door.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE CLAIMS OF SOCIETY.
+
+More than an hour after Allan had set forth on his exploring
+expedition through his own grounds, Midwinter rose, and enjoyed,
+in his turn, a full view by daylight of the magnificence of the
+new house.
+
+Refreshed by his long night's rest, he descended the great
+staircase as cheerfully as Allan himself. One after another,
+he, too, looked into the spacious rooms on the ground floor
+in breathless astonishment at the beauty and the luxury which
+surrounded him. "The house where I lived in service when I was a
+boy, was a fine one," he thought, gayly; "but it was nothing to
+this! I wonder if Allan is as surprised and delighted as I am?"
+The beauty of the summer morning drew him out through the open
+hall door, as it had drawn his friend out before him. He ran
+briskly down the steps, humming the burden of one of the old
+vagabond tunes which he had danced to long since in the old
+vagabond time. Even the memories of his wretched childhood took
+their color, on that happy morning. from the bright medium
+through which he looked back at them. "If I was not out of
+practice," he thought to himself, as he leaned on the fence and
+looked over at the park, "I could try some of my old tumbling
+tricks on that delicious grass." He turned, noticed two of the
+servants talking together near the shrubbery, and asked for news
+of the master of the house.
+
+The men pointed with a smile in the direction of the gardens; Mr.
+Armadale had gone that way more than an hour since, and had met
+(as had been reported) with Miss Milroy in the grounds. Midwinter
+followed the path through the shrubbery, but, on reaching the
+flower garden, stopped, considered a little, and retraced his
+steps. "If Allan has met with the young lady," he said to
+himself, "Allan doesn't want me." He laughed as he drew that
+inevitable inference, and turned considerately to explore the
+beauties of Thorpe Ambrose on the other side of the house.
+
+Passing the angle of the front wall of the building, he descended
+some steps, advanced along a paved walk, turned another angle,
+and found himself in a strip of garden ground at the back of the
+house.
+
+Behind him was a row of small rooms situated on the level of the
+servants' offices. In front of him, on the further side of the
+little garden, rose a wall, screened by a laurel hedge, and
+having a door at one end of it, leading past the stables to a
+gate that opened on the high-road. Perceiving that he had only
+discovered thus far the shorter way to the house, used by the
+servants and trades-people, Midwinter turned back again, and
+looked in at the window of one of the rooms on the basement
+story as he passed it. Were these the servants' offices? No; the
+offices were apparently in some other part of the ground-floor;
+the window he had looked in at was the window of a lumber-room.
+The next two rooms in the row were both empty. The fourth window,
+when he approached it, presented a little variety. It served also
+as a door; and it stood open to the garden at that moment.
+
+Attracted by the book-shelves which he noticed on one of the
+walls, Midwinter stepped into the room.
+
+The books, few in number, did not detain him long; a glance at
+their backs was enough without taking them down. The Waverley
+Novels, Tales by Miss Edgeworth, and by Miss Edgeworth's many
+followers, the Poems of Mrs. Hemans, with a few odd volumes of
+the illustrated gift-books of the period, composed the bulk of
+the little library. Midwinter turned to leave the room, when an
+object on one side of the window, which he had not previously
+noticed, caught his attention and stopped him. It was a statuette
+standing on a bracket--a reduced copy of the famous Niobe of the
+Florence Museum. He glanced from the statuette to the window,
+with a sudden doubt which set his heart throbbing fast. It was a
+French window. He looked out with a suspicion which he had not
+felt yet. The view before him was the view of a lawn and garden.
+For a moment his mind struggled blindly to escape the conclusion
+which had seized it, and struggled in vain. Here, close round him
+and close before him--here, forcing him mercilessly back from the
+happy present to the horrible past, was the room that Allan had
+seen in the Second Vision of the Dream.
+
+He waited, thinking and looking round him while he thought.
+There was wonderfully little disturbance in his face and manner;
+he looked steadily from one to the other of the few objects in
+the room, as if the discovery of it had saddened rather than
+surprised him. Matting of some foreign sort covered the floor.
+Two cane chairs and a plain table comprised the whole of the
+furniture. The walls were plainly papered, and bare--broken
+to the eye in one place by a door leading into the interior
+of the house; in another, by a small stove; in a third, by the
+book-shelves which Midwinter had already noticed. He returned
+to the books, and this time he took some of them down from the
+shelves.
+
+The first that he opened contained lines in a woman's
+handwriting, traced in ink that had faded with time. He read the
+inscription--"Jane Armadale, from her beloved father. Thorpe
+Ambrose, October, 1828." In the second, third, and fourth volumes
+that he opened, the same inscription re-appeared. His previous
+knowledge of dates and persons helped him to draw the true
+inference from what he saw. The books must have belonged to
+Allan's mother; and she must have inscribed them with her name,
+in the interval of time between her return to Thorpe Ambrose from
+Madeira and the birth of her son. Midwinter passed on to a volume
+on another shelf--one of a series containing the writings of Mrs.
+Hemans. In this case, the blank leaf at the beginning of the book
+was filled on both sides with a copy of verses, the writing being
+still in Mrs. Armadale's hand. The verses were headed "Farewell
+to Thorpe Ambrose," and were dated "March, 1829"--two months only
+after Allan had been born.
+
+Entirely without merit in itself, the only interest of the little
+poem was in the domestic story that it told.
+
+The very room in which Midwinter then stood was described--with
+the view on the garden, the window made to open on it, the
+bookshelves, the Niobe, and other more perishable ornaments
+which Time had destroyed. Here, at variance with her brothers,
+shrinking from her friends, the widow of the murdered man had, on
+her own acknowledgment, secluded herself, without other comfort
+than the love and forgiveness of her father, until her child was
+born. The father's mercy and the father's recent death filled
+many verses, happily too vague in their commonplace expression of
+penitence and despair to give any hint of the marriage story in
+Madeira to any reader who looked at them ignorant of the truth. A
+passing reference to the writer's estrangement from her surviving
+relatives, and to her approaching departure from Thorpe Ambrose,
+followed. Last came the assertion of the mother's resolution to
+separate herself from all her old associations; to leave behind
+her every possession, even to the most trifling thing she had,
+that could remind her of the miserable past; and to date her new
+life in the future from the birthday of the child who had been
+spared to console her--who was now the one earthly object that
+could still speak to her of love and hope. So the old story of
+passionate feeling that finds comfort in phrases rather than not
+find comfort at all was told once again. So the poem in the faded
+ink faded away to its end.
+
+Midwinter put the book back with a heavy sigh, and opened no
+other volume on the shelves. "Here in the country house, or
+there on board the wreck," he said, bitterly, "the traces of my
+father's crime follow me, go where I may." He advanced toward
+the window, stopped, and looked back into the lonely, neglected
+little room. "Is _this_ chance?" he asked himself. "The place
+where his mother suffered is the place he sees in the Dream; and
+the first morning in the new house is the morning that reveals
+it, not to _him_, but to me. Oh, Allan! Allan! how will it end?"
+
+
+The thought had barely passed through his mind before he heard
+Allan's voice, from the paved walk at the side of the house,
+calling to him by his name. He hastily stepped out into the
+garden. At the same moment Allan came running round the corner,
+full of voluble apologies for having forgotten, in the society
+of his new neighbors, what was due to the laws of hospitality
+and the claims of his friend.
+
+"I really haven't missed you," said Midwinter; "and I am very,
+very glad to hear that the new neighbors have produced such a
+pleasant impression on you already."
+
+He tried, as he spoke, to lead the way back by the outside of the
+house; but Allan's flighty attention had been caught by the open
+window and the lonely little room. He stepped in immediately.
+Midwinter followed, and watched him in breathless anxiety as
+he looked round. Not the slightest recollection of the Dream
+troubled Allan's easy mind. Not the slightest reference to it
+fell from the silent lips of his friend.
+
+"Exactly the sort of place I should have expected you to hit on!"
+exclaimed Allan, gayly. "Small and snug and unpretending. I know
+you, Master Midwinter! You'll be slipping off here when the
+county families come visiting, and I rather think on those
+dreadful occasions you won't find me far behind you. What's the
+matter? You look ill and out of spirits. Hungry? Of course you
+are! unpardonable of me to have kept you waiting. This door leads
+somewhere, I suppose; let's try a short cut into the house. Don't
+be afraid of my not keeping you company at breakfast. I didn't
+eat much at the cottage; I feasted my eyes on Miss Milroy, as
+the poets say. Oh, the darling! the darling! she turns you
+topsy-turvy the moment you look at her. As for her father, wait
+till you see his wonderful clock! It's twice the size of the
+famous clock at Strasbourg, and the most tremendous striker ever
+heard yet in the memory of man!"
+
+Singing the praises of his new friends in this strain at the top
+of his voice, Allan hurried Midwinter along the stone passages on
+the basement floor, which led, as he had rightly guessed, to a
+staircase communicating with the hall. They passed the servants'
+offices on the way. At the sight of the cook and the roaring
+fire, disclosed through the open kitchen door, Allan's mind went
+off at a tangent, and Allan's dignity scattered itself to the
+four winds of heaven, as usual.
+
+"Aha, Mrs. Gripper, there you are with your pots and pans, and
+your burning fiery furnace! One had need be Shadrach, Meshach,
+and the other fellow to stand over that. Breakfast as soon as
+ever you like. Eggs, sausages, bacon, kidneys, marmalade,
+water-cresses, coffee, and so forth. My friend and I belong to
+the select few whom it's a perfect privilege to cook for.
+Voluptuaries, Mrs. Gripper, voluptuaries, both of us. You'll
+see," continued Allan, as they went on toward the stairs, "I
+shall make that worthy creature young again; I'm better than a
+doctor for Mrs. Gripper. When she laughs, she shakes her fat
+sides, and when she shakes her fat sides, she exerts her muscular
+system; and when she exerts her muscular system-- Ha! here's
+Susan again. Don't squeeze yourself flat against the banisters,
+my dear; if you don't mind hustling _me_ on the stairs, I rather
+like hustling _you_. She looks like a full-blown rose when she
+blushes, doesn't she? Stop, Susan! I've orders to give. Be very
+particular with Mr. Midwinter's room: shake up his bed like mad,
+and dust his furniture till those nice round arms of yours ache
+again. Nonsense, my dear fellow! I'm not too familiar with them;
+I'm only keeping them up to their work. Now, then, Richard! where
+do we breakfast? Oh, here. Between ourselves, Midwinter, these
+splendid rooms of mine are a size too large for me; I don't feel
+as if I should ever be on intimate terms with my own furniture.
+My views in life are of the snug and slovenly sort--a kitchen
+chair, you know, and a low ceiling. Man wants but little here
+below, and wants that little long. That's not exactly the right
+quotation; but it expresses my meaning, and we'll let alone
+correcting it till the next opportunity."
+
+"I beg your pardon," interposed Midwinter, "here is something
+waiting for you which you have not noticed yet."
+
+As he spoke, he pointed a little impatiently to a letter lying on
+the breakfast-table. He could conceal the ominous discovery which
+he had made that morning, from Allan's knowledge; but he could
+not conquer the latent distrust of circumstances which was now
+raised again in his superstitious nature--the instinctive
+suspicion of everything that happened, no matter how common or
+how trifling the event, on the first memorable day when the new
+life began in the new house.
+
+Allan ran his eye over the letter, and tossed it across the table
+to his friend. "I can't make head or tail of it," he said, "can
+you?"
+
+Midwinter read the letter, slowly, aloud. "Sir--I trust you will
+pardon the liberty I take in sending these few lines to wait your
+arrival at Thorpe Ambrose. In the event of circumstances not
+disposing you to place your law business in the hands of Mr.
+Darch--" He suddenly stopped at that point, and considered a
+little.
+
+"Darch is our friend the lawyer," said Allan, supposing Midwinter
+had forgotten the name. "Don't you remember our spinning the
+half-crown on the cabin table, when I got the two offers for the
+cottage? Heads, the major; tails, the lawyer. This is the
+lawyer."
+
+Without making any reply, Midwinter resumed reading the letter.
+"In the event of circumstances not disposing you to place your
+law business in the hands of Mr. Darch, I beg to say that I shall
+be happy to take charge of your interests, if you feel willing to
+honor me with your confidence. Inclosing a reference (should you
+desire it) to my agents in London, and again apologizing for this
+intrusion, I beg to remain, sir, respectfully yours, A. PEDGIFT,
+Sen."
+
+"Circumstances?" repeated Midwinter, as he laid the letter down.
+"What circumstances can possibly indispose you to give your law
+business to Mr. Darch?"
+
+"Nothing can indispose me," said Allan. "Besides being the family
+lawyer here, Darch was the first to write me word at Paris of my
+coming in for my fortune; and, if I have got any business to
+give, of course he ought to have it."
+
+Midwinter still looked distrustfully at the open letter on the
+table. "I am sadly afraid, Allan, there is something wrong
+already," he said. "This man would never have ventured on the
+application he has made to you, unless he had some good reason
+for believing he would succeed. If you wish to put yourself right
+at starting, you will send to Mr. Darch this morning to tell him
+you are here, and you will take no notice for the present of Mr.
+Pedgift's letter."
+
+Before more could be said on either side, the footman made his
+appearance with the breakfast tray. He was followed, after an
+interval, by the butler, a man of the essentially confidential
+kind, with a modulated voice, a courtly manner, and a bulbous
+nose. Anybody but Allan would have seen in his face that he had
+come into the room having a special communication to make to his
+master. Allan, who saw nothing under the surface, and whose head
+was running on the lawyer's letter, stopped him bluntly with the
+point-blank question: "Who's Mr. Pedgift?"
+
+The butler's sources of local knowledge opened confidentially on
+the instant. Mr. Pedgift was the second of the two lawyers in the
+town. Not so long established, not so wealthy, not so universally
+looked up to as old Mr. Darch. Not doing the business of the
+highest people in the county, and not mixing freely with the best
+society, like old Mr. Darch. A very sufficient man, in his way,
+nevertheless. Known as a perfectly competent and respectable
+practitioner all round the neighborhood. In short, professionally
+next best to Mr. Darch; and personally superior to him (if the
+expression might be permitted) in this respect--that Darch was a
+Crusty One, and Pedgift wasn't.
+
+Having imparted this information, the butler, taking a wise
+advantage of his position, glided, without a moment's stoppage,
+from Mr. Pedgift's character to the business that had brought him
+into the breakfast-room. The Midsummer Audit was near at hand;
+and the tenants were accustomed to have a week's notice of the
+rent-day dinner. With this necessity pressing, and with no orders
+given as yet, and no steward in office at Thorpe Ambrose, it
+appeared desirable that some confidential person should bring the
+matter forward. The butler was that confidential person; and he
+now ventured accordingly to trouble his master on the subject.
+
+At this point Allan opened his lips to interrupt, and was himself
+interrupted before he could utter a word.
+
+"Wait!" interposed Midwinter, seeing in Allan's face that he was
+in danger of being publicly announced in the capacity of steward.
+"Wait!" he repeated, eagerly, "till I can speak to you first."
+
+The butler's courtly manner remained alike unruffled by
+Midwinter's sudden interference and by his own dismissal from
+the scene. Nothing but the mounting color in his bulbous nose
+betrayed the sense of injury that animated him as he withdrew.
+Mr. Armadale's chance of regaling his friend and himself that day
+with the best wine in the cellar trembled in the balance, as the
+butler took his way back to the basement story.
+
+"This is beyond a joke, Allan," said Midwinter, when they were
+alone. "Somebody must meet your tenants on the rent-day who is
+really fit to take the steward's place. With the best will in the
+world to learn, it is impossible for _me_ to master the business
+at a week's notice. Don't, pray don't let your anxiety for my
+welfare put you in a false position with other people! I should
+never forgive myself if I was the unlucky cause--"
+
+"Gently gently!' cried Allan, amazed at his friend's
+extraordinary earnestness. "If I write to London by to-night's
+post for the man who came down here before, will that satisfy
+you?"
+
+Midwinter shook his head. "Our time is short," he said; "and the
+man may not be at liberty. Why not try in the neighborhood first?
+You were going to write to Mr. Darch. Send at once, and see if he
+can't help us between this and post-time."
+
+Allan withdrew to a side-table on which writing materials were
+placed. "You shall breakfast in peace, you old fidget," he
+replied, and addressed himself forthwith to Mr. Darch, with his
+usual Spartan brevity of epistolary expression. "Dear Sir--Here
+I am, bag and baggage. Will you kindly oblige me by being my
+lawyer? I ask this, because I want to consult you at once. Please
+look in in the course of the day, and stop to dinner if you
+possibly can. Yours truly. ALLAN ARMADALE." Having read this
+composition aloud with unconcealed admiration of his own rapidity
+of literary execution, Allan addressed the letter to Mr. Darch,
+and rang the bell. "Here, Richard, take this at once, and wait
+for an answer. And, I say, if there's any news stirring in the
+town, pick it up and bring it back with you. See how I manage
+my servants!" continued Allan, joining his friend at the
+breakfast-table. "See how I adapt myself to my new duties! I
+haven't been down here one clear day yet, and I'm taking an
+interest in the neighborhood already."
+
+Breakfast over, the two friends went out to idle away the morning
+under the shade of a tree in the park. Noon came, and Richard
+never appeared. One o'clock struck, and still there were no signs
+of an answer from Mr. Darch. Midwinter's patience was not proof
+against the delay. He left Allan dozing on the grass, and went to
+the house to make inquiries. The town was described as little
+more than two miles distant; but the day of the week happened to
+be market day, and Richard was being detained no doubt by some of
+the many acquaintances whom he would be sure to meet with on that
+occasion.
+
+Half an hour later the truant messenger returned, and was sent
+out to report himself to his master under the tree in the park.
+
+"Any answer from Mr. Darch?" asked Midwinter, seeing that Allan
+was too lazy to put the question for himself.
+
+"Mr. Darch was engaged, sir. I was desired to say that he would
+send an answer."
+
+"Any news in the town?" inquired Allan, drowsily, without
+troubling himself to open his eyes.
+
+"No, sir; nothing in particular."
+
+Observing the man suspiciously as he made that reply, Midwinter
+detected in his face that he was not speaking the truth. He was
+plainly embarrassed, and plainly relieved when his master's
+silence allowed him to withdraw. After a little consideration,
+Midwinter followed, and overtook the retreating servant on the
+drive before the house.
+
+"Richard," he said, quietly, "if I was to guess that there _is_
+some news in the town, and that you don't like telling it to your
+master, should I be guessing the truth?"
+
+The man started and changed color. "I don't know how you have
+found it out," he said; "but I can't deny you have guessed
+right."
+
+"If you let me hear what the news is, I will take the
+responsibility on myself of telling Mr. Armadale."
+
+After some little hesitation, and some distrustful consideration,
+on his side, of Midwinter's face, Richard at last prevailed on
+himself to repeat what he had heard that day in the town.
+
+The news of Allan's sudden appearance at Thorpe Ambrose had
+preceded the servant's arrival at his destination by some hours.
+Wherever he went, he found his master the subject of public
+discussion. The opinion of Allan's conduct among the leading
+townspeople, the resident gentry of the neighborhood, and the
+principal tenants on the estate was unanimously unfavorable. Only
+the day before, the committee for managing the pubic reception of
+the new squire had sketched the progress of the procession; had
+settled the serious question of the triumphal arches; and had
+appointed a competent person to solicit subscriptions for the
+flags, the flowers, the feasting, the fireworks, and the band. In
+less than a week more the money could have been collected, and
+the rector would have written to Mr. Armadale to fix the day. And
+now, by Allan's own act, the public welcome waiting to honor him
+had been cast back contemptuously in the public teeth! Everybody
+took for granted (what was unfortunately true) that he had
+received private information of the contemplated proceedings.
+Everybody declared that he had purposely stolen into his own
+house like a thief in the night (so the phrase ran) to escape
+accepting the offered civilities of his neighbors. In brief, the
+sensitive self-importance of the little town was wounded to the
+quick, and of Allan's once enviable position in the estimation
+of the neighborhood not a vestige remained.
+
+For a moment, Midwinter faced the messenger of evil tidings in
+silent distress. That moment past, the sense of Allan's critical
+position roused him, now the evil was known, to seek the remedy.
+
+"Has the little you have seen of your master, Richard, inclined
+you to like him?" he asked.
+
+This time the man answered without hesitation, "A pleasanter and
+kinder gentleman than Mr. Armadale no one could wish to serve."
+
+"If you think that," pursued Midwinter, "you won't object to give
+me some information which will help your master to set himself
+right with his neighbors. Come into the house."
+
+He led the way into the library, and, after asking the necessary
+questions, took down in writing a list of the names and addresses
+of the most influential persons living in the town and its
+neighborhood. This done, he rang the bell for the head footman,
+having previously sent Richard with a message to the stables
+directing an open carriage to be ready in an hour's time.
+
+"When the late Mr. Blanchard went out to make calls in the
+neighborhood, it was your place to go with him, was it not?"
+he asked, when the upper servant appeared. "Very well. Be ready
+in an hour's time, if you please, to go out with Mr. Armadale."
+Having given that order, he left the house again on his way back
+to Allan, with the visiting list in his hand. He smiled a little
+sadly as he descended the steps. "Who would have imagined,"
+he thought, "that my foot-boy's experience of the ways of
+gentlefolks would be worth looking back at one day for Allan's
+sake?"
+
+The object of the popular odium lay innocently slumbering on
+the grass, with his garden hat over his nose, his waistcoat
+unbuttoned, and his trousers wrinkled half way up his
+outstretched legs. Midwinter roused him without hesitation,
+and remorselessly repeated the servant's news.
+
+Allan accepted the disclosure thus forced on him without the
+slightest disturbance of temper. "Oh, hang 'em!" was all he said.
+"Let's have another cigar." Midwinter took the cigar out of his
+hand, and, insisting on his treating the matter seriously, told
+him in plain words that he must set himself right with his
+offended neighbors by calling on them personally to make his
+apologies. Allan sat up on the grass in astonishment; his eyes
+opened wide in incredulous dismay. Did Midwinter positively
+meditate forcing him into a "chimney-pot hat," a nicely brushed
+frock-coat, and a clean pair of gloves? Was it actually in
+contemplation to shut him up in a carriage, with his footman on
+the box and his card-case in his hand, and send him round from
+house to house, to tell a pack of fools that he begged their
+pardon for not letting them make a public show of him? If
+anything so outrageously absurd as this was really to be done,
+it could not be done that day, at any rate. He had promised to go
+back to the charming Milroy at the cottage and to take Midwinter
+with him. What earthly need had he of the good opinion of the
+resident gentry? The only friends he wanted were the friends he
+had got already. Let the whole neighborhood turn its back on him
+if it liked; back or face, the Squire of Thorpe Ambrose didn't
+care two straws about it.
+
+After allowing him to run on in this way until his whole stock
+of objections was exhausted, Midwinter wisely tried his personal
+influence next. He took Allan affectionately by the hand. "I am
+going to ask a great favor," he said. "If you won't call on these
+people for your own sake, will you call on them to please _me_?"
+
+Allan delivered himself of a groan of despair, stared in mute
+surprise at the anxious face of his friend, and good-humoredly
+gave way. As Midwinter took his arm, and led him back to the
+house, he looked round with rueful eyes at the cattle hard by,
+placidly whisking their tails in the pleasant shade. "Don't
+mention it in the neighborhood," he said; "I should like to
+change places with one of my own cows."
+
+Midwinter left him to dress, engaging to return when the carriage
+was at the door. Allan's toilet did not promise to be a speedy
+one. He began it by reading his own visiting cards; and he
+advanced it a second stage by looking into his wardrobe, and
+devoting the resident gentry to the infernal regions. Before he
+could discover any third means of delaying his own proceedings,
+the necessary pretext was unexpectedly supplied by Richard's
+appearance with a note in his hand. The messenger had just called
+with Mr. Darch's answer. Allan briskly shut up the wardrobe, and
+gave his whole attention to the lawyer's letter. The lawyer's
+letter rewarded him by the following lines:
+
+
+"SIR--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your favor of to-day's
+date, honoring me with two proposals; namely, ONE inviting me to
+act as your legal adviser, and ONE inviting me to pay you a visit
+at your house. In reference to the first proposal, I beg
+permission to decline it with thanks. With regard to the second
+proposal, I have to inform you that circumstances have come to
+my knowledge relating to the letting of the cottage at Thorpe
+Ambrose which render it impossible for me (in justice to myself)
+to accept your invitation. I have ascertained, sir, that my offer
+reached you at the same time as Major Milroy's; and that, with
+both proposals thus before you, you gave the preference to a
+total stranger, who addressed you through a house agent, over a
+man who had faithfully served your relatives for two generations,
+and who had been the first person to inform you of the most
+important event in your life. After this specimen of your
+estimate of what is due to the claims of common courtesy and
+common justice, I cannot flatter myself that I possess any of the
+qualities which would fit me to take my place on the list of your
+friends.
+
+"I remain, sir, your obedient servant,
+
+"JAMES DARCH."
+
+
+"Stop the messenger!" cried Allan, leaping to his feet, his ruddy
+face aflame with indignation. "Give me pen, ink, and paper! By
+the Lord Harry, they're a nice set of people in these parts; the
+whole neighborhood is in a conspiracy to bully me!" He snatched
+up the pen in a fine frenzy of epistolary inspiration. "Sir--I
+despise you and your letter.--" At that point the pen made a
+blot, and the writer was seized with a momentary hesitation. "Too
+strong," he thought; "I'll give it to the lawyer in his own cool
+and cutting style." He began again on a clean sheet of paper.
+"Sir--You remind me of an Irish bull. I mean that story in 'Joe
+Miller' where Pat remarked, in the hearing of a wag hard by, that
+'the reciprocity was all on one side.' _Your_ reciprocity is all
+on one side. You take the privilege of refusing to be my lawyer,
+and then you complain of my taking the privilege of refusing to
+be your landlord." He paused fondly over those last words.
+"Neat!" he thought. "Argument and hard hitting both in one. I
+wonder where my knack of writing comes from?" He went on, and
+finished the letter in two more sentences. "As for your casting
+my invitation back in my teeth, I beg to inform you my teeth are
+none the worse for it. I am equally glad to have nothing to say
+to you, either in the capacity of a friend or a tenant.--ALLAN
+ARMADALE." He nodded exultantly at his own composition, as he
+addressed it and sent it down to the messenger. "Darch's hide
+must be a thick one," he said, "if he doesn't feel _that_!"
+
+The sound of the wheels outside suddenly recalled him to the
+business of the day. There was the carriage waiting to take him
+on his round of visits; and there was Midwinter at his post,
+pacing to and fro on the drive.
+
+"Read that," cried Allan, throwing out the lawyer's letter; "I've
+written him back a smasher."
+
+He bustled away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a
+wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay
+the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth
+had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting
+himself in the neighborhood. "Whatever else they may say of me,
+they shan't say I was afraid to face them." Heated red-hot with
+that idea, he seized his hat and gloves, and hurrying out of the
+room, met Midwinter in the corridor with the lawyer's letter in
+his hand.
+
+"Keep up your spirits!" cried Allan, seeing the anxiety in his
+friend's face, and misinterpreting the motive of it immediately.
+"If Darch can't be counted on to send us a helping hand into the
+steward's office, Pedgift can."
+
+"My dear Allan, I was not thinking of that; I was thinking of Mr.
+Darch's letter. I don't defend this sour-tempered man; but I am
+afraid we must admit he has some cause for complaint. Pray don't
+give him another chance of putting you in the wrong. Where is
+your answer to his letter?"
+
+"Gone!" replied Allan. "I always strike while the iron's hot--a
+word and a blow, and the blow first, that's my way. Don't,
+there's a good fellow, don't fidget about the steward's books
+and the rent-day. Here! here's a bunch of keys they gave me last
+night: one of them opens the room where the steward's books are;
+go in and read them till I come back. I give you my sacred word
+of honor I'll settle it all with Pedgift before you see me
+again."
+
+"One moment," interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on
+his way out to the carriage. "I say nothing against Mr. Pedgift's
+fitness to possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify
+me in distrusting him. But he has not introduced himself to your
+notice in a very delicate way; and he has not acknowledged (what
+is quite clear to my mind) that he knew of Mr. Darch's unfriendly
+feeling toward you when he wrote. Wait a little before you go to
+this stranger; wait till we can talk it over together to-night."
+
+"Wait!" replied Allan. "Haven't I told you that I always strike
+while the iron's hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy, I'll
+look Pedgift through and through, and act accordingly. Don't keep
+me any longer, for Heaven's sake. I'm in a fine humor for
+tackling the resident gentry; and if I don't go at once, I'm
+afraid it may wear off."
+
+With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan
+boisterously broke away. Before it was possible to stop him
+again, he had jumped into the carriage and had left the house.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MARCH OF EVENTS.
+
+Midwinter's face darkened when the last trace of the carriage
+had disappeared from view. "I have done my best," he said, as he
+turned back gloomily into the house "If Mr. Brock himself were
+here, Mr. Brock could do no more!"
+
+He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his
+hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the
+steward's books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting
+nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various
+movables of the steward's office had been provisionally placed
+after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and
+tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the
+business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result exposed
+his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers
+bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the
+correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could
+understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted
+bitterly as he left the room again to his two years' solitary
+self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller's shop. "If I
+could only have worked at a business!" he thought. "If I could
+only have known that the company of poets and philosophers was
+company too high for a vagabond like me!"
+
+He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell
+heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it
+exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. "Curse
+the place!" he said, snatching up his hat and stick. "I like the
+bleakest hillside I ever slept on better than I like this house!"
+
+He impatiently descended the door-steps, and stopped on the
+drive, considering, by which direction he should leave the park
+for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the
+carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting
+him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own
+nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the
+dream without entering it again. But one other way remained: the
+way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning.
+There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major's daughter
+now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the
+gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.
+
+Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was
+full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable
+self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous
+and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the
+poor. "The heather-bell costs nothing!" he thought, looking
+contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that
+surrounded him; "and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as
+the best of you!" He followed the artfully contrived ovals and
+squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the
+symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design.
+"How many pounds a foot did _you_ cost?" he said, looking back
+with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. "Wind away
+over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain side, if
+you can!"
+
+He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him;
+crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached
+the major's cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion
+at the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate,
+to look at the trim little residence which would never have been
+empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan's ill-advised
+resolution to force the steward's situation on his friend.
+
+The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and
+still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the
+windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the
+sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park
+as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden inclosure.
+The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining--a
+voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with
+nothing but the hard power of it left--was the discordantly
+predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled
+the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the
+voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow
+Midwinter to distinguish the words that were spoken, he felt the
+impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at
+once stepped forward to continue his walk.
+
+At the same moment, the face of a young girl (easily recognizable
+as the face of Miss Milroy, from Allan's description of her)
+appeared at the open window of the room. In spite of himself,
+Midwinter paused to look at her. The expression of the bright
+young face, which had smiled so prettily on Allan, was weary and
+disheartened. After looking out absently over the park, she
+suddenly turned her head back into the room, her attention having
+been apparently struck by something that had just been said in
+it. "Oh, mamma, mamma," she exclaimed, indignantly, "how _can_
+you say such things!" The words were spoken close to the window;
+they reached Midwinter's ears, and hurried him away before he
+heard more. But the self-disclosure of Major Milroy's domestic
+position had not reached its end yet. As Midwinter turned the
+corner of the garden fence, a tradesman's boy was handing a
+parcel in at the wicket gate to the woman servant. "Well," said
+the boy, with the irrepressible impudence of his class, "how is
+the missus?" The woman lifted her hand to box his ears. "How is
+the missus?" she repeated, with an angry toss of her head, as the
+boy ran off. "If it would only please God to take the missus, it
+would be a blessing to everybody in the house."
+
+No such ill-omened shadow as this had passed over the bright
+domestic picture of the inhabitants of the cottage, which Allan's
+enthusiasm had painted for the contemplation of his friend. It
+was plain that the secret of the tenants had been kept from the
+landlord so far. Five minutes more of walking brought Midwinter
+to the park gates. "Am I fated to see nothing and hear nothing
+to-day, which can give me heart and hope for the future?" he
+thought, as he angrily swung back the lodge gate. "Even the
+people Allan has let the cottage to are people whose lives are
+imbittered by a household misery which it is _my_ misfortune to
+have found out!"
+
+He took the first road that lay before him, and walked on,
+noticing little, immersed in his own thoughts.
+
+More than an hour passed before the necessity of turning back
+entered his mind. As soon as the idea occurred to him, he
+consulted his watch, and determined to retrace his steps, so as
+to be at the house in good time to meet Allan on his return. Ten
+minutes of walking brought him back to a point at which three
+roads met, and one moment's observation of the place satisfied
+him that he had entirely failed to notice at the time by which of
+the three roads he had advanced. No sign-post was to be seen; the
+country on either side was lonely and flat, intersected by broad
+drains and ditches. Cattle were grazing here and there, and a
+windmill rose in the distance above the pollard willows that
+fringed the low horizon. But not a house was to be seen, and not
+a human creature appeared on the visible perspective of any one
+of the three roads. Midwinter glanced back in the only direction
+left to look at--the direction of the road along which he had
+just been walking. There, to his relief, was the figure of a man,
+rapidly advancing toward him, of whom he could ask his way.
+
+The figure came on, clad from head to foot in dreary black--a
+moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened
+road. He was a lean, elderly, miserably respectable man. He wore
+a poor old black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no
+pretense of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers
+clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty
+black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet.
+Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness
+of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a
+stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard
+jaws. The one morsel of color he carried about him was a lawyer's
+bag of blue serge, as lean and limp as himself. The one
+attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary old face was a neat
+set of teeth--teeth (as honest as his wig) which said plainly to
+all inquiring eyes, "We pass our nights on his looking-glass, and
+our days in his mouth."
+
+All the little blood in the man's body faintly reddened his
+fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the
+way to Thorpe Ambrose. His weak, watery eyes looked hither and
+thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a
+lion instead of a man, and if the few words addressed to him had
+been words expressing a threat instead of a question, he could
+hardly have looked more confused and alarmed than he looked now.
+For the first time in his life, Midwinter saw his own shy
+uneasiness in the presence of strangers reflected, with tenfold
+intensity of nervous suffering, in the face of another man--and
+that man old enough to be his father.
+
+"Which do you please to mean, sir--the town or the house? I beg
+your pardon for asking, but they both go by the same name in
+these parts."
+
+He spoke with a timid gentleness of tone, an ingratiatory smile,
+and an anxious courtesy of manner, all distressingly suggestive
+of his being accustomed to receive rough answers in exchange for
+his own politeness from the persons whom he habitually addressed.
+
+"I was not aware that both the house and the town went by the
+same name," said Midwinter; "I meant the house." He instinctively
+conquered his own shyness as he answered in those words, speaking
+with a cordiality of manner which was very rare with him in his
+intercourse with strangers.
+
+The man of miserable respectability seemed to feel the warm
+return of his own politeness gratefully; he brightened and took a
+little courage. His lean forefinger pointed eagerly to the right
+road. "That way, sir," he said, "and when you come to two roads
+next, please take the left one of the two. I am sorry I have
+business the other way, I mean in the town. I should have been
+happy to go with you and show you. Fine summer weather, sir, for
+walking? You can't miss your way if you keep to the left. Oh,
+don't mention it! I'm afraid I have detained you, sir. I wish you
+a pleasant walk back, and--good-morning."
+
+By the time he had made an end of speaking (under an impression
+apparently that the more he talked the more polite he would be)
+he had lost his courage again. He darted away down his own road,
+as if Midwinter's attempt to thank him involved a series of
+trials too terrible to confront. In two minutes more, his black
+retreating figure had lessened in the distance till it looked
+again, what it had once looked already, a moving blot on the
+brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road.
+
+The man ran strangely in Midwinter's thoughts while he took his
+way back to the house. He was at a loss to account for it. It
+never occurred to him that he might have been insensibly reminded
+of himself, when he saw the plain traces of past misfortune and
+present nervous suffering in the poor wretch's face. He blindly
+resented his own perverse interest in this chance foot passenger
+on the high-road, as he had resented all else that had happened
+to him since the beginning of the day. "Have I made another
+unlucky discovery?" he asked himself, impatiently. "Shall I see
+this man again, I wonder? Who can he be?"
+
+Time was to answer both those questions before many days more had
+passed over the inquirer's head.
+
+
+Allan had not returned when Midwinter reached the house. Nothing
+had happened but the arrival of a message of apology from the
+cottage. "Major Milroy's compliments, and he was sorry that Mrs.
+Milroy's illness would prevent his receiving Mr. Armadale that
+day." It was plain that Mrs. Milroy's occasional fits of
+suffering (or of ill temper) created no mere transitory
+disturbance of the tranquillity of the household. Drawing this
+natural inference, after what he had himself heard at the cottage
+nearly three hours since, Midwinter withdrew into the library to
+wait patiently among the books until his friend came back.
+
+It was past six o'clock when the well-known hearty voice was
+heard again in the hall. Allan burst into the library, in a state
+of irrepressible excitement, and pushed Midwinter back
+unceremoniously into the chair from which he was just rising,
+before he could utter a word.
+
+"Here's a riddle for you, old boy!" cried Allan. "Why am I like
+the resident manager of the Augean stable, before Hercules was
+called in to sweep the litter out? Because I have had my place to
+keep up, and I've gone and made an infernal mess of it! Why don't
+you laugh? By George, he doesn't see the point! Let's try again.
+Why am I like the resident manager--"
+
+"For God's sake, Allan, be serious for a moment!" interposed
+Midwinter. "You don't know how anxious I am to hear if you have
+recovered the good opinion of your neighbors."
+
+"That's just what the riddle was intended to tell you!" rejoined
+Allan. "But if you will have it in so many words, my own
+impression is that you would have done better not to disturb me
+under that tree in the park. I've been calculating it to a
+nicety, and I beg to inform you that I have sunk exactly three
+degrees lower in the estimation of the resident gentry since I
+had the pleasure of seeing you last."
+
+"You _will_ have your joke out," said Midwinter, bitterly. "Well,
+if I can't laugh, I can wait."
+
+"My dear fellow, I'm not joking; I really mean what I say. You
+shall hear what happened; you shall have a report in full of my
+first visit. It will do, I can promise you, as a sample for all
+the rest. Mind this, in the first place, I've gone wrong with the
+best possible intentions. When I started for these visits, I own
+I was angry with that old brute of a lawyer, and I certainly had
+a notion of carrying things with a high hand. But it wore off
+somehow on the road; and the first family I called on, I went in,
+as I tell you, with the best possible intentions. Oh, dear, dear!
+there was the same spick-and-span reception-room for me to wait
+in, with the neat conservatory beyond, which I saw again and
+again and again at every other house I went to afterward. There
+was the same choice selection of books for me to look at--a
+religious book, a book about the Duke of Wellington, a book about
+sporting, and a book about nothing in particular, beautifully
+illustrated with pictures. Down came papa with his nice white
+hair, and mamma with her nice lace cap; down came young mister
+with the pink face and straw-colored whiskers, and young miss
+with the plump cheeks and the large petticoats. Don't suppose
+there was the least unfriendliness on my side; I always began
+with them in the same way--I insisted on shaking hands all round.
+That staggered them to begin with. When I came to the sore
+subject next--the subject of the public reception--I give you my
+word of honor I took the greatest possible pains with my
+apologies. It hadn't the slightest effect; they let my apologies
+in at one ear and out at the other, and then waited to hear more.
+Some men would have been disheartened: I tried another way with
+them; I addressed myself to the master of the house, and put it
+pleasantly next. 'The fact is,' I said, 'I wanted to escape the
+speechifying--my getting up, you know, and telling you to your
+face you're the best of men, and I beg to propose your health;
+and your getting up and telling me to my face I'm the best of
+men, and you beg to thank me; and so on, man after man, praising
+each other and pestering each other all round the table.' That's
+how I put it, in an easy, light-handed, convincing sort of way.
+Do you think any of them took it in the same friendly spirit?
+Not one! It's my belief they had got their speeches ready for
+the reception, with the flags and the flowers, and that they're
+secretly angry with me for stopping their open mouths just as
+they were ready to begin. Anyway, whenever we came to the matter
+of the speechifying (whether they touched it first or I), down
+I fell in their estimation the first of those three steps I told
+you of just now. Don't suppose I made no efforts to get up again!
+I made desperate efforts. I found they were all anxious to know
+what sort of life I had led before I came in for the Thorpe
+Ambrose property, and I did my best to satisfy them. And what
+came of that, do you think? Hang me, if I didn't disappoint them
+for the second time! When they found out that I had actually
+never been to Eton or Harrow, or Oxford or Cambridge, they were
+quite dumb with astonishment. I fancy they thought me a sort of
+outlaw. At any rate, they all froze up again; and down I fell
+the second step in their estimation. Never mind! I wasn't to be
+beaten; I had promised you to do my best, and I did it. I tried
+cheerful small-talk about the neighborhood next. The women said
+nothing in particular; the men, to my unutterable astonishment,
+all began to condole with me. I shouldn't be able to find a pack
+of hounds, they said, within twenty miles of my house; and they
+thought it only right to prepare me for the disgracefully
+careless manner in which the Thorpe Ambrose covers had been
+preserved. I let them go on condoling with me, and then what do
+you think I did? I put my foot in it again. 'Oh, don't take that
+to heart!' I said; 'I don't care two straws about hunting or
+shooting, either. When I meet with a bird in my walk, I can't for
+the life of me feel eager to kill it; I rather like to see the
+bird flying about and enjoying itself.' You should have seen
+their faces! They had thought me a sort of outlaw before; now
+they evidently thought me mad. Dead silence fell upon them all;
+and down I tumbled the third step in the general estimation. It
+was just the same at the next house, and the next and the next.
+The devil possessed us all, I think. It _would_ come out, now in
+one way, and now in another, that I couldn't make speeches--that
+I had been brought up without a university education--and that
+I could enjoy a ride on horseback without galloping after a
+wretched stinking fox or a poor distracted little hare. These
+three unlucky defects of mine are not excused, it seems, in
+a country gentleman (especially when he has dodged a public
+reception to begin with). I think I got on best, upon the whole,
+with the wives and daughters. The women and I always fell, sooner
+or later, on the subject of Mrs. Blanchard and her niece. We
+invariably agreed that they had done wisely in going to Florence;
+and the only reason we had to give for our opinion was that we
+thought their minds would be benefited after their sad
+bereavement, by the contemplation of the masterpieces of Italian
+art. Every one of the ladies--I solemnly declare it--at every
+house I went to, came sooner or later to Mrs. and Miss
+Blanchard's bereavement and the masterpieces of Italian art. What
+we should have done without that bright idea to help us, I really
+don't know. The one pleasant thing at any of the visits was when
+we all shook our heads together, and declared that the
+masterpieces would console them. As for the rest of it, there's
+only one thing more to be said. What I might be in other places
+I don't know: I'm the wrong man in the wrong place here. Let me
+muddle on for the future in my own way, with my own few friends;
+and ask me anything else in the world, as long as you don't ask
+me to make any more calls on my neighbors."
+
+With that characteristic request, Allan's report of his exploring
+expedition among the resident gentry came to a close. For a
+moment Midwinter remained silent. He had allowed Allan to run on
+from first to last without uttering a word on his side. The
+disastrous result of the visits--coming after what had happened
+earlier in the day; and threatening Allan, as it did, with
+exclusion from all local sympathies at the very outset of his
+local career--had broken down Midwinter's power of resisting the
+stealthily depressing influence of his own superstition. It was
+with an effort that he now looked up at Allan; it was with an
+effort that he roused himself to answer.
+
+"It shall be as you wish," he said, quietly. "I am sorry for what
+has happened; but I am not the less obliged to you, Allan, for
+having done what I asked you."
+
+His head sank on his breast, and the fatalist resignation which
+had once already quieted him on board the wreck now quieted him
+again. "What _must_ be, _will_ be," he thought once more. "What
+have I to do with the future, and what has he?"
+
+"Cheer up!" said Allan. "_Your_ affairs are in a thriving
+condition, at any rate. I paid one pleasant visit in the town,
+which I haven't told you of yet. I've seen Pedgift, and Pedgift's
+son, who helps him in the office. They're the two jolliest
+lawyers I ever met with in my life; and, what's more, they can
+produce the very man you want to teach you the steward's
+business."
+
+Midwinter looked up quickly. Distrust of Allan's discovery was
+plainly written in his face already; but he said nothing.
+
+"I thought of you," Allan proceeded, "as soon as the two Pedgifts
+and I had had a glass of wine all round to drink to our friendly
+connection. The finest sherry I ever tasted in my life; I've
+ordered some of the same--but that's not the question just now.
+In two words I told these worthy fellows your difficulty, and in
+two seconds old Pedgift understood all about it. 'I have got the
+man in my office,' he said, 'and before the audit-day comes, I'll
+place him with the greatest pleasure at your friend's disposal.'"
+
+At this last announcement, Midwinter's distrust found its
+expression in words. He questioned Allan unsparingly.
+
+The man's name, it appeared was Bashwood. He had been some time
+(how long, Allan could not remember) in Mr. Pedgift's service.
+He had been previously steward to a Norfolk gentleman (name
+forgotten) in the westward district of the county. He had lost
+the steward's place, through some domestic trouble, in connection
+with his son, the precise nature of which Allan was not able to
+specify. Pedgift vouched for him, and Pedgift would send him to
+Thorpe Ambrose two or three days before the rent-day dinner. He
+could not be spared, for office reasons, before that time. There
+was no need to fidget about it; Pedgift laughed at the idea of
+there being any difficulty with the tenants. Two or three day's
+work over the steward's books with a man to help Midwinter who
+practically understood that sort of thing would put him all right
+for the audit; and the other business would keep till afterward.
+
+"Have you seen this Mr. Bashwood yourself, Allan?" asked
+Midwinter, still obstinately on his guard.
+
+"No," replied Allan "he was out--out with the bag, as young
+Pedgift called it. They tell me he's a decent elderly man. A
+little broken by his troubles, and a little apt to be nervous and
+confused in his manner with strangers; but thoroughly competent
+and thoroughly to be depended on--those are Pedgift's own words."
+
+Midwinter paused and considered a little, with a new interest in
+the subject. The strange man whom he had just heard described,
+and the strange man of whom he had asked his way where the three
+roads met, were remarkably like each other. Was this another link
+in the fast-lengthening chain of events? Midwinter grew doubly
+determined to be careful, as the bare doubt that it might be so
+passed through his mind.
+
+"When Mr. Bashwood comes," he said, "will you let me see him, and
+speak to him, before anything definite is done?"
+
+"Of course I will!" rejoined Allan. He stopped and looked at his
+watch. "And I'll tell you what I'll do for you, old boy, in the
+meantime," he added; "I'll introduce you to the prettiest girl in
+Norfolk! There's just time to run over to the cottage before
+dinner. Come along, and be introduced to Miss Milroy."
+
+"You can't introduce me to Miss Milroy today," replied Midwinter;
+and he repeated the message of apology which had been brought
+from the major that afternoon. Allan was surprised and
+disappointed; but he was not to be foiled in his resolution to
+advance himself in the good graces of the inhabitants of the
+cottage. After a little consideration he hit on a means of
+turning the present adverse circumstances to good account. "I'll
+show a proper anxiety for Mrs. Milroy's recovery," he said,
+gravely. "I'll send her a basket of strawberries, with my best
+respects, to-morrow morning."
+
+Nothing more happened to mark the end of that first day in the
+new house.
+
+
+The one noticeable event of the next day was another disclosure
+of Mrs. Milroy's infirmity of temper. Half an hour after Allan's
+basket of strawberries had been delivered at the cottage, it was
+returned to him intact (by the hands of the invalid lady's
+nurse), with a short and sharp message, shortly and sharply
+delivered. "Mrs. Milroy's compliments and thanks. Strawberries
+invariably disagreed with her." If this curiously petulant
+acknowledgment of an act of politeness was intended to irritate
+Allan, it failed entirely in accomplishing its object. Instead of
+being offended with the mother, he sympathized with the daughter.
+"Poor little thing," was all he said, "she must have a hard life
+of it with such a mother as that!"
+
+He called at the cottage himself later in the day, but Miss
+Milroy was not to be seen; she was engaged upstairs. The major
+received his visitor in his working apron--far more deeply
+immersed in his wonderful clock, and far less readily accessible
+to outer influences, than Allan had seen him at their first
+interview. His manner was as kind as before; but not a word more
+could be extracted from him on the subject of his wife than that
+Mrs. Milroy "had not improved since yesterday."
+
+The two next days passed quietly and uneventfully. Allan
+persisted in making his inquiries at the cottage; but all he saw
+of the major's daughter was a glimpse of her on one occasion at
+a window on the bedroom floor. Nothing more was heard from Mr.
+Pedgift; and Mr. Bashwood's appearance was still delayed.
+Midwinter declined to move in the matter until time enough had
+passed to allow of his first hearing from Mr. Brock, in answer to
+the letter which he had addressed to the rector on the night of
+his arrival at Thorpe Ambrose. He was unusually silent and quiet,
+and passed most of his hours in the library among the books. The
+time wore on wearily. The resident gentry acknowledged Allan's
+visit by formally leaving their cards. Nobody came near the house
+afterward; the weather was monotonously fine. Allan grew a little
+restless and dissatisfied. He began to resent Mrs. Milroy's
+illness; he began to think regretfully of his deserted yacht.
+
+The next day--the twentieth--brought some news with it from the
+outer world. A message was delivered from Mr. Pedgift, announcing
+that his clerk, Mr. Bashwood, would personally present himself at
+Thorpe Ambrose on the following day; and a letter in answer to
+Midwinter was received from Mr. Brock.
+
+The letter was dated the 18th, and the news which it contained
+raised not Allan's spirits only, but Midwinter's as well.
+
+On the day on which he wrote, Mr. Brock announced that he was
+about to journey to London; having been summoned thither on
+business connected with the interests of a sick relative, to whom
+he stood in the position of trustee. The business completed, he
+had good hope of finding one or other of his clerical friends in
+the metropolis who would be able and willing to do duty for him
+at the rectory; and, in that case, he trusted to travel on from
+London to Thorpe Ambrose in a week's' time or less. Under these
+circumstances, he would leave the majority of the subjects on
+which Midwinter had written to him to be discussed when they met.
+But as time might be of importance, in relation to the
+stewardship of the Thorpe Ambrose estate, he would say at once
+that he saw no reason why Midwinter should not apply his mind
+to learning the steward's duties, and should not succeed in
+rendering himself invaluably serviceable in that way to the
+interests of his friend.
+
+Leaving Midwinter reading and re-reading the rector's cheering
+letter, as if he was bent on getting every sentence in it by
+heart, Allan went out rather earlier than usual, to make his
+daily inquiry at the cottage--or, in plainer words, to make a
+fourth attempt at improving his acquaintance with Miss Milroy.
+The day had begun encouragingly, and encouragingly it seemed
+destined to go on. When Allan turned the corner of the second
+shrubbery, and entered the little paddock where he and the
+major's daughter had first met, there was Miss Milroy herself
+loitering to and fro on the grass, to all appearance on the watch
+for somebody.
+
+She gave a little start when Allan appeared, and came forward
+without hesitation to meet him. She was not in her best looks.
+Her rosy complexion had suffered under confinement to the house,
+and a marked expression of embarrassment clouded her pretty face.
+
+"I hardly know how to confess it, Mr. Armadale," she said,
+speaking eagerly, before Allan could utter a word, "but I
+certainly ventured here this morning in the hope of meeting with
+you. I have been very much distressed; I have only just heard, by
+accident, of the manner in which mamma received the present of
+fruit you so kindly sent to her. Will you try to excuse her? She
+has been miserably ill for years, and she is not always quite
+herself. After your being so very, very kind to me (and to papa),
+I really could not help stealing out here in the hope of seeing
+you, and telling you how sorry I was. Pray forgive and forget,
+Mr. Armadale--pray do!" her voice faltered over the last words,
+and, in her eagerness to make her mother's peace with him, she
+laid her hand on his arm.
+
+Allan was himself a little confused. Her earnestness took him by
+surprise, and her evident conviction that he had been offended
+honestly distressed him. Not knowing what else to do, he followed
+his instincts, and possessed himself of her hand to begin with.
+
+"My dear Miss Milroy, if you say a word more you will distress
+_me_ next," he rejoined, unconsciously pressing her hand closer
+and closer, in the embarrassment of the moment. "I never was in
+the least offended; I made allowances--upon my honor I did--for
+poor Mrs. Milroy's illness. Offended!" cried Allan, reverting
+energetically to the old complimentary strain. "I should like to
+have my basket of fruit sent back every day--if I could only be
+sure of its bringing you out into the paddock the first thing in
+the morning."
+
+Some of Miss Milroy's missing color began to appear again in her
+cheeks. "Oh, Mr. Armadale, there is really no end to your
+kindness," she said; "you don't know how you relieve me! She
+paused; her spirits rallied with as happy a readiness of recovery
+as if they had been the spirits of a child; and her native
+brightness of temper sparkled again in her eyes, as she looked
+up, shyly smiling in Allan's face. "Don't you think," she asked,
+demurely, "that it is almost time now to let go of my hand?"
+
+Their eyes met. Allan followed his instincts for the second time.
+Instead of releasing her hand, he lifted it to his lips and
+kissed it. All the missing tints of the rosier sort returned to
+Miss Milroy's complexion on the instant. She snatched away her
+hand as if Allan had burned it.
+
+"I'm sure _that's_ wrong, Mr. Armadale," she said, and turned her
+head aside quickly, for she was smiling in spite of herself.
+
+"I meant it as an apology for--for holding your hand too long,"
+stammered Allan. "An apology can't be wrong--can it?"
+
+There are occasions, though not many, when the female mind
+accurately appreciates an appeal to the force of pure reason.
+This was one of the occasions. An abstract proposition had been
+presented to Miss Milroy, and Miss Milroy was convinced. If it
+was meant as an apology, that, she admitted, made all the
+difference. "I only hope," said the little coquet, looking at him
+slyly, "you're not misleading me. Not that it matters much now,"
+she added, with a serious shake of her head. "If we have
+committed any improprieties, Mr. Armadale, we are not likely
+to have the opportunity of committing many more."
+
+"You're not going away?" exclaimed Allan, in great alarm.
+
+"Worse than that, Mr. Armadale. My new governess is coming."
+
+"Coming?" repeated Allan. "Coming already?"
+
+"As good as coming, I ought to have said--only I didn't know you
+wished me to be so very particular. We got the answers to the
+advertisements this morning. Papa and I opened them and read them
+together half an hour ago; and we both picked out the same letter
+from all the rest. I picked it out, because it was so prettily
+expressed; and papa picked it out because the terms were so
+reasonable. He is going to send the letter up to grandmamma in
+London by today's post, and, if she finds everything satisfactory
+on inquiry, the governess is to be engaged You don't know how
+dreadfully nervous I am getting about it already; a strange
+governess is such an awful prospect. But it is not quite so bad
+as going to school; and I have great hopes of this new lady,
+because she writes such a nice letter! As I said to papa, it
+almost reconciles me to her horrid, unromantic name."
+
+"What is her name?" asked Allan. "Brown? Grubb? Scraggs? Anything
+of that sort?"
+
+"Hush! hush! Nothing quite so horrible as that. Her name is
+Gwilt. Dreadfully unpoetical, isn't it? Her reference must be a
+respectable person, though; for she lives in the same part of
+London as grandmamma. Stop, Mr. Armadale! we are going the wrong
+way. No; I can't wait to look at those lovely flowers of yours
+this morning, and, many thanks, I can't accept your arm. I have
+stayed here too long already. Papa is waiting for his breakfast;
+and I must run back every step of the way. Thank you for making
+those kind allowances for mamma; thank you again and again, and
+good-by! "
+
+"Won't you shake hands?" asked Allan.
+
+She gave him her hand. "No more apologies, if you please, Mr.
+Armadale," she said, saucily. Once more their eyes met, and once
+more the plump, dimpled little hand found its way to Allan's
+lips. "It isn't an apology this time!" cried Allan, precipitately
+defending himself. "It's--it's a mark of respect."
+
+She started back a few steps, and burst out laughing. "You won't
+find me in our grounds again, Mr. Armadale," she said, merrily,
+"till I have got Miss Gwilt to take care of me!" With that
+farewell, she gathered up her skirts, and ran back across the
+paddock at the top of her speed.
+
+Allan stood watching her in speechless admiration till she was
+out of sight. His second interview with Miss Milroy had produced
+an extraordinary effect on him. For the first time since he had
+become the master of Thorpe Ambrose, he was absorbed in serious
+consideration of what he owed to his new position in life. "The
+question is," pondered Allan, "whether I hadn't better set myself
+right with my neighbors by becoming a married man? I'll take the
+day to consider; and if I keep in the same mind about it, I'll
+consult Midwinter to-morrow morning."
+
+
+When the morning came, and when Allan descended to the
+breakfast-room, resolute to consult his friend on the obligations
+that he owed to his neighbors in general, and to Miss Milroy in
+particular, no Midwinter was to he seen. On making inquiry, it
+appeared that he had been observed in the hall; that he had taken
+from the table a letter which the morning's post had brought to
+him; and that he had gone back immediately to his own room. Allan
+at once ascended the stairs again, and knocked at his friend's
+door.
+
+"May I come in?" he asked.
+
+"Not just now," was the answer.
+
+"You have got a letter, haven't you?" persisted Allan. "Any bad
+news? Anything wrong?"
+
+"Nothing. I'm not very well this morning. Don't wait breakfast
+for me; I'll come down as soon as I can."
+
+No more was said on either side. Allan returned to the
+breakfast-room a little disappointed. He had set his heart on
+rushing headlong into his consultation with Midwinter, and here
+was the consultation indefinitely delayed. "What an odd fellow he
+is!" thought Allan. "What on earth can he be doing, locked in
+there by himself?"
+
+He was doing nothing. He was sitting by the window, with the
+letter which had reached him that morning open in his hand. The
+handwriting was Mr. Brock's, and the words written were these:
+
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--I have literally only two minutes before post
+time to tell you that I have just met (in Kensington Gardens)
+with the woman whom we both only know, thus far, as the woman
+with the red Paisley shawl. I have traced her and her companion
+(a respectable-looking elderly lady) to their residence--after
+having distinctly heard Allan's name mentioned between them.
+Depend on my not losing sight of the woman until I am satisfied
+that she means no mischief at Thorpe Ambrose; and expect to hear
+from me again as soon as I know how this strange discovery is to
+end.
+
+"Very truly yours, DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+
+After reading the letter for the second time, Midwinter folded it
+up thoughtfully, and placed it in his pocket-book, side by side
+with the manuscript narrative of Allan's dream.
+
+"Your discovery will not end with _you_, Mr. Brock," he said. "Do
+what you will with the woman, when the time comes the woman will
+be here."
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MOTHER OLDERSHAW ON HER GUARD.
+
+1. _From Mrs. Oldershaw (Diana Street, Pimlico) to Miss Gwilt
+(West Place, Old Brompton)_.
+
+"Ladies' Toilet Repository, June 20th,
+
+Eight in the Evening.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--About three hours have passed, as well as I can
+remember, since I pushed you unceremoniously inside my house in
+West Place, and, merely telling you to wait till you saw me
+again, banged the door to between us, and left you alone in the
+hall. I know your sensitive nature, my dear, and I am afraid you
+have made up your mind by this time that never yet was a guest
+treated so abominably by her hostess as I have treated you.
+
+"The delay that has prevented me from explaining my strange
+conduct is, believe me, a delay for which I am not to blame.
+One of the many delicate little difficulties which beset so
+essentially confidential a business as mine occurred here
+(as I have since discovered) while we were taking the air this
+afternoon in Kensington Gardens. I see no chance of being able to
+get back to you for some hours to come, and I have a word of very
+urgent caution for your private ear, which has been too long
+delayed already. So I must use the spare minutes as they come,
+and write.
+
+"Here is caution the first. On no account venture outside the
+door again this evening, and be very careful, while the daylight
+lasts, not to show yourself at any of the front windows. I have
+reason to fear that a certain charming person now staying with me
+may possibly be watched. Don't be alarmed, and don't be
+impatient; you shall know why.
+
+"I can only explain myself by going back to our unlucky meeting
+in the Gardens with that reverend gentleman who was so obliging
+as to follow us both back to my house.
+
+"It crossed my mind, just as we were close to the door, that
+there might be a motive for the parson's anxiety to trace us
+home, far less creditable to his taste, and far more dangerous to
+both of us, than the motive you supposed him to have. In plainer
+words, Lydia, I rather doubted whether you had met with another
+admirer; and I strongly suspected that you had encountered
+another enemy instead . There was no time to tell you this. There
+was only time to see you safe into the house, and to make sure of
+the parson (in case my suspicions were right) by treating him as
+he had treated us; I mean, by following him in his turn.
+
+"I kept some little distance behind him at first, to turn the
+thing over in my mind, and to be satisfied that my doubts were
+not misleading me. We have no concealments from each other; and
+you shall know what my doubts were.
+
+"I was not surprised at _your_ recognizing _him_; he is not at
+all a common-looking old man; and you had seen him twice in
+Somersetshire--once when you asked your way of him to Mrs.
+Armadale's house, and once when you saw him again on your way
+back to the railroad. But I was a little puzzled (considering
+that you had your veil down on both those occasions, and your
+veil down also when we were in the Gardens) at his recognizing
+_you_. I doubted his remembering your figure in a summer dress
+after he had only seen it in a winter dress; and though we were
+talking when he met us, and your voice is one among your many
+charms, I doubted his remembering your voice, either. And yet
+I felt persuaded that he knew you. 'How?' you will ask. My dear,
+as ill-luck would have it, we were speaking at the time of young
+Armadale. I firmly believe that the name was the first thing that
+struck him; and when he heard _that_, your voice certainly and
+your figure perhaps, came back to his memory. 'And what if it
+did?' you may say. Think again, Lydia, and tell me whether the
+parson of the place where Mrs. Armadale lived was not likely to
+be Mrs. Armadale's friend? If he _was_ her friend, the very first
+person to whom she would apply for advice after the manner in
+which you frightened her, and after what you most injudiciously
+said on the subject of appealing to her son, would be the
+clergyman of the parish--and the magistrate, too, as the landlord
+at the inn himself told you.
+
+"You will now understand why I left you in that extremely uncivil
+manner, and I may go on to what happened next.
+
+"I followed the old gentleman till he turned into a quiet street,
+and then accosted him, with respect for the Church written
+(I flatter myself) in every line of my face.
+
+"'Will you excuse me,' I said, 'if I venture to inquire, sir,
+whether you recognized the lady who was walking with me when you
+happened to pass us in the Gardens?'
+
+"'Will you excuse my asking, ma'am, why you put that question?'
+was all the answer I got.
+
+"'I will endeavor to tell you, sir,' I said. 'If my friend is
+not an absolute stranger to you, I should wish to request your
+attention to a very delicate subject, connected with a lady
+deceased, and with her son who survives her.'
+
+"He was staggered; I could see that. But he was sly enough at the
+same time to hold his tongue and wait till I said something more.
+
+"'If I am wrong, sir, in thinking that you recognized my friend,'
+I went on, 'I beg to apologize. But I could hardly suppose it
+possible that a gentleman in your profession would follow a lady
+home who was a total stranger to him.'
+
+"There I had him. He colored up (fancy that, at his age!), and
+owned the truth, in defense of his own precious character.
+
+"'I have met with the lady once before, and I acknowledge that I
+recognized her in the Gardens,' he said. 'You will excuse me if
+I decline entering into the question of whether I did or did not
+purposely follow her home. If you wish to be assured that your
+friend is not an absolute stranger to me, you now have that
+assurance; and if you have anything particular to say to me, I
+leave you to decide whether the time has come to say it.'
+
+"He waited, and looked about. I waited, and looked about. He said
+the street was hardly a fit place to speak of a delicate subject
+in. I said the street was hardly a fit place to speak of a
+delicate subject in. He didn't offer to take me to where he
+lived. I didn't offer to take him to where I lived. Have you ever
+seen two strange cats, my dear, nose to nose on the tiles? If you
+have, you have seen the parson and me done to the life.
+
+"'Well, ma'am,' he said, at last, 'shall we go on with our
+conversation in spite of circumstances?'
+
+"'Yes, sir,' I said; 'we are both of us, fortunately, of an age
+to set circumstances at defiance' (I had seen the old wretch
+looking at my gray hair, and satisfying himself that his
+character was safe if he _was_ seen with me).
+
+"After all this snapping and snarling, we came to the point at
+last. I began by telling him that I feared his interest in you
+was not of the friendly sort. He admitted that much--of course,
+in defense of his own character once more. I next repeated
+to him everything you had told me about your proceedings in
+Somersetshire, when we first found that he was following us home.
+Don't be alarmed my dear--I was acting on principle. If you want
+to make a dish of lies digestible, always give it a garnish
+of truth. Well, having appealed to the reverend gentleman's
+confidence in this matter, I next declared that you had become
+an altered woman since he had seen you last. I revived that dead
+wretch, your husband (without mentioning names, of course),
+established him (the first place I thought of) in business at the
+Brazils, and described a letter which he had written, offering to
+forgive his erring wife, if she would repent and go back to him.
+I assured the parson that your husband's noble conduct had
+softened your obdurate nature; and then, thinking I had produced
+the right impression, I came boldly to close quarters with him.
+I said, 'At the very time when you met us, sir, my unhappy friend
+was speaking in terms of touching, self-reproach of her conduct
+to the late Mrs. Armadale. She confided to me her anxiety to make
+some atonement, if possible, to Mrs. Armadale's son; and it is
+at her entreaty (for she cannot prevail on herself to face you)
+that I now beg to inquire whether Mr. Armadale is still in
+Somersetshire, and whether he would consent to take back in small
+installments the sum of money which my friend acknowledges that
+she received by practicing on Mrs. Armadale's fears.' Those were
+my very words. A neater story (accounting so nicely for
+everything) was never told; it was a story to melt a stone. But
+this Somersetshire parson is harder than stone itself. I blush
+for _him_, my dear, when I assure you that he was evidently
+insensible enough to disbelieve every word I said about your
+reformed character, your husband in the Brazils, and your
+penitent anxiety to pay the money back. It is really a disgrace
+that such a man should be in the Church; such cunning as his is
+in the last degree unbecoming in a member of a sacred profession.
+
+"'Does your friend propose to join her husband by the next
+steamer?' was all he condescended to say, when I had done.
+
+"I acknowledge I was angry. I snapped at him. I said, 'Yes, she
+does.'
+
+"'How am I to communicate with her?' he asked.
+
+"I snapped at him again. 'By letter--through me.'
+
+"'At what address, ma'am?'
+
+"There, I had him once more. 'You have found my address out for
+yourself, sir,' I said. 'The directory will tell you my name, if
+you wish to find that out for yourself also; otherwise, you are
+welcome to my card.'
+
+"'Many thanks, ma'am. If your friend wishes to communicate with
+Mr. Armadale, I will give you _my_ card in return.'
+
+"'Thank you, sir.'
+
+"'Thank you, ma'am.'
+
+"'Good-afternoon, sir.'
+
+"'Good-afternoon, ma'am.'
+
+"So we parted. I went my way to an appointment at my place
+of business, and he went his in a hurry; which is of itself
+suspicious. What I can't get over is his heartlessness. Heaven
+help the people who send for _him_ to comfort them on their
+death-beds!
+
+"The next consideration is, What are we to do? If we don't find
+out the right way to keep this old wretch in the dark, he may be
+the ruin of us at Thorpe Ambrose just as we are within easy reach
+of our end in view. Wait up till I come to you, with my mind
+free, I hope, from the other difficulty which is worrying me
+here. Was there ever such ill luck as ours? Only think of that
+man deserting his congregation, and coming to London just at the
+very time when we have answered Major Milroy's advertisement, and
+may expect the inquiries to be made next week! I have no patience
+with him; his bishop ought to interfere.
+
+"Affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+2. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
+
+"West Place, June 20th.
+
+"MY POOR OLD DEAR--How very little you know of my sensitive
+nature, as you call it! Instead of feeling offended when you left
+me, I went to your piano, and forgot all about you till your
+messenger came. Your letter is irresistible; I have been laughing
+over it till I am quite out of breath. Of all the absurd stories
+I ever read, the story you addressed to the Somersetshire
+clergyman is the most ridiculous. And as for your interview with
+him in the street, it is a perfect sin to keep it to ourselves.
+The public ought really to enjoy it in the form of a farce at one
+of the theaters.
+
+"Luckily for both of us (to come to serious matters), your
+messenger is a prudent person. He sent upstairs to know if there
+was an answer. In the midst of my merriment I had presence of
+mind enough to send downstairs and say 'Yes.'
+
+"Some brute of a man says, in some book which I once read, that
+no woman can keep two separate trains of ideas in her mind at the
+same time. I declare you have almost satisfied me that the man
+is right. What! when you have escaped unnoticed to your place
+of business, and when you suspect this house to be watched, you
+propose to come back here, and to put it in the parson's power to
+recover the lost trace of you! What madness! Stop where you are;
+and when you have got over your difficulty at Pimlico (it is some
+woman's business, of course; what worries women are!), be so good
+as to read what I have got to say about our difficulty at
+Brompton.
+
+"In the first place, the house (as you supposed) is watched.
+
+"Half an hour after you left me, loud voices in the street
+interrupted me at the piano, and I went to the window. There was
+a cab at the house opposite, where they let lodgings; and an old
+man, who looked like a respectable servant, was wrangling with
+the driver about his fare. An elderly gentleman came out of the
+house, and stopped them. An elderly gentleman returned into the
+house, and appeared cautiously at the front drawing-room window.
+You know him, you worthy creature; he had the bad taste, some few
+hours since, to doubt whether you were telling him the truth.
+Don't be afraid, he didn't see me. When he looked up, after
+settling with the cab driver, I was behind the curtain. I have
+been behind the curtain once or twice since; and I have seen
+enough to satisfy me that he and his servant will relieve each
+other at the window, so as never to lose sight of your house
+here, night or day. That the parson suspects the real truth
+is of course impossible. But that he firmly believes I mean some
+mischief to young Armadale, and that you have entirely confirmed
+him in that conviction, is as plain as that two and two make
+four. And this has happened (as you helplessly remind me) just
+when we have answered the advertisement, and when we may expect
+the major's inquiries to be made in a few days' time.
+
+"Surely, here is a terrible situation for two women to find
+themselves in? A fiddlestick's end for the situation! We have got
+an easy way out of it--thanks, Mother Oldershaw, to what I myself
+forced you to do, not three hours before the Somersetshire
+clergyman met with us.
+
+"Has that venomous little quarrel of ours this morning--after we
+had pounced on the major's advertisement in the newspaper--quite
+slipped out of your memory? Have you forgotten how I persisted in
+my opinion that you were a great deal too well known in London to
+appear safely as my reference in your own name, or to receive an
+inquiring lady or gentleman (as you were rash enough to propose)
+in your own house? Don't you remember what a passion you were in
+when I brought our dispute to an end by declining to stir a step
+in the matter, unless I could conclude my application to Major
+Milroy by referring him to an address at which you were totally
+unknown, and to a name which might be anything you pleased, as
+long as it was not yours? What a look you gave me when you found
+there was nothing for it but to drop the whole speculation or to
+let me have my own way! How you fumed over the lodging hunting
+on the other side of the Park! and how you groaned when you came
+back, possessed of furnished apartments in respectable Bayswater,
+over the useless expense I had put you to!
+
+"What do you think of those furnished apartments _now_, you
+obstinate old woman? Here we are, with discovery threatening us
+at our very door, and with no hope of escape unless we can
+contrive to disappear from the parson in the dark. And there are
+the lodgings in Bayswater, to which no inquisitive strangers have
+traced either you or me, ready and waiting to swallow us up--the
+lodgings in which we can escape all further molestation, and
+answer the major's inquiries at our ease. Can you see, at last, a
+little further than your poor old nose? Is there anything in the
+world to prevent your safe disappearance from Pimlico to-night,
+and your safe establishment at the new lodgings, in the character
+of my respectable reference, half an hour afterward? Oh, fie,
+fie, Mother Oldershaw! Go down on your wicked old knees, and
+thank your stars that you had a she-devil like me to deal with
+this morning!
+
+"Suppose we come now to the only difficulty worth mentioning--
+_my_ difficulty. Watched as I am in this house, how am I to join
+you without bringing the parson or the parson's servant with me
+at my heels?
+
+"Being to all intents and purposes a prisoner here, it seems to
+me that I have no choice but to try the old prison plan of
+escape: a change of clothes. I have been looking at your
+house-maid. Except that we are both light, her face and hair and
+my face and hair are as unlike each other as possible. But she is
+as nearly as can be my height and size; and (if she only knew how
+to dress herself, and had smaller feet) her figure is a very much
+better one than it ought to be for a person in her station in
+life.
+
+"My idea is to dress her in the clothes I wore in the Gardens
+to-day; to send her out, with our reverend enemy in full pursuit
+of her; and, as soon as the coast is clear, to slip away myself
+and join you. The thing would be quite impossible, of course, if
+I had been seen with my veil up; but, as events have turned out,
+it is one advantage of the horrible exposure which followed my
+marriage that I seldom show myself in public, and never, of
+course, in such a populous place as London, without wearing a
+thick veil and keeping that veil down. If the house-maid wears my
+dress, I don't really see why the house-maid may not be counted
+on to represent me to the life.
+
+"The one question is, Can the woman be trusted? If she can, send
+me a line, telling her, on your authority, that she is to place
+herself at my disposal. I won't say a word till I have heard from
+you first.
+
+"Let me have my answer to-night. As long as we were only talking
+about my getting the governess's place, I was careless enough how
+it ended. But now that we have actually answered Major Milroy's
+advertisement, I am in earnest at last. I mean to be Mrs.
+Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose; and woe to the man or woman who tries
+to stop me! Yours,
+
+"LYDIA GWILT.
+
+"P.S.--I open my letter again to say that you need have no fear
+of your messenger being followed on his return to Pimlico. He
+will drive to a public-house where he is known, will dismiss the
+cab at the door, and will go out again by a back way which is
+only used by the landlord and his friends.--L. G."
+
+3. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Diana Street, 10 o'clock.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--You have written me a heartless letter. If you
+had been in my trying position, harassed as I was when I wrote
+to you, I should have made allowances for my friend when I found
+my friend not so sharp as usual. But the vice of the present age
+is a want of consideration for persons in the decline of life.
+Morally speaking, you are in a sad state, my dear; and you stand
+much in need of a good example. You shall have a good example--I
+forgive you.
+
+"Having now relieved my mind by the performance of a good action,
+suppose I show you next (though I protest against the vulgarity
+of the expression) that I _can_ see a little further than my poor
+old nose?
+
+"I will answer your question about the house-maid first. You may
+trust her implicitly. She has had her troubles, and has learned
+discretion. She also looks your age; though it is only her due to
+say that, in this particular, she has some years the advantage of
+you. I inclose the necessary directions which will place her
+entirely at your disposal.
+
+"And what comes next?
+
+"Your plan for joining me at Bayswater comes next. It is very
+well as far as it goes; but it stands sadly in need of a little
+judicious improvement. There is a serious necessity (you shall
+know why presently) for deceiving the parson far more completely
+than you propose to deceive him. I want him to see the
+house-maid's face under circumstances which will persuade him
+that it is _your_ face. And then, going a step further, I want
+him to see the house-maid leave London, under the impression that
+he has seen _you_ start on the first stage of your journey to the
+Brazils. He didn't believe in that journey when I announced it to
+him this afternoon in the street. He may believe in it yet, if
+you follow the directions I am now going to give you.
+
+"To-morrow is Saturday. Send the housemaid out in your walking
+dress of to-day, just as you propose; but don't stir out
+yourself, and don't go near the window. Desire the woman to keep
+her veil down, to take half an hour's walk (quite unconscious, of
+course, of the parson or his servant at her heels), and then to
+come back to you. As soon as she appears, send her instantly to
+the open window, instructing her to lift her veil carelessly and
+look out. Let her go away again after a minute or two, take off
+her bonnet and shawl, and then appear once more at the window,
+or, better still, in the balcony outside. She may show herself
+again occasionally (not too often) later in the day. And
+to-morrow--as we have a professional gentleman to deal with--by
+all means send her to church. If these proceedings don't persuade
+the parson that the house-maid's face is your face, and if they
+don't make him readier to believe in your reformed character than
+he was when I spoke to him, I have lived sixty years, my love,
+in this vale of tears to mighty little purpose.
+
+"The next day is Monday. I have looked at the shipping
+advertisements, and I find that a steamer leaves Liverpool for
+the Brazils on Tuesday. Nothing could be more convenient; we will
+start you on your voyage under the parson's own eyes. You may
+manage it in this way:
+
+"At one o'clock send out the man who cleans the knives and forks
+to get a cab; and when he has brought it up to the door, let him
+go back and get a second cab, which he is to wait in himself,
+round the corner, in the square. Let the house-maid (still in
+your dress) drive off, with the necessary boxes, in the first cab
+to the North-western Railway. When she is gone, slip out yourself
+to the cab waiting round the corner, and come to me at Bayswater.
+They may be prepared to follow the house-maid's cab, because they
+have seen it at the door; but they won't be prepared to follow
+your cab, because it has been hidden round the corner. When the
+house-maid has got to the station, and has done her best to
+disappear in the crowd (I have chosen the mixed train at 2:10,
+so as to give her every chance), you will be safe with me; and
+whether they do or do not find out that she does not really start
+for Liverpool won't matter by that time. They will have lost all
+trace of you; and they may follow the house-maid half over
+London, if they like. She has my instructions (inclosed) to leave
+the empty boxes to find their way to the lost luggage office and
+to go to her friends in the City, and stay there till I write
+word that I want her again.
+
+"And what is the object of all this?
+
+"My dear Lydia, the object is your future security (and mine).
+We may succeed or we may fail, in persuading the parson that you
+have actually gone to the Brazils. If we succeed, we are relieved
+of all fear of him. If we fail, he will warn young Armadale to be
+careful _of a woman like my house-maid, and not of a woman like
+you_. This last gain is a very important one; for we don't know
+that Mrs. Armadale may not have told him your maiden name. In
+that event, the 'Miss Gwilt' whom he will describe as having
+slipped through his fingers here will be so entirely unlike
+the 'Miss Gwilt' established at Thorpe Ambrose, as to satisfy
+everybody that it is not a case of similarity of persons, but
+only a case of similarity of names.
+
+"What do you say now to my improvement on your idea? Are my
+brains not quite so addled as you thought them when you wrote?
+Don't suppose I'm at all overboastful about my own ingenuity.
+Cleverer tricks than this trick of mine are played off on the
+public by swindlers, and are recorded in the newspapers every
+week. I only want to show you that my assistance is not less
+necessary to the success of the Armadale speculation now than
+it was when I made our first important discoveries, by means
+of the harmless-looking young man and the private inquiry office
+in Shadyside Place.
+
+"There is nothing more to say that I know of, except that I am
+just going to start for the new lodging, with a box directed in
+my new name. The last expiring moments of Mother Oldershaw, of
+the Toilet Repository, are close at hand, and the birth of Miss
+Gwilt's respectable reference, Mrs. Mandeville, will take place
+in a cab in five minutes' time. I fancy I must be still young
+at heart, for I am quite in love already with my romantic name;
+it sounds almost as pretty as Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose,
+doesn't it?
+
+"Good-night, my dear, and pleasant dreams. If any accident
+happens between this and Monday, write to me instantly by post.
+If no accident happens you will be with me in excellent time
+for the earliest inquiries that the major can possibly make.
+My last words are, don't go out, and don't venture near the
+front windows till Monday comes.
+
+"Affectionately yours,
+
+M. O."
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+MIDWINTER IN DISGUISE.
+
+Toward noon on the day of the twenty-first, Miss Milroy was
+loitering in the cottage garden--released from duty in the
+sick-room by an improvement in her mother's health--when her
+attention was attracted by the sound of voices in the park. One
+of the voices she instantly recognized as Allan's; the other was
+strange to her. She put aside the branches of a shrub near the
+garden palings, and, peeping through, saw Allan approaching the
+cottage gate, in company with a slim, dark, undersized man, who
+was talking and laughing excitably at the top of his voice. Miss
+Milroy ran indoors to warn her father of Mr. Armadale's arrival,
+and to add that he was bringing with him a noisy stranger, who
+was, in all probability, the friend generally reported to be
+staying with the squire at the great house.
+
+Had the major's daughter guessed right? Was the squire's
+loud-talking, loud-laughing companion the shy, sensitive
+Midwinter of other times? It was even so. In Allan's presence,
+that morning, an extraordinary change had passed over the
+ordinarily quiet demeanor of Allan's friend.
+
+When Midwinter had first appeared in the breakfast-room, after
+putting aside Mr. Brock's startling letter, Allan had been too
+much occupied to pay any special attention to him. The undecided
+difficulty of choosing the day for the audit dinner had pressed
+for a settlement once more, and had been fixed at last (under the
+butler's advice) for Saturday, the twenty-eighth of the month. It
+was only on turning round to remind Midwinter of the ample space
+of time which the new arrangement allowed for mastering the
+steward's books, that even Allan's flighty attention had been
+arrested by a marked change in the face that confronted him. He
+had openly noticed the change in his usual blunt manner, and had
+been instantly silenced by a fretful, almost an angry, reply.
+The two had sat down together to breakfast without the usual
+cordiality, and the meal had proceeded gloomily, till Midwinter
+himself broke the silence by bursting into the strange outbreak
+of gayety which had revealed in Allan's eyes a new side to the
+character of his friend.
+
+As usual with most of Allan's judgments, here again the
+conclusion was wrong. It was no new side to Midwinter's character
+that now presented itself--it was only a new aspect of the one
+ever-recurring struggle of Midwinter's life.
+
+Irritated by Allan's discovery of the change in him, and dreading
+the next questions that Allan's curiosity might put, Midwinter
+had roused himself to efface, by main force, the impression which
+his own altered appearance had produced. It was one of those
+efforts which no men compass so resolutely as the men of his
+quick temper and his sensitive feminine organization. With his
+whole mind still possessed by the firm belief that the Fatality
+had taken one great step nearer to Allan and himself since the
+rector's adventure in Kensington Gardens--with his face still
+betraying what he had suffered, under the renewed conviction that
+his father's death-bed warning was now, in event after event,
+asserting its terrible claim to part him, at any sacrifice, from
+the one human creature whom he loved--with the fear still busy at
+his heart that the first mysterious vision of Allan's Dream might
+be a vision realized, before the new day that now saw the two
+Armadales together was a day that had passed over their
+heads--with these triple bonds, wrought by his own superstition,
+fettering him at that moment as they had never fettered him yet,
+he mercilessly spurred his resolution to the desperate effort of
+rivaling, in Allan's presence, the gayety and good spirits of
+Allan himself.
+
+He talked and laughed, and heaped his plate indiscriminately from
+every dish on the breakfast-table. He made noisily merry with
+jests that had no humor, and stories that had no point. He first
+astonished Allan, then amused him, then won his easily encouraged
+confidence on the subject of Miss Milroy. He shouted with
+laughter over the sudden development of Allan's views on
+marriage, until the servants downstairs began to think that their
+master's strange friend had gone mad. Lastly, he had accepted
+Allan's proposal that he should be presented to the major's
+daughter, and judge of her for himself, as readily, nay, more
+readily than it would have been accepted by the least diffident
+man living. There the two now stood at the cottage gate
+--Midwinter's voice rising louder and louder over Allan's--
+Midwinter's natural manner disguised (how madly and miserably
+none but he knew!) in a coarse masquerade of boldness--the
+outrageous, the unendurable boldness of a shy man.
+
+They were received in the parlor by the major's daughter, pending
+the arrival of the major himself.
+
+Allan attempted to present his friend in the usual form. To his
+astonishment, Midwinter took the words flippantly out of his
+lips, and introduced himself to Miss Milroy with a confident
+look, a hard laugh, and a clumsy assumption of ease which
+presented him at his worst. His artificial spirits, lashed
+continuously into higher and higher effervescence since the
+morning, were now mounting hysterically beyond his own control.
+He looked and spoke with that terrible freedom of license which
+is the necessary consequence, when a diffident man has thrown off
+his reserve, of the very effort by which he has broken loose from
+his own restraints. He involved himself in a confused medley of
+apologies that were not wanted, and of compliments that might
+have overflattered the vanity of a savage. He looked backward and
+forward from Miss Milroy to Allan, and declared jocosely that he
+understood now why his friend's morning walks were always taken
+in the same direction. He asked her questions about her mother,
+and cut short the answers she gave him by remarks on the weather.
+In one breath, he said she must feel the day insufferably hot,
+and in another he protested that he quite envied her in her cool
+muslin dress.
+
+The major came in.
+
+Before he could say two words, Midwinter overwhelmed him with
+the same frenzy of familiarity, and the same feverish fluency
+of speech. He expressed his interest in Mrs. Milroy's health in
+terms which would have been exaggerated on the lips of a friend
+of the family. He overflowed into a perfect flood of apologies
+for disturbing the major at his mechanical pursuits. He quoted
+Allan's extravagant account of the clock, and expressed his own
+anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant still. He paraded his
+superficial book knowledge of the great clock at Strasbourg, with
+far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton figures which
+that clock puts in motion--on the procession of the Twelve
+Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy
+cock, which crows at St. Peter's appearance--and this before a
+man who had studied every wheel in that complex machinery, and
+who had passed whole years of his life in trying to imitate it.
+"I hear you have outnumbered the Strasbourg apostles, and
+outcrowed the Strasbourg cock," he exclaimed, with the tone and
+manner of a friend habitually privileged to waive all ceremony;
+"and I am dying, absolutely dying, major, to see your wonderful
+clock!"
+
+Major Milroy had entered the room with his mind absorbed in his
+own mechanical contrivances as usual. But the sudden shock of
+Midwinter's familiarity was violent enough to recall him
+instantly to himself, and to make him master again, for the time,
+of his social resources as a man of the world.
+
+"Excuse me for interrupting you," he said, stopping Midwinter for
+the moment, by a look of steady surprise. "I happen to have seen
+the clock at Strasbourg; and it sounds almost absurd in my ears
+(if you will pardon me for saying so) to put my little experiment
+in any light of comparison with that wonderful achievement. There
+is nothing else of the kind like it in the world!" He paused, to
+control his own mounting enthusiasm; the clock at Strasbourg was
+to Major Milroy what the name of Michael Angelo was to Sir Joshua
+Reynolds. "Mr. Armadale's kindness has led him to exaggerate a
+little," pursued the major, smiling at Allan, and passing over
+another attempt of Midwinter's to seize on the talk, as if no
+such attempt had been made. "But as there does happen to be this
+one point of resemblance between the great clock abroad and the
+little clock at home, that they both show what they can do on the
+stroke of noon, and as it is close on twelve now, if you still
+wish to visit my workshop, Mr. Midwinter, the sooner I show you
+the way to it the better." He opened the door, and apologized to
+Midwinter, with marked ceremony, for preceding him out of the
+room.
+
+"What do you think of my friend?" whispered Allan, as he and Miss
+Milroy followed.
+
+"Must I tell you the truth, Mr. Armadale?" she whispered back.
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"Then I don't like him at all!"
+
+"He's the best and dearest fellow in the world, " rejoined the
+outspoken Allan. "You'll like him better when you know him
+better--I'm sure you will!"
+
+Miss Milroy made a little grimace, implying supreme indifference
+to Midwinter, and saucy surprise at Allan's earnest advocacy of
+the merits of his friend. "Has he got nothing more interesting to
+say to me than _that_," she wondered, privately, "after kissing
+my hand twice yesterday morning?"
+
+They were all in the major's workroom before Allan had the chance
+of trying a more attractive subject. There, on the top of a rough
+wooden case, which evidently contained the machinery, was the
+wonderful clock. The dial was crowned by a glass pedestal placed
+on rock-work in carved ebony; and on the top of the pedestal sat
+the inevitable figure of Time, with his everlasting scythe in his
+hand. Below the dial was a little platform, and at either end of
+it rose two miniature sentry-boxes, with closed doors.
+Externally, this was all that appeared, until the magic moment
+came when the clock struck twelve noon.
+
+It wanted then about three minutes to twelve; and Major Milroy
+seized the opportunity of explaining what the exhibition was to
+be, before the exhibition began.
+
+"At the first words, his mind fell back again into its old
+absorption over the one employment of his life. He turned to
+Midwinter (who had persisted in talking all the way from the
+parlor, and who was talking still) without a trace left in his
+manner of the cool and cutting composure with which he had spoken
+but a few minutes before. The noisy, familiar man, who had been
+an ill-bred intruder in the parlor, became a privileged guest in
+the workshop, for _there_ he possessed the all-atoning social
+advantage of being new to the performances of the wonderful
+clock.
+
+"At the first stroke of twelve, Mr. Midwinter," said the major,
+quite eagerly, "keep your eye on the figure of Time: he will move
+his scythe, and point it downward to the glass pedestal. You will
+next see a little printed card appear behind the glass, which
+will tell you the day of the month and the day of the week. At
+the last stroke of the clock, Time will lift his scythe again
+into its former position, and the chimes will ring a peal. The
+peal will be succeeded by the playing of a tune--the favorite
+march of my old regiment--and then the final performance of the
+clock will follow. The sentry-boxes, which you may observe at
+each side, will both open at the same moment. In one of them you
+will see the sentinel appear; and from the other a corporal and
+two privates will march across the platform to relieve the guard,
+and will then disappear, leaving the new sentinel at his post.
+I must ask your kind allowances for this last part of the
+performance. The machinery is a little complicated, and there are
+defects in it which I am ashamed to say I have not yet succeeded
+in remedying as I could wish. Sometimes the figures go all wrong,
+and sometimes they go all right. I hope they may do their best on
+the occasion of your seeing them for the first time."
+
+As the major, posted near his clock, said the last words, his
+little audience of three, assembled at the opposite end of the
+room, saw the hour-hand and the minute-hand on the dial point
+together to twelve. The first stroke sounded, and Time, true to
+the signal, moved his scythe. The day of the month and the day of
+the week announced themselves in print through the glass pedestal
+next; Midwinter applauding their appearance with a noisy
+exaggeration of surprise, which Miss Milroy mistook for coarse
+sarcasm directed at her father's pursuits, and which Allan
+(seeing that she was offended) attempted to moderate by touching
+the elbow of his friend. Meanwhile, the performances of the clock
+went on. At the last stroke of twelve, Time lifted his scythe
+again, the chimes rang, the march tune of the major's old
+regiment followed; and the crowning exhibition of the relief
+of the guard announced itself in a preliminary trembling of the
+sentry-boxes, and a sudden disappearance of the major at the back
+of the clock.
+
+The performance began with the opening of the sentry-box on
+the right-hand side of the platform, as punctually as could be
+desired; the door on the other side, however, was less
+tractable--it remained obstinately closed. Unaware of this hitch
+in the proceedings, the corporal and his two privates appeared
+in their places in a state of perfect discipline, tottered out
+across the platform, all three trembling in every limb, dashed
+themselves headlong against the closed door on the other side,
+and failed in producing the smallest impression on the immovable
+sentry presumed to be within. An intermittent clicking, as of the
+major's keys and tools at work, was heard in the machinery. The
+corporal and his two privates suddenly returned, backward, across
+the platform, and shut themselves up with a bang inside their own
+door. Exactly at the same moment, the other door opened for the
+first time, and the provoking sentry appeared with the utmost
+deliberation at his post, waiting to be relieved. He was allowed
+to wait. Nothing happened in the other box but an occasional
+knocking inside the door, as if the corporal and his privates
+were impatient to be let out. The clicking of the major's tools
+was heard again among the machinery; the corporal and his party,
+suddenly restored to liberty, appeared in a violent hurry, and
+spun furiously across the platform. Quick as they were, however,
+the hitherto deliberate sentry on the other side now perversely
+showed himself to be quicker still. He disappeared like lightning
+into his own premises, the door closed smartly after him, the
+corporal and his privates dashed themselves headlong against it
+for the second time, and the major, appearing again round the
+corner of the clock, asked his audience innocently "if they would
+be good enough to tell him whether anything had gone wrong?"
+
+The fantastic absurdity of the exhibition, heightened by Major
+Milroy's grave inquiry at the end of it, was so irresistibly
+ludicrous that the visitors shouted with laughter; and even Miss
+Milroy, with all her consideration for her father's sensitive
+pride in his clock, could not restrain herself from joining in
+the merriment which the catastrophe of the puppets had provoked.
+But there are limits even to the license of laughter; and these
+limits were ere long so outrageously overstepped by one of the
+little party as to have the effect of almost instantly silencing
+the other two. The fever of Midwinter's false spirits flamed out
+into sheer delirium as the performance of the puppets came to
+an end. His paroxysms of laughter followed each other with such
+convulsive violence that Miss Milroy started back from him in
+alarm, and even the patient major turned on him with a look which
+said plainly, Leave the room! Allan, wisely impulsive for once
+in his life, seized Midwinter by the arm, and dragged him out by
+main force into the garden, and thence into the park beyond.
+
+"Good heavens! what has come to you!" he exclaimed, shrinking
+back from the tortured face before him, as he stopped and looked
+close at it for the first time.
+
+For the moment, Midwinter was incapable of answering. The
+hysterical paroxysm was passing from one extreme to the other.
+He leaned against a tree, sobbing and gasping for breath, and
+stretched out his hand in mute entreaty to Allan to give him
+time.
+
+"You had better not have nursed me through my fever," he said,
+faintly, as soon as he could speak. "I'm mad and miserable,
+Allan; I have never recovered it. Go back and ask them to forgive
+me; I am ashamed to go and ask them myself. I can't tell how it
+happened; I can only ask your pardon and theirs." He turned aside
+his head quickly so as to conceal his face. "Don't stop here," he
+said; "don't look at me; I shall soon get over it." Allan still
+hesitated, and begged hard to be allowed to take him back to the
+house. It was useless. "You break my heart with your kindness,"
+he burst out, passionately. "For God's sake, leave me by my
+self!"
+
+Allan went back to she cottage, and pleaded there for indulgence
+to Midwinter, with an earnestness and simplicity which raised him
+immensely in the major's estimation, but which totally failed to
+produce the same favorable impression on Miss Milroy. Little as
+she herself suspected it, she was fond enough of Allan already to
+be jealous of Allan's friend.
+
+"How excessively absurd!" she thought, pettishly. "As if either
+papa or I considered such a person of the slightest consequence!"
+
+"You will kindly suspend your opinion, won't you, Major Milroy?"
+said Allan, in his hearty way, at parting.
+
+"With the greatest pleasure! " replied the major, cordially
+shaking hands.
+
+"And you, too, Miss Milroy?" added Allan.
+
+Miss Milroy made a mercilessly formal bow. "_My_ opinion, Mr.
+Armadale, is not of the slightest consequence."
+
+Allan left the cottage, sorely puzzled to account for Miss
+Milroy's sudden coolness toward him. His grand idea of
+conciliating the whole neighborhood by becoming a married man
+underwent some modification as he closed the garden gate behind
+him. The virtue called Prudence and the Squire of Thorpe Ambrose
+became personally acquainted with each other, on this occasion,
+for the first time; and Allan, entering headlong as usual on the
+high-road to moral improvement, actually decided on doing nothing
+in a hurry!
+
+A man who is entering on a course of reformation ought, if
+virtue is its own reward, to be a man engaged in an essentially
+inspiriting pursuit. But virtue is not always its own reward; and
+the way that leads to reformation is remarkably ill-lighted for
+so respectable a thoroughfare. Allan seemed to have caught the
+infection of his friend's despondency. As he walked home, he,
+too, began to doubt--in his widely different way, and for his
+widely different reasons--whether the life at Thorpe Ambrose was
+promising quite as fairly for the future as it had promised at
+first.
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE PLOT THICKENS.
+
+Two messages were waiting for Allan when he returned to the
+house. One had been left by Midwinter. "He had gone out for a
+long walk, and Mr. Armadale was not to be alarmed if he did not
+get back till late in the day." The other message had been left
+by "a person from Mr. Pedgift's office," who had called,
+according to appointment, while the two gentlemen were away at
+the major's. "Mr. Bashwood's respects, and he would have the
+honor of waiting on Mr. Armadale again in the course of the
+evening."
+
+Toward five o'clock, Midwinter returned, pale and silent. Allan
+hastened to assure him that his peace was made at the cottage;
+and then, to change the subject, mentioned Mr. Bashwood's
+message. Midwinter's mind was so preoccupied or so languid that
+he hardly seemed to remember the name. Allan was obliged to
+remind him that Bashwood was the elderly clerk, whom Mr. Pedgift
+had sent to be his instructor in the duties of the steward's
+office. He listened without making any remark, and withdrew to
+his room, to rest till dinner-time.
+
+Left by himself, Allan went into the library, to try if he could
+while away the time over a book.
+
+He took many volumes off the shelves, and put a few of them back
+again; and there he ended. Miss Milroy contrived in some
+mysterious manner to get, in this case, between the reader and
+the books. Her formal bow and her merciless parting speech dwelt,
+try how he might to forget them, on Allan's mind; he began to
+grow more and more anxious as the idle hour wore on, to recover
+his lost place in her favor. To call again that day at the
+cottage, and ask if he had been so unfortunate as to offend her,
+was impossible. To put the question in writing with the needful
+nicety of expression proved, on trying the experiment, to be a
+task beyond his literary reach. After a turn or two up and down
+the room, with his pen in his mouth, he decided on the more
+diplomatic course (which happened, in this case, to be the
+easiest course, too), of writing to Miss Milroy as cordially as
+if nothing had happened, and of testing his position in her good
+graces by the answer that she sent him back. An invitation of
+some kind (including her father, of course, but addressed
+directly to herself) was plainly the right thing to oblige her
+to send a written reply; but here the difficulty occurred of what
+the invitation was to be. A ball was not to be thought of, in his
+present position with the resident gentry. A dinner-party, with
+no indispensable elderly lady on the premises to receive Miss
+Milroy--except Mrs. Gripper, who could only receive her in the
+kitchen--was equally out of the question. What was the invitation
+to be? Never backward, when he wanted help, in asking for it
+right and left in every available direction, Allan, feeling
+himself at the end of his own resources, coolly rang the bell,
+and astonished the servant who answered it by inquiring how the
+late family at Thorpe Ambrose used to amuse themselves, and what
+sort of invitations they were in the habit of sending to their
+friends.
+
+"The family did what the rest of the gentry did, sir," said the
+man, staring at his master in utter bewilderment. "They gave
+dinner-parties and balls. And in fine summer weather, sir, like
+this, they sometimes had lawn-parties and picnics--"
+
+"That'll do!" shouted Allan. "A picnic's just the thing to please
+her. Richard, you're an invaluable man; you may go downstairs
+again."
+
+Richard retired wondering, and Richard's master seized his ready
+pen.
+
+
+"DEAR MISS MILROY--Since I left you it has suddenly struck me
+that we might have a picnic. A little change and amusement (what
+I should call a good shaking-up, if I wasn't writing to a young
+lady) is just the thing for you, after being so long indoors
+lately in Mrs. Milroy's room. A picnic is a change, and (when the
+wine is good) amusement, too. Will you ask the major if he will
+consent to the picnic, and come? And if you have got any friends
+in the neighborhood who like a picnic, pray ask them too, for
+I have got none. It shall be your picnic, but I will provide
+everything and take everybody. You shall choose the day, and we
+will picnic where you like. I have set my heart on this picnic.
+
+"Believe me, ever yours,
+
+"ALLAN ARMADALE."
+
+
+On reading over his composition before sealing it up, Allan
+frankly acknowledged to himself, this time, that it was not quite
+faultless. " 'Picnic' comes in a little too often," he said.
+"Never mind; if she likes the idea, she won't quarrel with that."
+He sent off the letter on the spot, with strict instructions to
+the messenger to wait for a reply.
+
+In half an hour the answer came back on scented paper, without an
+erasure anywhere, fragrant to smell, and beautiful to see.
+
+The presentation of the naked truth is one of those exhibitions
+from which the native delicacy of the female mind seems
+instinctively to revolt. Never were the tables turned more
+completely than they were now turned on Allan by his fair
+correspondent. Machiavelli himself would never have suspected,
+from Miss Milroy's letter, how heartily she had repented her
+petulance to the young squire as soon as his back was turned,
+and
+how extravagantly delighted she was when his invitation was
+placed in her hands. Her letter was the composition of a model
+young lady whose emotions are all kept under parental lock and
+key, and served out for her judiciously as occasion may require.
+"Papa," appeared quite as frequently in Miss Milroy's reply as
+"picnic" had appeared in Allan's invitation. "Papa" had been as
+considerately kind as Mr. Armadale in wishing to procure her a
+little change and amusement, and had offered to forego his usual
+quiet habits and join the picnic. With "papa's" sanction,
+therefore, she accepted, with much pleasure, Mr. Armadale's
+proposal; and, at "papa's" suggestion, she would presume on Mr.
+Armadale's kindness to add two friends of theirs recently settled
+at Thorpe Ambrose, to the picnic party--a widow lady and her son;
+the latter in holy orders and in delicate health. If Tuesday next
+would suit Mr. Armadale, Tuesday next would suit "papa"--being
+the first day he could spare from repairs which were required by
+his clock. The rest, by "papa's" advice, she would beg to leave
+entirely in Mr. Armadale's hands; and, in the meantime, she would
+remain, with "papa's" compliments, Mr. Armadale's truly--ELEANOR
+MILROY."
+
+Who would ever have supposed that the writer of that letter had
+jumped for joy when Allan's invitation arrived? Who would ever
+have suspected that there was an entry already in Miss Milroy's
+diary, under that day's date, to this effect: "The sweetest,
+dearest letter from _I-know-who_; I'll never behave unkindly to
+him again as long as I live?" As for Allan, he was charmed with
+the sweet success of his maneuver. Miss Milroy had accepted his
+invitation; consequently, Miss Milroy was not offended with him.
+It was on the tip of his tongue to mention the correspondence to
+his friend when they met at dinner. But there was something in
+Midwinter's face and manner (even plain enough for Allan to see)
+which warned him to wait a little before he said anything to
+revive the painful subject of their visit to the cottage. By
+common consent they both avoided all topics connected with Thorpe
+Ambrose, not even the visit from Mr. Bashwood, which was to come
+with the evening, being referred to by either of them. All
+through the dinner they drifted further and further back into the
+old endless talk of past times about ships and sailing. When the
+butler withdrew from his attendance at table, he came downstairs
+with a nautical problem on his mind, and asked his
+fellow-servants if they any of them knew the relative merits "on
+a wind" and "off a wind" of a schooner and a brig.
+
+The two young men had sat longer at table than usual that day.
+When they went out into the garden with their cigars, the summer
+twilight fell gray and dim on lawn and flower bed, and narrowed
+round them by slow degrees the softly fading circle of the
+distant view. The dew was heavy, and, after a few minutes in the
+garden, they agreed to go back to the drier ground on the drive
+in front of the house.
+
+They were close to the turning which led into the shrubbery, when
+there suddenly glided out on them, from behind the foliage, a
+softly stepping black figure--a shadow, moving darkly through the
+dim evening light. Midwinter started back at the sight of it, and
+even the less finely strung nerves of his friend were shaken for
+the moment.
+
+"Who the devil are you?" cried Allan.
+
+The figure bared its head in the gray light, and came slowly a
+step nearer. Midwinter advanced a step on his side, and looked
+closer. It was the man of the timid manners and the mourning
+garments, of whom he had asked the way to Thorpe Ambrose where
+the three roads met.
+
+"Who are you?" repeated Allan.
+
+"I humbly beg your pardon, sir," faltered the stranger, stepping
+back again, confusedly. "The servants told me I should find Mr.
+Armadale--"
+
+"What, are you Mr. Bashwood?"
+
+"Yes, if you please, sir."
+
+"I beg your pardon for speaking to you so roughly," said Allan;
+"but the fact is, you rather startled me. My name is Armadale
+(put on your hat, pray), and this is my friend, Mr. Midwinter,
+who wants your help in the steward's office."
+
+"We hardly stand in need of an introduction," said Midwinter.
+"I met Mr. Bashwood out walking a few days since, and he was kind
+enough to direct me when I had lost my way."
+
+"Put on your hat," reiterated Allan, as Mr. Bashwood, still
+bareheaded, stood bowing speechlessly, now to one of the young
+men, and now to the other. "My good sir, put on your hat, and let
+me show you the way back to the house. Excuse me for noticing
+it," added Allan, as the man, in sheer nervous helplessness, let
+his hat fall, instead of putting it back on his head; "but you
+seem a little out of sorts; a glass of good wine will do you no
+harm before you and my friend come to business. Whereabouts did
+you meet with Mr. Bashwood, Midwinter, when you lost your way?"
+
+"I am too ignorant of the neighborhood to know. I must refer you
+to Mr. Bashwood."
+
+"Come, tell us where it was," said Allan, trying, a little too
+abruptly, to set the man at his ease, as they all three walked
+back to the house.
+
+The measure of Mr. Bashwood's constitutional timidity seemed to
+be filled to the brim by the loudness of Allan's voice and the
+bluntness of Allan's request. He ran over in the same feeble flow
+of words with which he had deluged Midwinter on the occasion when
+they first met.
+
+"It was on the road, sir," he began, addressing himself
+alternately to Allan, whom he called, "sir," and to Midwinter,
+whom he called by his name, "I mean, if you please, on the road
+to Little Gill Beck. A singular name, Mr. Midwinter, and a
+singular place; I don't mean the village; I mean the
+neighborhood--I mean the 'Broads' beyond the neighborhood.
+Perhaps you may have heard of the Norfolk Broads, sir? What they
+call lakes in other parts of England, they call Broads here. The
+Broads are quite numerous; I think they would repay a visit. You
+would have seen the first of them, Mr. Midwinter, if you had
+walked on a few miles from where I had the honor of meeting you.
+Remarkably numerous, the Broads, sir--situated between this and
+the sea. About three miles from the sea, Mr. Midwinter--about
+three miles. Mostly shallow, sir, with rivers running between
+them. Beautiful; solitary. Quite a watery country, Mr. Midwinter;
+quite separate, as it were, in itself. Parties sometimes visit
+them, sir--pleasure parties in boats. It's quite a little network
+of lakes, or, perhaps--yes, perhaps, more correctly, pools.
+There is good sport in the cold weather. The wild fowl are quite
+numerous. Yes; the Broads would repay a visit, Mr. Midwinter.
+The next time you are walking that way. The distance from here
+to Little Gill Beck, and then from Little Gill Beck to Girdler
+Broad, which is the first you come to, is altogether not more--"
+In sheer nervous inability to leave off, he would apparently
+have gone on talking of the Norfolk Broads for the rest of the
+evening, if one of his two listeners had not unceremoniously cut
+him short before he could find his way into a new sentence.
+
+"Are the Broads within an easy day's drive there and back from
+this house?" asked Allan, feeling, if they were, that the place
+for the picnic was discovered already.
+
+"Oh, yes, sir; a nice drive--quite a nice easy drive from this
+beautiful place!"
+
+They were by this time ascending the portico steps, Allan leading
+the way up, and calling to Midwinter and Mr. Bashwood to follow
+him into the library, where there was a lighted lamp.
+
+In the interval which elapsed before the wine made its
+appearance, Midwinter looked at his chance acquaintance of the
+high-road with strangely mingled feelings of compassion and
+distrust--of compassion that strengthened in spite of him;
+of distrust that persisted in diminishing, try as he might to
+encourage it to grow. There, perched comfortless on the edge of
+his chair, sat the poor broken-down, nervous wretch, in his worn
+black garments, with his watery eyes, his honest old outspoken
+wig, his miserable mohair stock, and his false teeth that were
+incapable of deceiving anybody--there he sat, politely ill at
+ease; now shrinking in the glare of the lamp, now wincing under
+the shock of Allan's sturdy voice; a man with the wrinkles of
+sixty years in his face, and the manners of a child in the
+presence of strangers; an object of pity surely, if ever there
+was a pitiable object yet!
+
+"Whatever else you're afraid of, Mr. Bashwood," cried Allan,
+pouring out a glass of wine, "don't be afraid of that! There
+isn't a headache in a hogshead of it! Make yourself comfortable;
+I'll leave you and Mr. Midwinter to talk your business over by
+yourselves. It's all in Mr. Midwinter's hands; he acts for me,
+and settles everything at his own discretion."
+
+He said those words with a cautious choice of expression very
+uncharacteristic of him, and, without further explanation, made
+abruptly for the door. Midwinter, sitting near it, noticed his
+face as he went out. Easy as the way was into Allan's favor, Mr.
+Bashwood, beyond all kind of doubt, had in some unaccountable
+manner failed to find it!
+
+The two strangely assorted companions were left together--parted
+widely, as it seemed on the surface, from any possible
+interchange of sympathy; drawn invisibly one to the other,
+nevertheless, by those magnetic similarities of temperament which
+overleap all difference of age or station, and defy all apparent
+incongruities of mind and character. From the moment when Allan
+left the room, the hidden Influence that works in darkness began
+slowly to draw the two men together, across the great social
+desert which had lain between them up to this day.
+
+Midwinter was the first to approach the subject of the interview.
+
+"May I ask," he began, "if you have been made acquainted with my
+position here, and if you know why it is that I require your
+assistance?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood--still hesitating and still timid, but manifestly
+relieved by Allan's departure--sat further back in his chair, and
+ventured on fortifying himself with a modest little sip of wine.
+
+"Yes, sir," he replied; "Mr. Pedgift informed me of all--at least
+I think I may say so--of all the circumstances. I am to instruct,
+or perhaps, I ought to say to advise--"
+
+"No, Mr. Bashwood; the first word was the best word of the two. I
+am quite ignorant of the duties which Mr. Armadale's kindness has
+induced him to intrust to me. If I understand right, there can be
+no question of your capacity to instruct me, for you once filled
+a steward's situation yourself. May I inquire where it was?"
+
+"At Sir John Mellowship's, sir, in West Norfolk. Perhaps you
+would like--I have got it with me--to see my testimonial?
+Sir John might have dealt more kindly with me; but I have no
+complaint to make; it's all done and over now!" His watery eyes
+looked more watery still, and the trembling in his hands spread
+to his lips as he produced an old dingy letter from his
+pocket-book and laid it open on the table.
+
+The testimonial was very briefly and very coldly expressed, but
+it was conclusive as far as it went. Sir John considered it only
+right to say that he had no complaint to make of any want of
+capacity or integrity in his steward. If Mr. Bashwood's domestic
+position had been compatible with the continued performance of
+his duties on the estate, Sir John would have been glad to keep
+him. As it was, embarrassments caused by the state of Mr.
+Bashwood's personal affairs had rendered it undesirable that he
+should continue in Sir John's service; and on that ground, and
+that only, his employer and he had parted. Such was Sir John's
+testimony to Mr. Bashwood's character. As Midwinter read the last
+lines, he thought of another testimonial, still in his own
+possession--of the written character which they had given him
+at the school, when they turned their sick usher adrift in the
+world. His superstition (distrusting all new events and all new
+faces at Thorpe Ambrose) still doubted the man before him as
+obstinately as ever. But when he now tried to put those doubts
+into words, his heart upbraided him, and he laid the letter on
+the table in silence.
+
+The sudden pause in the conversation appeared to startle Mr.
+Bashwood. He comforted himself with another little sip of wine,
+and, leaving the letter untouched, burst irrepressibly into
+words, as if the silence was quite unendurable to him.
+
+"I am ready to answer any question, sir," he began. "Mr. Pedgift
+told me that I must answer questions, because I was applying for
+a place of trust. Mr. Pedgift said neither you nor Mr. Armadale
+was likely to think the testimonial sufficient of itself. Sir
+John doesn't say--he might have put it more kindly, but I don't
+complain--Sir John doesn't say what the troubles were that lost
+me my place. Perhaps you might wish to know--" He stopped
+confusedly, looked at the testimonial, and said no more.
+
+"If no interests but mine were concerned in the matter," rejoined
+Midwinter, "the testimonial would, I assure you, be quite enough
+to satisfy me. But while I am learning my new duties, the person
+who teaches me will be really and truly the steward of my
+friend's estate. I am very unwilling to ask you to speak on what
+may be a painful subject, and I am sadly inexperienced in putting
+such questions as I ought to put; but, perhaps, in Mr. Armadale's
+interests, I ought to know something more, either from yourself,
+or from Mr. Pedgift, if you prefer it--" He, too, stopped
+confusedly, looked at the testimonial, and said no more.
+
+There was another moment of silence. The night was warm, and Mr.
+Bashwood, among his other misfortunes, had the deplorable
+infirmity of perspiring in the palms of the hands. He took out a
+miserable little cotton pocket-handkerchief, rolled it up into a
+ball, and softly dabbed it to and fro, from one hand to the
+other, with the regularity of a pendulum. Performed by other men,
+under other circumstances, the action might have been ridiculous.
+Performed by this man, at the crisis of the interview, the action
+was horrible.
+
+"Mr. Pedgift's time is too valuable, sir, to be wasted on me," he
+said. "I will mention what ought to be mentioned myself--if you
+will please to allow me. I have been unfortunate in my family.
+It is very hard to bear, though it seems not much to tell. My
+wife--" One of his hands closed fast on the pocket-handkerchief;
+he moistened his dry lips, struggled with himself, and went on.
+
+"My wife, sir," he resumed, "stood a little in my way; she did
+me (I am afraid I must confess) some injury with Sir John. Soon
+after I got the steward's situation, she contracted--she
+took--she fell into habits (I hardly know how to say it) of
+drinking. I couldn't break her of it, and I couldn't always
+conceal it from Sir John's knowledge. She broke out, and--and
+tried his patience once or twice, when he came to my office on
+business. Sir John excused it, not very kindly; but still he
+excused it. I don't complain of Sir John! I don't complain now
+of my wife." He pointed a trembling finger at his miserable
+crape-covered beaver hat on the floor. "I'm in mourning for her,"
+he said, faintly. "She died nearly a year ago, in the county
+asylum here."
+
+His mouth began to work convulsively. He took up the glass of
+wine at his side, and, instead of sipping it this time, drained
+it to the bottom. "I'm not much used to wine, sir," he said,
+conscious, apparently, of the flush that flew into his face as he
+drank, and still observant of the obligations of politeness amid
+all the misery of the recollections that he was calling up.
+
+"I beg, Mr. Bashwood, you will not distress yourself by telling
+me any more," said Midwinter, recoiling from any further sanction
+on his part of a disclosure which had already bared the sorrows
+of the unhappy man before him to the quick.
+
+"I'm much obliged to you, sir," replied Mr. Bashwood. "But if
+I don't detain you too long, and if you will please to remember
+that Mr. Pedgift's directions to me were very particular--and,
+besides, I only mentioned my late wife because if she hadn't
+tried Sir John's patience to begin with, things might have turned
+out differently--" He paused, gave up the disjointed sentence
+in which he had involved himself, and tried another. "I had only
+two children, sir," he went on, advancing to a new point in his
+narrative, "a boy and a girl. The girl died when she was a baby.
+My son lived to grow up; and it was my son who lost me my place.
+I did my best for him; I got him into a respectable office in
+London. They wouldn't take him without security. I'm afraid it
+was imprudent; but I had no rich friends to help me, and I became
+security. My boy turned out badly, sir. He--perhaps you will
+kindly understand what I mean, if I say he behaved dishonestly.
+His employers consented, at my entreaty, to let him off without
+prosecuting. I begged very hard--I was fond of my son James--and
+I took him home, and did my best to reform him. He wouldn't stay
+with me; he went away again to London; he--I beg your pardon,
+sir! I'm afraid I'm confusing things; I'm afraid I'm wandering
+from the point."
+
+"No, no," said Midwinter, kindly. "If you think it right to tell
+me this sad story, tell it in your own way. Have you seen your
+son since he left you to go to London?"
+
+"No, sir. He's in London still, for all I know. When I last heard
+of him, he was getting his bread--not very creditably. He was
+employed, under the inspector, at the Private Inquiry Office in
+Shadyside Place."
+
+He spoke those words--apparently (as events then stood) the most
+irrelevant to the matter in hand that had yet escaped him;
+actually (as events were soon to be) the most vitally important
+that he had uttered yet--he spoke those words absently, looking
+about him in confusion, and trying vainly to recover the lost
+thread of his narrative.
+
+Midwinter compassionately helped him. "You were telling me,"
+he said, "that your son had been the cause of your losing your
+place. How did that happen?"
+
+"In this way, sir," said Mr. Bashwood, getting back again
+excitedly into the right train of thought. "His employers
+consented to let him off; but they came down on his security; and
+I was the man. I suppose they were not to blame; the security
+covered their loss. I couldn't pay it all out of my savings; I
+had to borrow--on the word of a man, sir, I couldn't help it--I
+had to borrow. My creditor pressed me; it seemed cruel, but, if
+he wanted the money, I suppose it was only just. I was sold out
+of house and home. I dare say other gentlemen would have said
+what Sir John said; I dare say most people would have refused
+to keep a steward who had had the bailiffs after him, and his
+furniture sold in the neighborhood. That was how it ended, Mr.
+Midwinter. I needn't detain you any longer--here is Sir John's
+address, if you wish to apply to him." Midwinter generously
+refused to receive the address.
+
+"Thank you kindly, sir," said Mr. Bashwood, getting tremulously
+on his legs. "There is nothing more, I think, except--except that
+Mr. Pedgift will speak for me, if you wish to inquire into my
+conduct in his service. I'm very much indebted to Mr. Pedgift;
+he's a little rough with me sometimes, but, if he hadn't taken me
+into his office, I think I should have gone to the workhouse when
+I left Sir John, I was so broken down." He picked up his dingy
+old hat from the floor. "I won't intrude any longer, sir. I shall
+be happy to call again if you wish to have time to consider
+before you decide-"
+
+"I want no time to consider after what you have told me," replied
+Midwinter, warmly, his memory busy, while he spoke, with the time
+when _he_ had told _his_ story to Mr. Brock, and was waiting for
+a generous word in return, as the man before him was waiting now.
+"To-day is Saturday," he went on. "Can you come and give me my
+first lesson on Monday morning? I beg your pardon," he added,
+interrupting Mr. Bashwood's profuse expressions of
+acknowledgment, and stopping him on his way out of the room;
+"there is one thing we ought to settle, ought we not? We haven't
+spoken yet about your own interest in this matter; I mean, about
+the terms." He referred, a little confusedly, to the pecuniary
+part of the subject. Mr. Bashwood (getting nearer and nearer to
+the door) answered him more confusedly still.
+
+"Anything, sir--anything you think right. I won't intrude any
+longer; I'll leave it to you and Mr. Armadale."
+
+"I will send for Mr. Armadale, if you like," said Midwinter,
+following him into the hall. "But I am afraid he has as little
+experience in matters of this kind as I have. Perhaps, if you see
+no objection, we might be guided by Mr. Pedgift?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood caught eagerly at the last suggestion, pushing his
+retreat, while he spoke, as far as the front door. "Yes, sir--oh,
+yes, yes! nobody better than Mr. Pedgift. Don't--pray don't
+disturb Mr. Armadale!" His watery eyes looked quite wild with
+nervous alarm as he turned round for a moment in the light of the
+hall lamp to make that polite request. If sending for Allan had
+been equivalent to unchaining a ferocious watch-dog, Mr. Bashwood
+could hardly have been more anxious to stop the proceeding. "I
+wish you kindly good-evening, sir," he went on, getting out to
+the steps. "I'm much obliged to you. I will be scrupulously
+punctual on Monday morning--I hope--I think--I'm sure you will
+soon learn everything I can teach you. It's not difficult--oh
+dear, no--not difficult at all! I wish you kindly good-evening,
+sir. A beautiful night; yes, indeed, a beautiful night for a walk
+home."
+
+With those words, all dropping out of his lips one on the top of
+the other, and without noticing, in his agony of embarrassment at
+effecting his departure, Midwinter's outstretched hand, he went
+noiselessly down the steps, and was lost in the darkness of the
+night.
+
+As Midwinter turned to re-enter the house, the dining-room door
+opened and his friend met him in the hall.
+
+"Has Mr. Bashwood gone?" asked Allan.
+
+"He has gone," replied Midwinter, "after telling me a very sad
+story, and leaving me a little ashamed of myself for having
+doubted him without any just cause. I have arranged that he is
+to give me my first lesson in the steward's office on Monday
+morning."
+
+"All right," said Allan. "You needn't be afraid, old boy, of my
+interrupting you over your studies. I dare say I'm wrong--but I
+don't like Mr. Bashwood."
+
+"I dare say _I'm_ wrong," retorted the other, a little
+petulantly. "I do."
+
+
+The Sunday morning found Midwinter in the park, waiting to
+intercept the postman, on the chance of his bringing more news
+from Mr. Brock.
+
+At the customary hour the man made his appearance, and placed the
+expected letter in Midwinter's hands. He opened it, far away from
+all fear of observation this time, and read these lines:
+
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--I write more for the purpose of quieting your
+anxiety than because I have anything definite to say. In my last
+hurried letter I had no time to tell you that the elder of the
+two women whom I met in the Gardens had followed me, and spoken
+to me in the street. I believe I may characterize what she said
+(without doing her any injustice) as a tissue of falsehoods from
+beginning to end. At any rate, she confirmed me in the suspicion
+that some underhand proceeding is on foot, of which Allan is
+destined to be the victim, and that the prime mover in the
+conspiracy is the vile woman who helped his mother's marriage and
+who hastened his mother's death.
+
+"Feeling this conviction, I have not hesitated to do, for Allan's
+sake, what I would have done for no other creature in the world.
+I have left my hotel, and have installed myself (with my old
+servant Robert) in a house opposite the house to which I traced
+the two women. We are alternately on the watch (quite
+unsuspected, I am certain, by the people opposite) day and night.
+All my feelings, as a gentleman and a clergyman, revolt from such
+an occupation as I am now engaged in; but there is no other
+choice. I must either do this violence to my own self-respect, or
+I must leave Allan, with his easy nature, and in his assailable
+position, to defend himself against a wretch who is prepared, I
+firmly believe, to take the most unscrupulous advantage of his
+weakness and his youth. His mother's dying entreaty has never
+left my memory; and, God help me, I am now degrading myself in my
+own eyes in consequence.
+
+"There has been some reward already for the sacrifice. This day
+(Saturday) I have gained an immense advantage--I have at last
+seen the woman's face. She went out with her veil down as before;
+and Robert kept her in view, having my instructions, if she
+returned to the house, not to follow her back to the door. She
+did return to the house; and the result of my precaution was,
+as I had expected, to throw her off her guard. I saw her face
+unveiled at the window, and afterward again in the balcony. If
+any occasion should arise for describing her particularly, you
+shall have the description. At present I need only say that she
+looks the full age (five-and-thirty) at which you estimated her,
+and that she is by no means so handsome a woman as I had (I
+hardly know why) expected to see.
+
+"This is all I can now tell you. If nothing more happens by
+Monday or Tuesday next, I shall have no choice but to apply to my
+lawyers for assistance; though I am most unwilling to trust this
+delicate and dangerous matter in other hands than mine. Setting
+my own feelings however, out of the question, the business which
+has been the cause of my journey to London is too important to be
+trifled with much longer as I am trifling with it now. In any and
+every case, depend on my keeping you informed of the progress of
+events, and believe me yours truly,
+
+"DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+
+Midwinter secured the letter as he had secured the letter that
+preceded it--side by side in his pocket-book with the narrative
+of Allan's Dream.
+
+"How many days more?" he asked himself, as he went back to the
+house. "How many days more?"
+
+Not many. The time he was waiting for was a time close at hand.
+
+
+Monday came, and brought Mr. Bashwood, punctual to the appointed
+hour. Monday came, and found Allan immersed in his preparations
+for the picnic. He held a series of interviews, at home and
+abroad, all through the day. He transacted business with Mrs.
+Gripper, with the butler, and with the coachman, in their three
+several departments of eating, drinking, and driving. He went to
+the town to consult his professional advisers on the subject of
+the Broads, and to invite both the lawyers, father and son (in
+the absence of anybody else in the neighborhood whom he could
+ask), to join the picnic. Pedgift Senior (in his department)
+supplied general information, but begged to be excused from
+appearing at the picnic, on the score of business engagements.
+Pedgift Junior (in his department) added all the details; and,
+casting business engagements to the winds, accepted the
+invitation with the greatest pleasure. Returning from the
+lawyer's office, Allan's next proceeding was to go to the major's
+cottage and obtain Miss Milroy's approval of the proposed
+locality for the pleasure party. This object accomplished, he
+returned to his own house, to meet the last difficulty now left
+to encounter--the difficulty of persuading Midwinter to join the
+expedition to the Broads.
+
+On first broaching the subject, Allan found his friend
+impenetrably resolute to remain at home. Midwinter's natural
+reluctance to meet the major and his daughter after what had
+happened at the cottage, might probably have been overcome. But
+Midwinter's determination not to allow Mr. Bashwood's course of
+instruction to be interrupted was proof against every effort that
+could be made to shake it. After exerting his influence to the
+utmost, Allan was obliged to remain contented with a compromise.
+Midwinter promised, not very willingly, to join the party toward
+evening, at the place appointed for a gypsy tea-making, which was
+to close the proceedings of the day. To this extent he would
+consent to take the opportunity of placing himself on a friendly
+footing with the Milroys. More he could not concede, even to
+Allan's persuasion, and for more it would he useless to ask.
+
+The day of the picnic came. The lovely morning, and the cheerful
+bustle of preparation for the expedition, failed entirely to
+tempt Midwinter into altering his resolution. At the regular hour
+he left the breakfast-table to join Mr. Bashwood in the steward's
+office. The two were quietly closeted over the books, at the back
+of the house, while the packing for the picnic went on in front.
+Young Pedgift (short in stature, smart in costume, and
+self-reliant in manner) arrived some little time before the hour
+for starting, to revise all the arrangements, and to make any
+final improvements which his local knowledge might suggest. Allan
+and he were still busy in consultation when the first hitch
+occurred in the proceedings. The woman-servant from the cottage
+was reported to be waiting below for an answer to a note from her
+young mistress, which was placed in Allan's hands.
+
+On this occasion Miss Milroy's emotions had apparently got the
+better of her sense of propriety. The tone of the letter was
+feverish, and the handwriting wandered crookedly up and down in
+deplorable freedom from all proper restraint.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Armadale" (wrote the major's daughter), "such a
+misfortune! What _are_ we to do? Papa has got a letter from
+grandmamma this morning about the new governess. Her reference
+has answered all the questions, and she's ready to come at the
+shortest notice. Grandmamma thinks (how provoking!) the sooner
+the better; and she says we may expect her--I mean the
+governess--either to-day or to-morrow. Papa says (he _will_ be so
+absurdly considerate to everybody!) that we can't allow Miss
+Gwilt to come here (if she comes to-day) and find nobody at home
+to receive her. What is to be done? I am ready to cry with
+vexation. I have got the worst possible impression (though
+grandmamma says she is a charming person) of Miss Gwilt. _Can_
+you suggest something, dear Mr. Armadale? I'm sure papa would
+give way if you could. Don't stop to write; send me a message
+back. I have got a new hat for the picnic; and oh, the agony of
+not knowing whether I am to keep it on or take it off. Yours
+truly, E. M."
+
+"The devil take Miss Gwilt!" said Allan, staring at his legal
+adviser in a state of helpless consternation.
+
+"With all my heart, sir--I don't wish to interfere," remarked
+Pedgift Junior. "May I ask what's the matter?"
+
+Allan told him. Mr. Pedgift the younger might have his faults,
+but a want of quickness of resource was not among them.
+
+"There's a way out of the difficulty, Mr. Armadale," he said. "If
+the governess comes today, let's have her at the picnic."
+
+Allan's eyes opened wide in astonishment.
+
+"All the horses and carriages in the Thorpe Ambrose stables are
+not wanted for this small party of ours," proceeded Pedgift
+Junior. "Of course not! Very good. If Miss Gwilt comes to-day,
+she can't possibly get here before five o'clock. Good again. You
+order an open carriage to be waiting at the major's door at that
+time, Mr. Armadale, and I'll give the man his directions where to
+drive to. When the governess comes to the cottage, let her find
+a nice little note of apology (along with the cold fowl, or
+whatever else they give her after her journey) begging her to
+join us at the picnic, and putting a carriage at her own sole
+disposal to take her there. Gad, sir!" said young Pedgift, gayly,
+"she _must_ be a Touchy One if she thinks herself neglected after
+that!"
+
+"Capital!" cried Allan. "She shall have every attention. I'll
+give her the pony-chaise and the white harness, and she shall
+drive herself, if she likes."
+
+He scribbled a line to relieve Miss Milroy's apprehensions, and
+gave the necessary orders for the pony-chaise. Ten minutes later,
+the carriages for the pleasure party were at the door.
+
+"Now we've taken all this trouble about her," said Allan,
+reverting to the governess as they left the house, "I wonder, if
+she does come today, whether we shall see her at the picnic!"
+
+"Depends, entirely on her age, sir," remarked young Pedgift,
+pronouncing judgment with the happy confidence in himself which
+eminently distinguished him. "If she's an old one, she'll be
+knocked up with the journey, and she'll stick to the cold fowl
+and the cottage. If she's a young one, either I know nothing of
+women, or the pony in the white harness will bring her to the
+picnic."
+
+They started for the major's cottage.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE NORFOLK BROADS.
+
+The little group gathered together in Major Milroy's parlor
+to wait for the carriages from Thorpe Ambrose would hardly
+have conveyed the idea, to any previously uninstructed person
+introduced among them, of a party assembled in expectation
+of a picnic. They were almost dull enough, as far as outward
+appearances went, to have been a party assembled in expectation
+of a marriage.
+
+Even Miss Milroy herself, though conscious, of looking her best
+in her bright muslin dress and her gayly feathered new hat, was
+at this inauspicious moment Miss Milroy under a cloud. Although
+Allan's note had assured her, in Allan's strongest language, that
+the one great object of reconciling the governess's arrival with
+the celebration of the picnic was an object achieved, the doubt
+still remained whether the plan proposed--whatever it might
+be--would meet with her father's approval. In a word, Miss Milroy
+declined to feel sure of her day's pleasure until the carriage
+made its appearance and took her from the door. The major, on his
+side, arrayed for the festive occasion in a tight blue frock-coat
+which he had not worn for years, and threatened with a whole long
+day of separation from his old friend and comrade the clock, was
+a man out of his element, if ever such a man existed yet. As for
+the friends who had been asked at Allan's request--the widow lady
+(otherwise Mrs. Pentecost) and her son (the Reverend Samuel) in
+delicate health--two people less capable, apparently of adding to
+the hilarity of the day could hardly have been discovered in the
+length and breadth of all England. A young man who plays his part
+in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with
+a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of
+virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have
+at a picnic. An old lady afflicted with deafness, whose one
+inexhaustible subject of interest is the subject of her son, and
+who (on the happily rare occasions when that son opens his lips)
+asks everybody eagerly, "What does my boy say?" is a person to be
+pitied in respect of her infirmities, and a person to be admired
+in respect of her maternal devotedness, but not a person, if the
+thing could possibly be avoided, to take to a picnic. Such a man,
+nevertheless, was the Reverend Samuel Pentecost, and such a woman
+was the Reverend Samuel's mother; and in the dearth of any other
+producible guests, there they were, engaged to eat, drink, and be
+merry for the day at Mr. Armadale's pleasure party to the Norfolk
+Broads.
+
+The arrival of Allan, with his faithful follower, Pedgift Junior,
+at his heels, roused the flagging spirits of the party at the
+cottage. The plan for enabling the governess to join the picnic,
+if she arrived that day, satisfied even Major Milroy's anxiety
+to show all proper attention to the lady who was coming into
+his house. After writing the necessary note of apology and
+invitation, and addressing it in her very best handwriting to
+the new governess, Miss Milroy ran upstairs to say good-by to
+her mother, and returned with a smiling face and a side look of
+relief directed at her father, to announce that there was nothing
+now to keep any of them a moment longer indoors. The company at
+once directed their steps to the garden gate, and were there met
+face to face by the second great difficulty of the day. How were
+the six persons of the picnic to be divided between the two open
+carriages that were in waiting for them?
+
+Here, again, Pedgift Junior exhibited his invaluable faculty of
+contrivance. This highly cultivated young man possessed in an
+eminent degree an accomplishment more or less peculiar to all
+the young men of the age we live in: he was perfectly capable
+of taking his pleasure without forgetting his business. Such a
+client as the Master of Thorpe Ambrose fell but seldom in his
+father's way, and to pay special but unobtrusive attention to
+Allan all through the day was the business of which young
+Pedgift, while proving himself to be the life and soul of the
+picnic, never once lost sight from the beginning of the
+merry-making to the end. He had detected the state of affairs
+between Miss Milroy and Allan at glance, and he at once provided
+for his client's inclinations in that quarter by offering, in
+virtue of his local knowledge, to lead the way in the first
+carriage, and by asking Major Milroy and the curate if they would
+do him the honor of accompanying him.
+
+"We shall pass a very interesting place to a military man, sir,"
+said young Pedgift, addressing the major, with his happy and
+unblushing confidence--"the remains of a Roman encampment. And my
+father, sir, who is a subscriber," proceeded this rising lawyer,
+turning to the curate, "wished me to ask your opinion of the new
+Infant School buildings at Little Gill Beck. Would you kindly
+give it me as we go along?" He opened the carriage door, and
+helped in the major and the curate before they could either of
+them start any difficulties. The necessary result followed. Allan
+and Miss Milroy rode together in the same carriage, with the
+extra convenience of a deaf old lady in attendance to keep the
+squire's compliments within the necessary limits.
+
+Never yet had Allan enjoyed such an interview with Miss Milroy as
+the interview he now obtained on the road to the Broads.
+
+The dear old lady, after a little anecdote or two on the subject
+of her son, did the one thing wanting to secure the perfect
+felicity of her two youthful companions: she became considerately
+blind for the occasion, as well as deaf. A quarter of an hour
+after the carriage left the major's cottage, the poor old soul,
+reposing on snug cushions, and fanned by a fine summer air, fell
+peaceably asleep. Allan made love, and Miss Milroy sanctioned
+the manufacture of that occasionally precious article of human
+commerce, sublimely indifferent on both sides to a solemn bass
+accompaniment on two notes, played by the curate's mother's
+unsuspecting nose. The only interruption to the love-making (the
+snoring, being a thing more grave and permanent in its nature,
+was not interrupted at all) came at intervals from the carriage
+ahead. Not satisfied with having the major's Roman encampment and
+the curate's Infant Schools on his mind, Pedgift Junior rose
+erect from time to time in his place, and, respectfully hailing
+the hindmost vehicle, directed Allan's attention, in a shrill
+tenor voice, and with an excellent choice of language, to objects
+of interest on the road. The only way to quiet him was to answer,
+which Allan invariably did by shouting back, "Yes, beautiful,"
+upon which young Pedgift disappeared again in the recesses of the
+leading carriage, and took up the Romans and the Infants where he
+had left them last.
+
+The scene through which the picnic party was now passing merited
+far more attention than it received either from Allan or Allan's
+friends.
+
+
+An hour's steady driving from the major's cottage had taken young
+Armadale and his guests beyond the limits of Midwinter's solitary
+walk, and was now bringing them nearer and nearer to one of
+the strangest and loveliest aspects of nature which the inland
+landscape, not of Norfolk only, but of all England, can show.
+Little by little the face of the country began to change as
+the carriages approached the remote and lonely district of the
+Broads. The wheat fields and turnip fields became perceptibly
+fewer, and the fat green grazing grounds on either side grew
+wider and wider in their smooth and sweeping range. Heaps of dry
+rushes and reeds, laid up for the basket-maker and the thatcher,
+began to appear at the road-side. The old gabled cottages of the
+early part of the drive dwindled and disappeared, and huts with
+mud walls rose in their place. With the ancient church towers and
+the wind and water mills, which had hitherto been the only lofty
+objects seen over the low marshy flat, there now rose all round
+the horizon, gliding slow and distant behind fringes of pollard
+willows, the sails of invisible boats moving on invisible waters.
+All the strange and startling anomalies presented by an inland
+agricultural district, isolated from other districts by its
+intricate surrounding network of pools and streams--holding
+its communications and carrying its produce by water instead
+of by land--began to present themselves in closer and closer
+succession. Nets appeared on cottage pailings; little
+flat-bottomed boats lay strangely at rest among the flowers in
+cottage gardens; farmers' men passed to and fro clad in composite
+costume of the coast and the field, in sailors' hats, and
+fishermen's boots, and plowmen's smocks; and even yet the
+low-lying labyrinth of waters, embosomed in its mystery of
+solitude, was a hidden labyrinth still. A minute more, and
+the carriages took a sudden turn from the hard high-road into
+a little weedy lane. The wheels ran noiseless on the damp and
+spongy ground. A lonely outlying cottage appeared with its litter
+of nets and boats. A few yards further on, and the last morsel of
+firm earth suddenly ended in a tiny creek and quay. One turn more
+to the end of the quay--and there, spreading its great sheet of
+water, far and bright and smooth, on the right hand and the
+left--there, as pure in its spotless blue, as still in its
+heavenly peacefulness, as the summer sky above it, was the first
+of the Norfolk Broads.
+
+The carriages stopped, the love-making broke off, and the
+venerable Mrs. Pentecost, recovering the use of her senses at a
+moment's notice, fixed her eyes sternly on Allan the instant she
+woke.
+
+"I see in your face, Mr. Armadale," said the old lady, sharply,
+"that you think I have been asleep."
+
+The consciousness of guilt acts differently on the two sexes. In
+nine cases out of ten, it is a much more manageable consciousness
+with a woman than with a man. All the confusion, on this
+occasion, was on the man's side. While Allan reddened and looked
+embarrassed, the quick-witted Miss Milroy instantly embraced
+the old lady with a burst of innocent laughter. "He is quite
+incapable, dear Mrs. Pentecost," said the little hypocrite,
+"of anything so ridiculous as thinking you have been asleep!"
+
+"All I wish Mr. Armadale to know," pursued the old lady, still
+suspicious of Allan, "is, that my head being giddy, I am obliged
+to close my eyes in a carriage. Closing the eyes, Mr. Armadale,
+is one thing, and going to sleep is another. Where is my son?"
+
+The Reverend Samuel appeared silently at the carriage door, and
+assisted his mother to get out ("Did you enjoy the drive, Sammy?"
+asked the old lady. "Beautiful scenery, my dear, wasn't it?")
+Young Pedgift, on whom the arrangements for exploring the Broads
+devolved, hustled about, giving his orders to the boatman. Major
+Milroy, placid and patient, sat apart on an overturned punt, and
+privately looked at his watch. Was it past noon already? More
+than an hour past. For the first time, for many a long year, the
+famous clock at home had struck in an empty workshop. Time had
+lifted his wonderful scythe, and the corporal and his men had
+relieved guard, with no master's eye to watch their performances,
+with no master's hand to encourage them to do their best. The
+major sighed as he put his watch back in his pocket. "I'm afraid
+I'm too old for this sort of thing," thought the good man,
+looking about him dreamily. "I don't find I enjoy it as much as I
+thought I should. When are we going on the water, I wonder?
+Where's Neelie?"
+
+Neelie--more properly Miss Milroy--was behind one of the
+carriages with the promoter of the picnic. They were immersed in
+the interesting subject of their own Christian names, and Allan
+was as near a pointblank proposal of marriage as it is well
+possible for a thoughtless young gentleman of two-and-twenty
+to be.
+
+"Tell me the truth," said Miss Milroy, with her eyes modestly
+riveted on the ground. "When you first knew what my name was,
+you didn't like it, did you?"
+
+"I like everything that belongs to you," rejoined Allan,
+vigorously. "I think Eleanor is a beautiful name; and yet, I
+don't know why, I think the major made an improvement when he
+changed it to Neelie."
+
+"I can tell you why, Mr. Armadale," said the major's daughter,
+with great gravity. 'There are some unfortunate people in this
+world whose names are--how can I express it?--whose names are
+misfits. Mine is a misfit. I don't blame my parents, for of
+course it was impossible to know when I was a baby how I should
+grow up. But as things are, I and my name don't fit each other.
+When you hear a young lady called Eleanor, you think of a tall,
+beautiful, interesting creature directly--the very opposite of
+_me_! With my personal appearance, Eleanor sounds ridiculous;
+and Neelie, as you yourself remarked, is just the thing. No! no!
+don't say any more; I'm tired of the subject. I've got another
+name in my head, if we must speak of names, which is much better
+worth talking about than mine."
+
+She stole a glance at her companion which said plainly enough,
+"The name is yours." Allan advanced a step nearer to her, and
+lowered his voice, without the slightest necessity, to a
+mysterious whisper. Miss Milroy instantly resumed her
+investigation of the ground. She looked at it with such
+extraordinary interest that a geologist might have suspected
+her of scientific flirtation with the superficial strata.
+
+"What name are you thinking of?" asked Allan.
+
+Miss Milroy addressed her answer, in the form of a remark, to
+the superficial strata--and let them do what they liked with it,
+in their capacity of conductors of sound. "If I had been a man,"
+she said, "I should so like to have been called Allan!"
+
+She felt his eyes on her as she spoke, and, turning her head
+aside, became absorbed in the graining of the panel at the back
+of the carriage. "How beautiful it is!" she exclaimed, with a
+sudden outburst of interest in the vast subject of varnish.
+"I wonder how they do it?"
+
+Man persists, and woman yields. Allan declined to shift the
+ground from love-making to coach-making. Miss Milroy dropped
+the subject.
+
+"Call me by my name, if you really like it," he whispered,
+persuasively. "Call me 'Allan' for once; just to try."
+
+She hesitated with a heightened color and a charming smile,
+and shook her head. "I couldn't just yet," she answered,
+softly.
+
+"May I call you Neelie? Is it too soon?"
+
+She looked at him again, with a sudden disturbance about the
+bosom of her dress, and a sudden flash of tenderness in her
+dark-gray eyes.
+
+"You know best," she said, faintly, in a whisper.
+
+The inevitable answer was on the tip of Allan's tongue. At the
+very instant, however, when he opened his lips, the abhorrent
+high tenor of Pedgift Junior, shouting for "Mr. Armadale," rang
+cheerfully through the quiet air. At the same moment, from the
+other side of the carriage, the lurid spectacles of the Reverend
+Samuel showed themselves officiously on the search; and the voice
+of the Reverend Samuel's mother (who had, with great dexterity,
+put the two ideas of the presence of water and a sudden movement
+among the company together) inquired distractedly if anybody was
+drowned? Sentiment flies and Love shudders at all demonstrations
+of the noisy kind. Allan said: "Damn it," and rejoined young
+Pedgift. Miss Milroy sighed, and took refuge with her father.
+
+"I've done it, Mr. Armadale!" cried young Pedgift, greeting his
+patron gayly. "We can all go on the water together; I've got the
+biggest boat on the Broads. The little skiffs," he added, in a
+lower tone, as he led the way to the quay steps, "besides being
+ticklish and easily upset, won't hold more than two, with the
+boatman; and the major told me he should feel it his duty to go
+with his daughter, if we all separated in different boats. I
+thought _that_ would hardly do, sir," pursued Pedgift Junior,
+with a respectfully sly emphasis on the words. "And, besides,
+if we had put the old lady into a skiff, with her weight (sixteen
+stone if she's a pound), we might have had her upside down in
+the water half her time, which would have occasioned delay, and
+thrown what you call a damp on the proceedings. Here's the boat,
+Mr. Armadale. What do you think of it?"
+
+The boat added one more to the strangely anomalous objects which
+appeared at the Broads. It was nothing less than a stout old
+lifeboat, passing its last declining years on the smooth fresh
+water, after the stormy days of its youth time on the wild salt
+sea. A comfortable little cabin for the use of fowlers in the
+winter season had been built amidships, and a mast and sail
+adapted for inland navigation had been fitted forward. There
+was room enough and to spare for the guests, the dinner, and
+the three men in charge. Allan clapped his faithful lieutenant
+approvingly on the shoulder; and even Mrs. Pentecost, when
+the whole party were comfortably established on board, took
+a comparatively cheerful view of the prospects of the picnic.
+"If anything happens," said the old lady, addressing the company
+generally, "there's one comfort for all of us. My son can swim."
+
+The boat floated out from the creek into the placid waters of the
+Broad, and the full beauty of the scene opened on the view.
+
+On the northward and westward, as the boat reached the middle of
+the lake, the shore lay clear and low in the sunshine, fringed
+darkly at certain points by rows of dwarf trees; and dotted here
+and there, in the opener spaces, with windmills and reed-thatched
+cottages, of puddled mud. Southward, the great sheet of water
+narrowed gradually to a little group of close-nestling islands
+which closed the prospect; while to the east a long, gently
+undulating line of reeds followed the windings of the Broad, and
+shut out all view of the watery wastes beyond. So clear and so
+light was the summer air that the one cloud in the eastern
+quarter of the heaven was the smoke cloud left by a passing
+steamer three miles distant and more on the invisible sea. When
+the voices of the pleasure party were still, not a sound rose,
+far or near, but the faint ripple at the bows, as the men, with
+slow, deliberate strokes of their long poles, pressed the boat
+forward softly over the shallow water. The world and the world's
+turmoil seemed left behind forever on the land; the silence was
+the silence of enchantment--the delicious interflow of the soft
+purity of the sky and the bright tranquillity of the lake.
+
+Established in perfect comfort in the boat--the major and his
+daughter on one side, the curate and his mother on the other, and
+Allan and young Pedgift between the two--the water party floated
+smoothly toward the little nest of islands at the end of the
+Broad. Miss Milroy was in raptures; Allan was delighted; and the
+major for once forgot his clock. Every one felt pleasurably, in
+their different ways, the quiet and beauty of the scene. Mrs.
+Pentecost, in her way, felt it like a clairvoyant--with closed
+eyes.
+
+"Look behind you, Mr. Armadale," whispered young Pedgift. "I
+think the parson's beginning to enjoy himself."
+
+An unwonted briskness--portentous apparently of coming
+speech--did certainly at that moment enliven the curate's manner.
+He jerked his head from side to side like a bird; he cleared his
+throat, and clasped his hands, and looked with a gentle interest
+at the company. Getting into spirits seemed, in the case of this
+excellent person, to be alarmingly like getting into the pulpit.
+
+"Even in this scene of tranquillity," said the Reverend Samuel,
+coming out softly with his first contribution to the society in
+the shape of a remark, "the Christian mind--led, so to speak,
+from one extreme to another--is forcibly recalled to the unstable
+nature of all earthly enjoyments. How if this calm should not
+last? How if the winds rose and the waters became agitated?"
+
+"You needn't alarm yourself about that, sir," said young Pedgift;
+"June's the fine season here--and you can swim."
+
+Mrs. Pentecost (mesmerically affected, in all probability, by the
+near neighborhood of her son) opened her eyes suddenly and asked,
+with her customary eagerness. "What does my boy say?"
+
+The Reverend Samuel repeated his words in the key that suited
+his mother's infirmity. The old lady nodded in high approval,
+and pursued her son's train of thought through the medium of
+a quotation.
+
+"Ah!" sighed Mrs. Pentecost, with infinite relish, "He rides the
+whirlwind, Sammy, and directs the storm!"
+
+"Noble words!" said the Reverend Samuel. "Noble and consoling
+words!"
+
+"I say," whispered Allan, "if he goes on much longer in that way,
+what's to be done?"
+
+"I told you, papa, it was a risk to ask them," added Miss Milroy,
+in another whisper.
+
+"My dear!" remonstrated the major. "We knew nobody else in the
+neighborhood, and, as Mr. Armadale kindly suggested our bringing
+our friends, what could we do?"
+
+"We can't upset the boat," remarked young Pedgift, with sardonic
+gravity. "It's a lifeboat, unfortunately. May I venture to
+suggest putting something into the reverend gentleman's mouth,
+Mr. Armadale? It's close on three o'clock. What do you say to
+ringing the dinner-bell, sir?"
+
+Never was the right man more entirely in the right place than
+Pedgift Junior at the picnic. In ten minutes more the boat was
+brought to a stand-still among the reeds; the Thorpe Ambrose
+hampers were unpacked on the roof of the cabin; and the current
+of the curate's eloquence was checked for the day.
+
+How inestimably important in its moral results--and therefore
+how praiseworthy in itself--is the act of eating and drinking!
+The social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a
+better husband, father, and brother after dinner than before
+is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man. What hidden
+charms of character disclose themselves, what dormant
+amiabilities awaken, when our common humanity gathers together to
+pour out the gastric juice! At the opening of the hampers from
+Thorpe Ambrose, sweet Sociability (offspring of the happy union
+of Civilization and Mrs. Gripper) exhaled among the boating
+party, and melted in one friendly fusion the discordant elements
+of which that party had hitherto been composed. Now did the
+Reverend Samuel Pentecost, whose light had hitherto been hidden
+under a bushel, prove at last that he could do something by
+proving that he could eat. Now did Pedgift Junior shine brighter
+than ever he had shone yet in gems of caustic humor and exquisite
+fertilities of resource. Now did the squire, and the squire's
+charming guest, prove the triple connection between Champagne
+that sparkles, Love that grows bolder, and Eyes whose vocabulary
+is without the word No. Now did cheerful old times come back to
+the major's memory, and cheerful old stories not told for years
+find their way to the major's lips. And now did Mrs. Pentecost,
+coming out wakefully in the whole force of her estimable maternal
+character, seize on a supplementary fork, and ply that useful
+instrument incessantly between the choicest morsels in the whole
+round of dishes, and the few vacant places left available on the
+Reverend Samuel's plate. "Don't laugh at my son," cried the old
+lady, observing the merriment which her proceedings produced
+among the company. "It's my fault, poor dear--_I_ make him eat!"
+And there are men in this world who, seeing virtues such as these
+developed at the table, as they are developed nowhere else, can,
+nevertheless, rank the glorious privilege of dining with the
+smallest of the diurnal personal worries which necessity imposes
+on mankind--with buttoning your waistcoat, for example, or lacing
+your stays! Trust no such monster as this with your tender
+secrets, your loves and hatreds, your hopes and fears. His heart
+is uncorrected by his stomach, and the social virtues are not in
+him.
+
+The last mellow hours of the day and the first cool breezes of
+the long summer evening had met before the dishes were all laid
+waste, and the bottles as empty as bottles should be. This point
+in the proceedings attained, the picnic party looked lazily at
+Pedgift Junior to know what was to be done next. That
+inexhaustible functionary was equal as ever to all the calls on
+him. He had a new amusement ready before the quickest of the
+company could so much as ask him what that amusement was to be.
+
+"Fond of music on the water, Miss Milroy?" he asked, in his
+airiest and pleasantest manner.
+
+Miss Milroy adored music, both on the water and the land--always
+excepting the one case when she was practicing the art herself
+on the piano at home.
+
+"We'll get out of the reeds first," said young Pedgift. He gave
+his orders to the boatmen, dived briskly into the little cabin,
+and reappeared with a concertina in his hand. "Neat, Miss Milroy,
+isn't it?" he observed, pointing to his initials, inlaid on the
+instrument in mother-of-pearl. "My name's Augustus, like my
+father's. Some of my friends knock off the 'A,' and call me
+'Gustus Junior.' A small joke goes a long way among friends,
+doesn't it, Mr. Armadale? I sing a little to my own
+accompaniment, ladies and gentlemen; and, if quite agreeable,
+I shall be proud and happy to do my best."
+
+"Stop!" cried Mrs. Pentecost; "I dote on music."
+
+With this formidable announcement, the old lady opened a
+prodigious leather bag, from which she never parted night or day,
+and took out an ear-trumpet of the old-fashioned kind--something
+between a key-bugle and a French horn. "I don't care to use the
+thing generally," explained Mrs. Pentecost, "because I'm afraid
+of its making me deafer than ever. But I can't and won't miss
+the music. I dote on music. If you'll hold the other end, Sammy,
+I'll stick it in my ear. Neelie, my dear, tell him to begin."
+
+Young Pedgift was troubled with no nervous hesitation. He began
+at once, not with songs of the light and modern kind, such as
+might have been expected from an amateur of his age and
+character, but with declamatory and patriotic bursts of poetry,
+set to the bold and blatant music which the people of England
+loved dearly at the earlier part of the present century, and
+which, whenever they can get it, they love dearly still. "The
+Death of Marmion," "The Battle of the Baltic," "The Bay of
+Biscay," "Nelson," under various vocal aspects, as exhibited by
+the late Braham--these were the songs in which the roaring
+concertina and strident tenor of Gustus Junior exulted together.
+"Tell me when you're tired, ladies and gentlemen," said the
+minstrel solicitor. "There's no conceit about _me_. Will you
+have a little sentiment by way of variety? Shall I wind up with
+'The Mistletoe Bough' and 'Poor Mary Anne'?"
+
+Having favored his audience with those two cheerful melodies,
+young Pedgift respectfully requested the rest of the company to
+follow his vocal example in turn, offering, in every case, to
+play "a running accompaniment" impromptu, if the singer would
+only be so obliging as to favor him with the key-note.
+
+"Go on, somebody!" cried Mrs. Pentecost, eagerly. "I tell you
+again, I dote on music. We haven't had half enough yet, have we,
+Sammy?"
+
+The Reverend Samuel made no reply. The unhappy man had reasons
+of his own--not exactly in his bosom, but a little lower--for
+remaining silent, in the midst of the general hilarity and the
+general applause. Alas for humanity! Even maternal love is
+alloyed with mortal fallibility. Owing much already to his
+excellent mother, the Reverend Samuel was now additionally
+indebted to her for a smart indigestion.
+
+Nobody, however, noticed as yet the signs and tokens of internal
+revolution in the curate's face. Everybody was occupied in
+entreating everybody else to sing. Miss Milroy appealed to the
+founder of the feast. "Do sing something, Mr. Armadale," she
+said; "I should so like to hear you!"
+
+"If you once begin, sir," added the cheerful Pedgift, "you'll
+find it get uncommonly easy as you go on. Music is a science
+which requires to be taken by the throat at starting."
+
+"With all my heart," said Allan, in his good-humored way. "I know
+lots of tunes, but the worst of it is, the words escape me. I
+wonder if I can remember one of Moore's Melodies? My poor mother
+used to be fond of teaching me Moore's Melodies when I was a
+boy."
+
+"Whose melodies?" asked Mrs. Pentecost. "Moore's? Aha! I know Tom
+Moore by heart."
+
+"Perhaps in that case you will he good enough to help me, ma'am,
+if my memory breaks down," rejoined Allan. "I'll take the easiest
+melody in the whole collection, if you'll allow me. Everybody
+knows it--'Eveleen's Bower.' "
+
+"I'm familiar, in a general sort of way, with the national
+melodies of England, Scotland, and Ireland," said Pedgift Junior.
+"I'll accompany you, sir, with the greatest pleasure. This is
+the sort of thing, I think." He seated himself cross-legged on
+the roof of the cabin, and burst into a complicated musical
+improvisation wonderful to hear--a mixture of instrumental
+flourishes and groans; a jig corrected by a dirge, and a dirge
+enlivened by a jig. "That's the sort of thing," said young
+Pedgift, with his smile of supreme confidence. "Fire away, sir!"
+
+Mrs. Pentecost elevated her trumpet, and Allan elevated his
+voice. "Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bower--" He
+stopped; the accompaniment stopped; the audience waited. "It's a
+most extraordinary thing," said Allan; "I thought I had the next
+line on the tip of my tongue, and it seems to have escaped me.
+I'll begin again, if you have no objection. 'Oh, weep for the
+hour when to Eveleen's Bower--' "
+
+"'The lord of the valley with false vows came,'" said Mrs.
+Pentecost.
+
+"Thank you, ma'am," said Allan. "Now I shall get on smoothly.
+'Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bower, the lord of the
+valley with false vows came. The moon was shining bright--'"
+
+"No!" said Mrs. Pentecost.
+
+"I beg your pardon, ma'am," remonstrated Allan. "'The moon was
+shining bright--' "
+
+"The moon wasn't doing anything of the kind," said Mrs.
+Pentecost.
+
+Pedgift Junior, foreseeing a dispute, persevered _sotto voce_
+with the accompaniment, in the interests of harmony.
+
+"Moore's own words, ma'am," said Allan, "in my mother's copy
+of the Melodies."
+
+"Your mother's copy was wrong," retorted Mrs. Pentecost. "Didn't
+I tell you just now that I knew Tom Moore by heart?"
+
+Pedgift Junior's peace-making concertina still flourished and
+groaned in the minor key.
+
+"Well, what _did_ the moon do?" asked Allan, in despair.
+
+"What the moon _ought_ to have done, sir, or Tom Moore wouldn't
+have written it so," rejoined Mrs. Pentecost. "'The moon hid her
+light from the heaven that night, and wept behind her clouds
+o'er the maiden's shame!' I wish that young man would leave off
+playing," added Mrs. Pentecost, venting her rising irritation on
+Gustus Junior. "I've had enough of him--he tickles my ears."
+
+"Proud, I'm sure, ma'am," said the unblushing Pedgift. "The whole
+science of music consists in tickling the ears."
+
+"We seem to be drifting into a sort of argument," remarked Major
+Milroy, placidly. "Wouldn't it be better if Mr. Armadale went on
+with his song?"
+
+"Do go on, Mr. Armadale!" added the major's daughter. "Do go on,
+Mr. Pedgift!"
+
+"One of them doesn't know the words, and the other doesn't know
+the music," said Mrs. Pentecost. "Let them go on if they can!"
+
+"Sorry to disappoint you, ma'am," said Pedgift Junior; "I'm ready
+to go on myself to any extent. Now, Mr. Armadale!"
+
+Allan opened his lips to take up the unfinished melody where
+he had last left it. Before he could utter a note, the curate
+suddenly rose, with a ghastly face, and a hand pressed
+convulsively over the middle region of his waistcoat.
+
+"What's the matter?" cried the whole boating party in chorus.
+
+"I am exceedingly unwell," said the Reverend Samuel Pentecost.
+The boat was instantly in a state of confusion. "Eveleen's Bower"
+expired on Allan's lips, and even the irrepressible concertina
+of Pedgift was silenced at last. The alarm proved to be quite
+needless. Mrs. Pentecost's son possessed a mother, and that
+mother had a bag. In two seconds the art of medicine occupied the
+place left vacant in the attention of the company by the art of
+music.
+
+"Rub it gently, Sammy," said Mrs. Pentecost. "I'll get out the
+bottles and give you a dose. It's his poor stomach, major. Hold
+my trumpet, somebody--and stop the boat. You take that bottle,
+Neelie, my dear; and you take this one, Mr. Armadale; and give
+them to me as I want them. Ah, poor dear, I know what's the
+matter with him! Want of power _here_, major--cold, acid, and
+flabby. Ginger to warm him; soda to correct him; sal volatile to
+hold him up. There, Sammy! drink it before it settles; and then
+go and lie down, my dear, in that dog-kennel of a place they call
+the cabin. No more music!" added Mrs. Pentecost, shaking her
+forefinger at the proprietor of the concertina--"unless it's a
+hymn, and that I don't object to."
+
+Nobody appearing to be in a fit frame of mind for singing a hymn,
+the all-accomplished Pedgift drew upon his stores of local
+knowledge, and produced a new idea. The course of the boat was
+immediately changed under his direction. In a few minutes more,
+the company found themselves in a little island creek, with a
+lonely cottage at the far end of it, and a perfect forest of
+reeds closing the view all round them. "What do you say, ladies
+and gentlemen, to stepping on shore and seeing what a
+reed-cutter's cottage looks like?" suggested young Pedgift.
+
+"We say yes, to be sure," answered Allan. "I think our spirits
+have been a little dashed by Mr. Pentecost's illness and Mrs.
+Pentecost's bag," he added, in a whisper to Miss Milroy. "A
+change of this sort is the very thing we want to set us all
+going again."
+
+He and young Pedgift handed Miss Milroy out of the boat. The
+major followed. Mrs. Pentecost sat immovable as the Egyptian
+Sphinx, with her bag on her knees, mounting guard over "Sammy"
+in the cabin.
+
+"We must keep the fun going, sir," said Allan, as he helped the
+major over the side of the boat. "We haven't half done yet with
+the enjoyment of the day."
+
+His voice seconded his hearty belief in his own prediction
+to such good purpose that even Mrs. Pentecost heard him, and
+ominously shook her head.
+
+"Ah!" sighed the curate's mother, "if you were as old as I am,
+young gentleman, you wouldn't feel quite so sure of the enjoyment
+of the day!"
+
+So, in rebuke of the rashness of youth, spoke the caution of age.
+The negative view is notoriously the safe view, all the world
+over, and the Pentecost philosophy is, as a necessary
+consequence, generally in the right.
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+FATE OR CHANCE?
+
+It was close on six o'clock when Allan and his friends left
+the boat, and the evening influence was creeping already,
+in its mystery and its stillness, over the watery solitude
+of the Broads.
+
+The shore in these wild regions was not like the shore
+elsewhere. Firm as it looked, the garden ground in front of the
+reed-cutter's cottage was floating ground, that rose and fell and
+oozed into puddles under the pressure of the foot. The boatmen
+who guided the visitors warned them to keep to the path, and
+pointed through gaps in the reeds and pollards to grassy places,
+on which strangers would have walked confidently, where the crust
+of earth was not strong enough to bear the weight of a child over
+the unfathomed depths of slime and water beneath. The solitary
+cottage, built of planks pitched black, stood on ground that had
+been steadied and strengthened by resting it on piles. A little
+wooden tower rose at one end of the roof, and served as a lookout
+post in the fowling season. From this elevation the eye ranged
+far and wide over a wilderness of winding water and lonesome
+marsh. If the reed-cutter had lost his boat, he would have been
+as completely isolated from all communication with town or
+village as if his place of abode had been a light-vessel instead
+of a cottage. Neither he nor his family complained of their
+solitude, or looked in any way the rougher or the worse for it.
+His wife received the visitors hospitably, in a snug little room,
+with a raftered ceiling, and windows which looked like windows
+in a cabin on board ship. His wife's father told stories of the
+famous days when the smugglers came up from the sea at night,
+rowing through the net-work of rivers with muffled oars till they
+gained the lonely Broads, and sank their spirit casks in the
+water, far from the coast-guard's reach. His wild little children
+played at hide-and-seek with the visitors; and the visitors
+ranged in and out of the cottage, and round and round the morsel
+of firm earth on which it stood, surprised and delighted by the
+novelty of all they saw. The one person who noticed the advance
+of the evening--the one person who thought of the flying time and
+the stationary Pentecosts in the boat--was young Pedgift. That
+experienced pilot of the Broads looked askance at his watch, and
+drew Allan aside at the first opportunity.
+
+"I don't wish to hurry you, Mr. Armadale," said Pedgift Junior;
+"but the time is getting on, and there's a lady in the case."
+
+"A lady?" repeated Allan.
+
+"Yes, sir," rejoined young Pedgift. "A lady from London;
+connected (if you'll allow me to jog your memory) with a
+pony-chaise and white harness."
+
+"Good heavens, the governess!" cried Allan. "Why, we have
+forgotten all about her!"
+
+"Don't be alarmed, sir; there's plenty of time, if we only get
+into the boat again. This is how it stands, Mr. Armadale. We
+settled, if you remember, to have the gypsy tea-making at the
+next 'Broad' to this--Hurle Mere?"
+
+"Certainly," said Allan. "Hurle Mere is the place where my friend
+Midwinter has promised to come and meet us."
+
+"Hurle Mere is where the governess will be, sir, if your coachman
+follows my directions," pursued young Pedgift. "We have got
+nearly an hour's punting to do, along the twists and turns of the
+narrow waters (which they call The Sounds here) between this and
+Hurle Mere; and according to my calculations we must get on board
+again in five minutes, if we are to be in time to meet the
+governess and to meet your friend."
+
+"We mustn't miss my friend on any account," said Allan; "or the
+governess, either, of course. I'll tell the major."
+
+Major Milroy was at that moment preparing to mount the wooden
+watch-tower of the cottage to see the view. The ever useful
+Pedgift volunteered to go up with him, and rattle off all
+the necessary local explanations in half the time which the
+reed-cutter would occupy in describing his own neighborhood
+to a stranger.
+
+Allan remained standing in front of the cottage, more quiet and
+more thoughtful than usual. His interview with young Pedgift had
+brought his absent friend to his memory for the first time since
+the picnic party had started. He was surprised that Midwinter,
+so much in his thoughts on all other occasions, should have been
+so long out of his thoughts now. Something troubled him, like
+a sense of self-reproach, as his mind reverted to the faithful
+friend at home, toiling hard over the steward's books, in his
+interests and for his sake. "Dear old fellow," thought Allan, "I
+shall be so glad to see him at the Mere; the day's pleasure won't
+be complete till he joins us!"
+
+"Should I be right or wrong, Mr. Armadale, if I guessed that you
+were thinking of somebody?" asked a voice, softly, behind him.
+
+Allan turned, and found the major's daughter at his side. Miss
+Milroy (not unmindful of a certain tender interview which had
+taken place behind a carriage) had noticed her admirer standing
+thoughtfully by himself, and had determined on giving him another
+opportunity, while her father and young Pedgift were at the top
+of the watch-tower.
+
+"You know everything," said Allan, smiling. "I _was_ thinking of
+somebody."
+
+Miss Milroy stole a glance at him--a glance of gentle
+encouragement. There could be but one human creature in Mr.
+Armadale's mind after what had passed between them that morning!
+It would be only an act of mercy to take him back again at once
+to the interrupted conversation of a few hours since on the
+subject of names.
+
+"I have been thinking of somebody, too," she said, half-inviting,
+half-repelling the coming avowal. "If I tell you the first letter
+of my Somebody's name, will you tell me the first letter of
+yours?"
+
+"I will tell you anything you like," rejoined Allan, with the
+utmost enthusiasm.
+
+She still shrank coquettishly from the very subject that she
+wanted to approach. "Tell me your letter first," she said, in
+low tones, looking away from him.
+
+Allan laughed. "M," he said, "is my first letter."
+
+She started a little. Strange that he should be thinking of her
+by her surname instead of her Christian name; but it mattered
+little as long as he _was_ thinking of her.
+
+"What is your letter?" asked Allan.
+
+She blushed and smiled. "A--if you will have it!" she answered,
+in a reluctant little whisper. She stole another look at him, and
+luxuriously protracted her enjoyment of the coming avowal once
+more. "How many syllables is the name in?" she asked, drawing
+patterns shyly on the ground with the end of the parasol.
+
+No man with the slightest knowledge of the sex would have been
+rash enough, in Allan's position, to tell her the truth. Allan,
+who knew nothing whatever of woman's natures, and who told the
+truth right and left in all mortal emergencies, answered as if
+he had been under examination in a court of justice.
+
+"It's a name in three syllables," he said.
+
+Miss Milroy's downcast eyes flashed up at him like lightning.
+"Three!" she repeated in the blankest astonishment.
+
+Allan was too inveterately straightforward to take the warning
+even now. "I'm not strong at my spelling, I know," he said, with
+his lighthearted laugh. "But I don't think I'm wrong, in calling
+Midwinter a name in three syllables. I was thinking of my friend;
+but never mind my thoughts. Tell me who A is--tell me whom _you_
+were thinking of?"
+
+"Of the first letter of the alphabet, Mr. Armadale, and I beg
+positively to inform you of nothing more!"
+
+With that annihilating answer the major's daughter put up her
+parasol and walked back by herself to the boat.
+
+Allan stood petrified with amazement. If Miss Milroy had actually
+boxed his ears (and there is no denying that she had privately
+longed to devote her hand to that purpose), he could hardly have
+felt more bewildered than he felt now. "What on earth have I
+done?" he asked himself, helplessly, as the major and young
+Pedgift joined him, and the three walked down together to the
+water-side. "I wonder what she'll say to me next?"
+
+She said absolutely nothing; she never so much as looked at Allan
+when he took his place in the boat. There she sat, with her eyes
+and her complexion both much brighter than usual, taking the
+deepest interest in the curate's progress toward recovery; in the
+state of Mrs. Pentecost's spirits; in Pedgift Junior (for whom
+she ostentatiously made room enough to let him sit beside her);
+in the scenery and the reed-cutter's cottage; in everybody and
+everything but Allan--whom she would have married with the
+greatest pleasure five minutes since. "I'll never forgive him,"
+thought the major's daughter. "To be thinking of that ill-bred
+wretch when I was thinking of _him_; and to make me all but
+confess it before I found him out! Thank Heaven, Mr. Pedgift
+is in the boat!"
+
+In this frame of mind Miss Neelie applied herself forthwith to
+the fascination of Pedgift and the discomfiture of Allan. "Oh,
+Mr. Pedgift, how extremely clever and kind of you to think of
+showing us that sweet cottage! Lonely, Mr. Armadale? I don't
+think it's lonely at all; I should like of all things to live
+there. What would this picnic have been without you, Mr. Pedgift;
+you can't think how I have enjoyed it since we got into the boat.
+Cool, Mr. Armadale? What can you possibly mean by saying it's
+cool; it's the warmest evening we've had this summer. And the
+music, Mr. Pedgift; how nice it was of you to bring your
+concertina! I wonder if I could accompany you on the piano? I
+would so like to try. Oh, yes, Mr. Armadale, no doubt you meant
+to do something musical, too, and I dare say you sing very well
+when you know the words; but, to tell you the truth, I always
+did, and always shall, hate Moore's Melodies!"
+
+Thus, with merciless dexterity of manipulation, did Miss Milroy
+work that sharpest female weapon of offense, the tongue; and thus
+she would have used it for some time longer, if Allan had only
+shown the necessary jealousy, or if Pedgift had only afforded the
+necessary encouragement. But adverse fortune had decreed that she
+should select for her victims two men essentially unassailable
+under existing circumstances. Allan was too innocent of all
+knowledge of female subtleties and susceptibilities to understand
+anything, except that the charming Neelie was unreasonably out of
+temper with him without the slightest cause. The wary Pedgift, as
+became one of the quick-witted youth of the present generation,
+submitted to female influence, with his eye fixed immovably all
+the time on his own interests. Many a young man of the past
+generation, who was no fool, has sacrificed everything for love.
+Not one young man in ten thousand of the present generation,
+_except_ the fools, has sacrificed a half-penny. The daughters of
+Eve still inherit their mother's merits and commit their mother's
+faults. But the sons of Adam, in these latter days, are men who
+would have handed the famous apple back with a bow, and a
+"Thanks, no; it might get me into a scrape." When Allan
+--surprised and disappointed--moved away out of Miss Milroy's
+reach to the forward part of the boat, Pedgift Junior rose and
+followed him. "You're a very nice girl," thought this shrewdly
+sensible young man; "but a client's a client; and I am sorry to
+inform you, miss, it won't do." He set himself at once to rouse
+Allan's spirits by diverting his attention to a new subject.
+There was to be a regatta that autumn on one of the Broads, and
+his client's opinion as a yachtsman might be valuable to the
+committee. "Something new, I should think, to you, sir, in a
+sailing match on fresh water?" he said, in his most ingratiatory
+manner. And Allan, instantly interested, answered, "Quite new.
+Do tell me about it!"
+
+As for the rest of the party at the other end of the boat, they
+were in a fair way to confirm Mrs. Pentecost's doubts whether
+the hilarity of the picnic would last the day out. Poor Neelie's
+natural feeling of irritation under the disappointment which
+Allan's awkwardness had inflicted on her was now exasperated
+into silent and settled resentment by her own keen sense of
+humiliation and defeat. The major had relapsed into his
+habitually dreamy, absent manner; his mind was turning
+monotonously with the wheels of his clock. The curate still
+secluded his indigestion from public view in the innermost
+recesses of the cabin; and the curate's mother, with a second
+dose ready at a moment's notice, sat on guard at the door. Women
+of Mrs. Pentecost's age and character generally enjoy their own
+bad spirits. "This," sighed the old lady, wagging her head with a
+smile of sour satisfaction "is what you call a day's pleasure, is
+it? Ah, what fools we all were to leave our comfortable homes!"
+
+Meanwhile the boat floated smoothly along the windings of the
+watery labyrinth which lay between the two Broads. The view on
+either side was now limited to nothing but interminable rows
+of reeds. Not a sound was heard, far or near; not so much as a
+glimpse of cultivated or inhabited land appeared anywhere. "A
+trifle dreary hereabouts, Mr. Armadale," said the ever-cheerful
+Pedgift. "But we are just out of it now. Look ahead, sir! Here
+we are at Hurle Mere."
+
+The reeds opened back on the right hand and the left, and the
+boat glided suddenly into the wide circle of a pool. Round the
+nearer half of the circle, the eternal reeds still fringed the
+margin of the water. Round the further half, the land appeared
+again, here rolling back from the pool in desolate sand-hills,
+there rising above it in a sweep of grassy shore. At one point
+the ground was occupied by a plantation, and at another by the
+out-buildings of a lonely old red brick house, with a strip of
+by-road near, that skirted the garden wall and ended at the pool.
+The sun was sinking in the clear heaven, and the water, where the
+sun's reflection failed to tinge it, was beginning to look black
+and cold. The solitude that had been soothing, the silence that
+had felt like an enchantment, on the other Broad, in the day's
+vigorous prime, was a solitude that saddened here--a silence
+that struck cold, in the stillness and melancholy of the day's
+decline.
+
+The course of the boat was directed across the Mere to a creek
+in the grassy shore. One or two of the little flat-bottomed
+punts peculiar to the Broads lay in the creek; and the reed
+cutters to whom the punts belonged, surprised at the appearance
+of strangers, came out, staring silently, from behind an angle
+of the old garden wall. Not another sign of life was visible
+anywhere. No pony-chaise had been seen by the reed cutters;
+no stranger, either man or woman, had approached the shores
+of Hurle Mere that day.
+
+Young Pedgift took another look at his watch, and addressed
+himself to Miss Milroy. "You may, or may not, see the governess
+when you get back to Thorpe Ambrose," he said; "but, as the time
+stands now, you won't see her here. You know best, Mr. Armadale,"
+he added, turning to Allan, "whether your friend is to be
+depended on to keep his appointment?"
+
+"I am certain he is to be depended on," replied Allan, looking
+about him--in unconcealed disappointment at Midwinter's absence.
+
+"Very good," pursued Pedgift Junior. "If we light the fire for
+our gypsy tea-making on the open ground there, your friend may
+find us out, sir, by the smoke. That's the Indian dodge for
+picking up a lost man on the prairie, Miss Milroy and it's pretty
+nearly wild enough (isn't it?) to be a prairie here!"
+
+There are some temptations--principally those of the smaller
+kind--which it is not in the defensive capacity of female human
+nature to resist. The temptation to direct the whole force of her
+influence, as the one young lady of the party, toward the instant
+overthrow of Allan's arrangement for meeting his friend, was too
+much for the major's daughter. She turned on the smiling Pedgift
+with a look which ought to have overwhelmed him. But who ever
+overwhelmed a solicitor?
+
+"I think it's the most lonely, dreary, hideous place I ever saw
+in my life!" said Miss Neelie. "If you insist on making tea here,
+Mr. Pedgift, don't make any for me. No! I shall stop in the boat;
+and, though I am absolutely dying with thirst, I shall touch
+nothing till we get back again to the other Broad!"
+
+The major opened his lips to remonstrate. To his daughter's
+infinite delight, Mrs. Pentecost rose from her seat before
+he could say a word, and, after surveying the whole landward
+prospect, and seeing nothing in the shape of a vehicle anywhere,
+asked indignantly whether they were going all the way back again
+to the place where they had left the carriages in the middle of
+the day. On ascertaining that this was, in fact, the arrangement
+proposed, and that, from the nature of the country, the carriages
+could not have been ordered round to Hurle Mere without, in the
+first instance, sending them the whole of the way back to Thorpe
+Ambrose, Mrs. Pentecost (speaking in her son's interests)
+instantly declared that no earthly power should induce her to
+be out on the water after dark. "Call me a boat!" cried the old
+lady, in great agitation. "Wherever there's water, there's a
+night mist, and wherever there's a night mist, my son Samuel
+catches cold. Don't talk to _me_ about your moonlight and your
+tea-making--you're all mad! Hi! you two men there!" cried Mrs.
+Pentecost, hailing the silent reed cutters on shore. "Sixpence
+apiece for you, if you'll take me and my son back in your boat!"
+
+Before young Pedgift could interfere, Allan himself settled the
+difficulty this time, with perfect patience and good temper.
+
+"I can't think, Mrs. Pentecost, of your going back in any boat
+but the boat you have come out in," he said. "There is not the
+least need (as you and Miss Milroy don't like the place) for
+anybody to go on shore here but me. I _must_ go on shore. My
+friend Midwinter never broke his promise to me yet; and I can't
+consent to leave Hurle Mere as long as there is a chance of his
+keeping his appointment. But there's not the least reason in the
+world why I should stand in the way on that account. You have the
+major and Mr. Pedgift to take care of you; and you can get back
+to the carriages before dark, if you go at once. I will wait
+here, and give my friend half an hour more, and then I can follow
+you in one of the reed-cutters' boats."
+
+"That's the most sensible thing, Mr. Armadale, you've said
+to-day," remarked Mrs. Pentecost, seating herself again in a
+violent hurry
+
+"Tell them to be quick! " cried the old lady, shaking her fist
+at the boatmen. "Tell them to be quick!"
+
+Allan gave the necessary directions, and stepped on shore. The
+wary Pedgift (sticking fast to his client) tried to follow.
+
+"We can't leave you here alone, sir," he said, protesting eagerly
+in a whisper. "Let the major take care of the ladies, and let me
+keep you company at the Mere."
+
+"No, no!" said Allan, pressing him back. "They're all in low
+spirits on board. If you want to be of service to me, stop like a
+good fellow where you are, and do your best to keep the thing
+going."
+
+He waved his hand, and the men pushed the boat off from the
+shore. The others all waved their hands in return except the
+major's daughter, who sat apart from the rest, with her face
+hidden under her parasol. The tears stood thick in Neelie's eyes.
+Her last angry feeling against Allan died out, and her heart went
+back to him penitently the moment he left the boat. "How good he
+is to us all!" she thought, "and what a wretch I am!" She got up
+with every generous impulse in her nature urging her to make
+atonement to him. She got up, reckless of appearances and looked
+after him with eager eyes and flushed checks, as he stood alone
+on the shore. "Don't be long, Mr. Armadale!" she said, with a
+desperate disregard of what the rest of the company thought of
+her.
+
+The boat was already far out in the water, and with all Neelie's
+resolution the words were spoken in a faint little voice, which
+failed to reach Allan's ears. The one sound he heard, as the boat
+gained the opposite extremity of the Mere, and disappeared
+slowly among the reeds, was the sound of the concertina. The
+indefatigable Pedgift was keeping things going--evidently under
+the auspices of Mrs. Pentecost--by performing a sacred melody.
+
+Left by himself, Allan lit a cigar, and took a turn backward
+and forward on the shore. "She might have said a word to me at
+parting!" he thought. "I've done everything for the best; I've
+as good as told her how fond of her I am, and this is the way she
+treats me!" He stopped, and stood looking absently at the sinking
+sun, and the fast-darkening waters of the Mere. Some inscrutable
+influence in the scene forced its way stealthily into his mind,
+and diverted his thoughts from Miss Milroy to his absent friend.
+He started, and looked about him.
+
+The reed-cutters had gone back to their retreat behind the angle
+of the wall, not a living creature was visible, not a sound rose
+anywhere along the dreary shore. Even Allan's spirits began
+to get depressed. It was nearly an hour after the time when
+Midwinter had promised to be at Hurle Mere. He had himself
+arranged to walk to the pool (with a stable-boy from Thorpe
+Ambrose as his guide), by lanes and footpaths which shortened
+the distance by the road. The boy knew the country well, and
+Midwinter was habitually punctual at all his appointments. Had
+anything gone wrong at Thorpe Ambrose? Had some accident happened
+on the way? Determined to remain no longer doubting and idling by
+himself, Allan made up his mind to walk inland from the Mere, on
+the chance of meeting his friend. He went round at once to the
+angle in the wall, and asked one of the reedcutters to show him
+the footpath to Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+The man led him away from the road, and pointed to a barely
+perceptible break in the outer trees of the plantation. After
+pausing for one more useless look around him, Allan turned his
+back on the Mere and made for the trees.
+
+For a few paces, the path ran straight through the plantation.
+Thence it took a sudden turn; and the water and the open country
+became both lost to view. Allan steadily followed the grassy
+track before him, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, until
+he came to another winding of the path. Turning in the new
+direction, he saw dimly a human figure sitting alone at the foot
+of one of the trees. Two steps nearer were enough to make
+the figure familiar to him. "Midwinter!" he exclaimed, in
+astonishment. "This is not the place where I was to meet you!
+What are you waiting for here?"
+
+Midwinter rose, without answering. The evening dimness among
+the trees, which obscured his face, made his silence doubly
+perplexing.
+
+Allan went on eagerly questioning him. "Did you come here by
+yourself?" he asked. "I thought the boy was to guide you?"
+
+This time Midwinter answered. "When we got as far as these
+trees," he said, "I sent the boy back. He told me I was close
+to the place, and couldn't miss it."
+
+"What made you stop here when he left you?" reiterated Allan.
+"Why didn't you walk on?"
+
+"Don't despise me," answered the other. "I hadn't the courage!"
+
+"Not the courage?" repeated Allan. He paused a moment. "Oh,
+I know!" he resumed, putting his hand gayly on Midwinter's
+shoulder. "You're still shy of the Milroys. What nonsense, when
+I told you myself that your peace was made at the cottage!"
+
+"I wasn't thinking, Allan, of your friends at the cottage.
+The truth is, I'm hardly myself to-day. I am ill and unnerved;
+trifles startle me." He stopped, and shrank away, under the
+anxious scrutiny of Allan's eyes. "If you _will_ have it," he
+burst out, abruptly, "the horror of that night on board the Wreck
+has got me again; there's a dreadful oppression on my head;
+there's a dreadful sinking at my heart. I am afraid of something
+happening to us, if we don't part before the day is out. I can't
+break my promise to you; for God's sake, release me from it, and
+let me go back!"
+
+Remonstrance, to any one who knew Midwinter, was plainly useless
+at that moment. Allan humored him. "Come out of this dark,
+airless place," he said, "and we will talk about it. The water
+and the open sky are within a stone's throw of us. I hate a wood
+in the evening; it even gives _me_ the horrors. You have been
+working too hard over the steward's books. Come and breathe
+freely in the blessed open air."
+
+Midwinter stopped, considered for a moment, and suddenly
+submitted.
+
+"You're right," he said, "and I'm wrong, as usual. I'm wasting
+time and distressing you to no purpose. What folly to ask you
+to let me go back! Suppose you had said yes?"
+
+"Well?" asked Allan.
+
+"Well," repeated Midwinter, "something would have happened at
+the first step to stop me, that's all. Come on."
+
+They walked together in silence on the way to the Mere.
+
+At the last turn in the path Allan's cigar went out. While he
+stopped to light it again, Midwinter walked on before him, and
+was the first to come in sight of the open ground.
+
+Allan had just kindled the match, when, to his surprise, his
+friend came back to him round the turn in the path. There was
+light enough to show objects more clearly in this part of the
+plantation. The match, as Midwinter faced him, dropped on the
+instant from Allan's hand.
+
+"Good God!" he cried, starting back, "you look as you looked
+on board the Wreck!"
+
+Midwinter held up his band for silence. He spoke with his wild
+eyes riveted on Allan's face, with his white lips close at
+Allan's ear.
+
+"You remember how I _looked_," he answered, in a whisper. "Do you
+remember what I _said_ when you and the doctor were talking of
+the Dream?"
+
+"I have forgotten the Dream," said Allan.
+
+As he made that answer, Midwinter took his hand, and led him
+round the last turn in the path.
+
+"Do you remember it now?" he asked, and pointed to the Mere.
+
+The sun was sinking in the cloudless westward heaven. The waters
+of the Mere lay beneath, tinged red by the dying light. The open
+country stretched away, darkening drearily already on the right
+hand and the left. And on the near margin of the pool, where all
+had been solitude before, there now stood, fronting the sunset,
+the figure of a woman.
+
+The two Armadales stood together in silence, and looked at the
+lonely figure and the dreary view.
+
+Midwinter was the first to speak.
+
+"Your own eyes have seen it," he said. "Now look at our own
+words."
+
+He opened the narrative of the Dream, and held it under Allan's
+eyes. His finger pointed to the lines which recorded the first
+Vision; his voice, sinking lower and lower, repeated the words:
+
+
+"The sense came to me of being left alone in the darkness.
+
+"I waited.
+
+"The darkness opened, and showed me the vision--as in a picture
+--of a broad, lonely pool, surrounded by open ground. Above
+the further margin of the pool I saw the cloudless western sky,
+red with the light of sunset.
+
+"On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of
+a Woman."
+
+He ceased, and let the hand which held the manuscript drop to his
+side. The other hand pointed to the lonely figure, standing with
+its back turned on them, fronting the setting sun.
+
+"There," he said, "stands the living Woman, in the Shadow's
+place! There speaks the first of the dream warnings to you and
+to me! Let the future time find us still together, and the second
+figure that stands in the Shadow's place will be Mine."
+
+Even Allan was silenced by the terrible certainty of conviction
+with which he spoke.
+
+In the pause that followed, the figure at the pool moved, and
+walked slowly away round the margin of the shore. Allan stepped
+out beyond the last of the trees, and gained a wider view of
+the open ground. The first object that met his eyes was the
+pony-chaise from Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+He turned back to Midwinter with a laugh of relief. "What
+nonsense have you been talking!" he said. "And what nonsense
+have I been listening to! It's the governess at last."
+
+Midwinter made no reply. Allan took him by the arm, and tried to
+lead him on. He released himself suddenly, and seized Allan with
+both hands, holding him back from the figure at the pool, as he
+had held him back from the cabin door on the deck of the timber
+ship. Once again the effort was in vain. Once again Allan broke
+away as easily as he had broken away in the past time.
+
+"One of us must speak to her," he said. "And if you won't,
+I will."
+
+He had only advanced a few steps toward the Mere, when he heard,
+or thought he heard, a voice faintly calling after him, once
+and once only, the word Farewell. He stopped, with a feeling of
+uneasy surprise, and looked round.
+
+"Was that you, Midwinter?" he asked.
+
+There was no answer. After hesitating a moment more, Allan
+returned to the plantation. Midwinter was gone.
+
+He looked back at the pool, doubtful in the new emergency what
+to do next. The lonely figure had altered its course in the
+interval; it had turned, and was advancing toward the trees.
+Allan had been evidently either heard or seen. It was impossible
+to leave a woman unbefriended, in that helpless position and
+in that solitary place. For the second time Allan went out from
+the trees to meet her.
+
+As he came within sight of her face, he stopped in ungovernable
+astonishment. The sudden revelation of her beauty, as she smiled
+and looked at him inquiringly, suspended the movement in his
+limbs and the words on his lips. A vague doubt beset him whether
+it was the governess, after all.
+
+He roused himself, and, advancing a few paces, mentioned his
+name. "May I ask," he added, "if I have the pleasure--?"
+
+The lady met him easily and gracefully half-way. "Major Milroy's
+governess," she said. "Miss Gwilt."
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE HOUSE-MAID'S FACE.
+
+ALL was quiet at Thorpe Ambrose. The hall was solitary, the rooms
+were dark. The servants, waiting for the supper hour in the
+garden at the back of the house, looked up at the clear heaven
+and the rising moon, and agreed that there was little prospect
+of the return of the picnic party until later in the night. The
+general opinion, led by the high authority of the cook, predicted
+that they might all sit down to supper without the least fear of
+being disturbed by the bell. Having arrived at this conclusion,
+the servants assembled round the table, and exactly at the moment
+when they sat down the bell rang.
+
+The footman, wondering, went up stairs to open the door,
+and found to his astonishment Midwinter waiting alone on the
+threshold, and looking (in the servant's opinion) miserably ill.
+He asked for a light, and, saying he wanted nothing else,
+withdrew at once to his room. The footman went back to his
+fellow-servants, and reported that something had certainly
+happened to his master's friend.
+
+On entering his room, Midwinter closed the door, and hurriedly
+filled a bag with the necessaries for traveling. This done, he
+took from a locked drawer, and placed in the breast pocket of his
+coat, some little presents which Allan had given him--a cigar
+case, a purse, and a set of studs in plain gold. Having possessed
+himself of these memorials, he snatched up the bag and laid his
+hand on the door. There, for the first time, he paused. There,
+the headlong haste of all his actions thus far suddenly ceased,
+and the hard despair in his face began to soften: he waited, with
+the door in his hand.
+
+Up to that moment he had been conscious of but one motive that
+animated him, but one purpose that he was resolute to achieve.
+"For Allan's sake!" he had said to himself, when he looked back
+toward the fatal landscape and saw his friend leaving him to meet
+the woman at the pool. "For Allan's sake!" he had said again,
+when he crossed the open country beyond the wood, and saw afar,
+in the gray twilight, the long line of embankment and the distant
+glimmer of the railway lamps beckoning him away already to the
+iron road.
+
+It was only when he now paused before he closed the door behind
+him--it was only when his own impetuous rapidity of action came
+for the first time to a check, that the nobler nature of the man
+rose in protest against the superstitious despair which was
+hurrying him from all that he held dear. His conviction of the
+terrible necessity of leaving Allan for Allan's good had not been
+shaken for an instant since he had seen the first Vision of the
+Dream realized on the shores of the Mere. But now, for the first
+time, his own heart rose against him in unanswerable rebuke. "Go,
+if you must and will! but remember the time when you were ill,
+and he sat by your bedside; friendless, and he opened his heart
+to you--and write, if you fear to speak; write and ask him to
+forgive you, before you leave him forever!"
+
+The half-opened door closed again softly. Midwinter sat down at
+the writing-table and took up the pen.
+
+He tried again and again, and yet again, to write the farewell
+words; he tried, till the floor all round him was littered with
+torn sheets of paper. Turn from them which way he would, the old
+times still came back and faced him reproachfully. The spacious
+bed-chamber in which he sat, narrowed, in spite of him, to the
+sick usher's garret at the west-country inn. The kind hand that
+had once patted him on the shoulder touched him again; the kind
+voice that had cheered him spoke unchangeably in the old friendly
+tones. He flung his arms on the table and dropped his head on
+them in tearless despair. The parting words that his tongue was
+powerless to utter his pen was powerless to write. Mercilessly in
+earnest, his superstition pointed to him to go while the time was
+his own. Mercilessly in earnest, his love for Allan held him back
+till the farewell plea for pardon and pity was written.
+
+He rose with a sudden resolution, and rang for the servant, "When
+Mr. Armadale returns," he said, "ask him to excuse my coming
+downstairs, and say that I am trying to get to sleep." He locked
+the door and put out the light, and sat down alone in the
+darkness. "The night will keep us apart," he said; "and time
+may help me to write. I may go in the early morning; I may go
+while--" The thought died in him uncompleted; and the sharp agony
+of the struggle forced to his lips the first cry of suffering
+that had escaped him yet.
+
+He waited in the darkness.
+
+As the time stole on, his senses remained mechanically awake, but
+his mind began to sink slowly under the heavy strain that had now
+been laid on it for some hours past. A dull vacancy possessed
+him; he made no attempt to kindle the light and write once more.
+He never started; he never moved to the open window, when the
+first sound of approaching wheels broke in on the silence of the
+night. He heard the carriages draw up at the door; he heard the
+horses champing their bits; he heard the voices of Allan and
+young Pedgift on the steps; and still he sat quiet in the
+darkness, and still no interest was aroused in him by the sounds
+that reached his ear from outside.
+
+The voices remained audible after the carriages had been driven
+away; the two young men were evidently lingering on the steps
+before they took leave of each other. Every word they said
+reached Midwinter through the open window. Their one subject of
+conversation was the new governess. Allan's voice was loud in her
+praise. He had never passed such an hour of delight in his life
+as the hour he had spent with Miss Gwilt in the boat, on the way
+from Hurle Mere to the picnic party waiting at the other Broad.
+Agreeing, on his side, with all that his client said in praise
+of the charming stranger, young Pedgift appeared to treat the
+subject, when it fell into his hands, from a different point of
+view. Miss Gwilt's attractions had not so entirely absorbed his
+attention as to prevent him from noticing the impression which
+the new governess had produced on her employer and her pupil.
+
+"There's a screw loose somewhere, sir, in Major Milroy's family,"
+said the voice of young Pedgift. "Did you notice how the major
+and his daughter looked when Miss Gwilt made her excuses for
+being late at the Mere? You don't remember? Do you remember what
+Miss Gwilt said?"
+
+"Something about Mrs. Milroy, wasn't it?" Allan rejoined.
+
+Young Pedgift's voice dropped mysteriously a note lower.
+
+"Miss Gwilt reached the cottage this afternoon, sir, at the time
+when I told you she would reach it, and she would have joined us
+at the time I told you she would come, but for Mrs. Milroy. Mrs.
+Milroy sent for her upstairs as soon as she entered the house,
+and kept her upstairs a good half-hour and more. That was Miss
+Gwilt's excuse, Mr. Armadale, for being late at the Mere."
+
+"Well, and what then?"
+
+"You seem to forget, sir, what the whole neighborhood has heard
+about Mrs. Milroy ever since the major first settled among us. We
+have all been told, on the doctor's own authority, that she is
+too great a sufferer to see strangers. Isn't it a little odd that
+she should have suddenly turned out well enough to see Miss Gwilt
+(in her husband's absence) the moment Miss Gwilt entered the
+house?"
+
+"Not a bit of it! Of course she was anxious to make acquaintance
+with her daughter's governess."
+
+"Likely enough, Mr. Armadale. But the major and Miss Neelie don't
+see it in that light, at any rate. I had my eye on them both when
+the governess told them that Mrs. Milroy had sent for her. If
+ever I saw a girl look thoroughly frightened, Miss Milroy was
+that girl; and (if I may be allowed, in the strictest confidence,
+to libel a gallant soldier) I should say that the major himself
+was much in the same condition. Take my word for it, sir, there's
+something wrong upstairs in that pretty cottage of yours; and
+Miss Gwilt is mixed up in it already!"
+
+There was a minute of silence. When the voices were next heard
+by Midwinter, they were further away from the house--Allan was
+probably accompanying young Pedgift a few steps on his way back.
+
+After a while, Allan's voice was audible once more under the
+portico, making inquiries after his friend; answered by the
+servant's voice giving Midwinter's message. This brief
+interruption over, the silence was not broken again till the time
+came for shutting up the house. The servants' footsteps passing
+to and fro, the clang of closing doors, the barking of a
+disturbed dog in the stable-yard--these sounds warned Midwinter
+it was getting late. He rose mechanically to kindle a light.
+But his head was giddy, his hand trembled; he laid aside the
+match-box, and returned to his chair. The conversation between
+Allan and young Pedgift had ceased to occupy his attention the
+instant he ceased to hear it; and now again, the sense that the
+precious time was failing him became a lost sense as soon as the
+house noises which had awakened it had passed away. His energies
+of body and mind were both alike worn out; he waited with a
+stolid resignation for the trouble that was to come to him with
+the coming day.
+
+An interval passed, and the silence was once more disturbed by
+voices outside; the voices of a man and a woman this time. The
+first few words exchanged between them indicated plainly enough
+a meeting of the clandestine kind; and revealed the man as one
+of the servants at Thorpe Ambrose, and the woman as one of the
+servants at the cottage.
+
+Here again, after the first greetings were over, the subject
+of the new governess became the all-absorbing subject of
+conversation.
+
+The major's servant was brimful of forebodings (inspired solely
+by Miss Gwilt's good looks) which she poured out irrepressibly on
+her "sweetheart," try as he might to divert her to other topics.
+Sooner or later, let him mark her words, there would be an awful
+"upset" at the cottage. Her master, it might be mentioned in
+confidence, led a dreadful life with her mistress. The major was
+the best of men; he hadn't a thought in his heart beyond his
+daughter and his everlasting clock. But only let a nice-looking
+woman come near the place, and Mrs. Milroy was jealous of
+her--raging jealous, like a woman possessed, on that miserable
+sick-bed of hers. If Miss Gwilt (who was certainly good-looking,
+in spite of her hideous hair) didn't blow the fire into a flame
+before many days more were over their heads, the mistress was
+the mistress no longer, but somebody else. Whatever happened,
+the fault, this time, would lie at the door of the major's mother.
+The old lady and the mistress had had a dreadful quarrel two years
+since; and the old lady had gone away in a fury, telling her son,
+before all the servants, that, if he had a spark of spirit in
+him, he would never submit to his wife's temper as he did. It
+would be too much, perhaps, to accuse the major's mother of
+purposely picking out a handsome governess to spite the major's
+wife. But it might be safely said that the old lady was the last
+person in the world to humor the mistress's jealousy, by
+declining to engage a capable and respectable governess for her
+granddaughter because that governess happened to be blessed with
+good looks. How it was all to end (except that it was certain to
+end badly) no human creature could say. Things were looking as
+black already as things well could. Miss Neelie was crying, after
+the day's pleasure (which was one bad sign); the mistress had
+found fault with nobody (which was another); the master had
+wished her good-night through the door (which was a third); and
+the governess had locked herself up in her room (which was the
+worst sign of all, for it looked as if she distrusted the
+servants). Thus the stream of the woman's gossip ran on, and thus
+it reached Midwinter's ears through the window, till the clock in
+the stable-yard struck, and stopped the talking. When the last
+vibrations of the bell had died away, the voices were not audible
+again, and the silence was broken no more.
+
+Another interval passed, and Midwinter made a new effort to rouse
+himself. This time he kindled the light without hesitation, and
+took the pen in hand.
+
+He wrote at the first trial with a sudden facility of expression,
+which, surprising him as he went on, ended in rousing in him
+some vague suspicion of himself. He left the table, and bathed
+his head and face in water, and came back to read what he had
+written. The language was barely intelligible; sentences were
+left unfinished; words were misplaced one for the other.
+Every line recorded the protest of the weary brain against the
+merciless will that had forced it into action. Midwinter tore up
+the sheet of paper as he had torn up the other sheets before it,
+and, sinking under the struggle at last, laid his weary head on
+the pillow. Almost on the instant, exhaustion overcame him, and
+before he could put the light out he fell asleep.
+
+He was roused by a noise at the door. The sunlight was pouring
+into the room, the candle had burned down into the socket, and
+the servant was waiting outside with a letter which had come for
+him by the morning's post.
+
+"I ventured to disturb you, sir," said the man, when Midwinter
+opened the door, "because the letter is marked 'Immediate,' and
+I didn't know but it might be of some consequence."
+
+Midwinter thanked him, and looked at the letter. It _was_ of some
+consequence--the handwriting was Mr. Brock's.
+
+He paused to collect his faculties. The torn sheets of paper
+on the floor recalled to him in a moment the position in which
+he stood. He locked the door again, in the fear that Allan
+might rise earlier than usual and come in to make inquiries.
+Then--feeling strangely little interest in anything that the
+rector could write to him now--he opened Mr. Brock's letter,
+and read these lines:
+
+"Tuesday.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--It is sometimes best to tell bad news
+plainly, in few words. Let me tell mine at once, in one sentence.
+My precautions have all been defeated: the woman has escaped me.
+
+"This misfortune--for it is nothing less--happened yesterday
+(Monday). Between eleven and twelve in the forenoon of that day,
+the business which originally brought me to London obliged me to
+go to Doctors' Commons, and to leave my servant Robert to watch
+the house opposite our lodging until my return. About an hour
+and a half after my departure he observed an empty cab drawn up
+at the door of the house. Boxes and bags made their appearance
+first; they were followed by the woman herself, in the dress I
+had first seen her in. Having previously secured a cab, Robert
+traced her to the terminus of the North-Western Railway, saw her
+pass through the ticket office, kept her in view till she reached
+the platform, and there, in the crowd and confusion caused by
+the starting of a large mixed train, lost her. I must do him
+the justice to say that he at once took the right course in
+this emergency. Instead of wasting time in searching for her
+on the platform, he looked along the line of carriages; and he
+positively declares that he failed to see her in any one of them.
+He admits, at the same time, that his search (conducted between
+two o'clock, when he lost sight of her, and ten minutes past,
+when the train started) was, in the confusion of the moment,
+necessarily an imperfect one. But this latter circumstance, in
+my opinion, matters little. I as firmly disbelieve in the woman's
+actual departure by that train as if I had searched every one
+of the carriages myself; and you, I have no doubt, will entirely
+agree with me.
+
+"You now know how the disaster happened. Let us not waste time
+and words in lamenting it. The evil is done, and you and I
+together must find the way to remedy it.
+
+"What I have accomplished already, on my side, may be told in two
+words. Any hesitation I might have previously felt at trusting
+this delicate business in strangers' hands was at an end the
+moment I heard Robert's news. I went back at once to the city,
+and placed the whole matter confidentially before my lawyers.
+The conference was a long one, and when I left the office it was
+past the post hour, or I should have written to you on Monday
+instead of writing today. My interview with the lawyers was not
+very encouraging. They warn me plainly that serious difficulties
+stand in the way of our recovering the lost trace. But they have
+promised to do their best, and we have decided on the course to
+be taken, excepting one point on which we totally differ. I must
+tell you what this difference is; for, while business keeps me
+away from Thorpe Ambrose, you are the only person whom I can
+trust to put my convictions to the test.
+
+"The lawyers are of opinion, then, that the woman has been
+aware from the first that I was watching her; that there is,
+consequently, no present hope of her being rash enough to appear
+personally at Thorpe Ambrose; that any mischief she may have it
+in contemplation to do will be done in the first instance by
+deputy; and that the only wise course for Allan's friends and
+guardians to take is to wait passively till events enlighten
+them. My own idea is diametrically opposed to this. After what
+has happened at the railway, I cannot deny that the woman must
+have discovered that I was watching her. But she has no reason to
+suppose that she has not succeeded in deceiving me; and I firmly
+believe she is bold enough to take us by surprise, and to win or
+force her way into Allan's confidence before we are prepared to
+prevent her.
+
+"You and you only (while I am detained in London) can decide
+whether I am right or wrong--and you can do it in this way.
+Ascertain at once whether any woman who is a stranger in the
+neighborhood has appeared since Monday last at or near Thorpe
+Ambrose. If any such person has been observed (and nobody escapes
+observation in the country), take the first opportunity you can
+get of seeing her, and ask yourself if her face does or does not
+answer certain plain questions which I am now about to write down
+for you. You may depend on my accuracy. I saw the woman unveiled
+on more than one occasion, and the last time through an excellent
+glass.
+
+"1. Is her hair light brown, and (apparently) not very plentiful?
+2. Is her forehead high, narrow, and sloping backward from the
+brow? 3. Are her eyebrows very faintly marked, and are her eyes
+small, and nearer dark than light--either gray or hazel (I have
+not seen her close enough to be certain which)? 4. Is her nose
+aquiline? 5 Are her lips thin, and is the upper lip long? 6. Does
+her complexion look like an originally fair complexion, which has
+deteriorated into a dull, sickly paleness? 7 (and lastly). Has
+she a retreating chin, and is there on the left side of it a mark
+of some kind--a mole or a scar, I can't say which?
+
+"I add nothing about her expression, for you may see her under
+circumstances which may partially alter it as seen by me. Test
+her by her features, which no circumstances can change. If there
+is a stranger in the neighborhood, and if her face answers my
+seven questions, _you have found the woman_! Go instantly, in
+that case, to the nearest lawyer, and pledge my name and credit
+for whatever expenses may be incurred in keeping her under
+inspection night and day. Having done this, take the speediest
+means of communicating with me; and whether my business is
+finished or not, I will start for Norfolk by the first train.
+
+"Always your friend, DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+
+Hardened by the fatalist conviction that now possessed him,
+Midwinter read the rector's confession of defeat, from the
+first line to the last, without the slightest betrayal either
+of interest or surprise. The one part of the letter at which
+he looked back was the closing part of it. "I owe much to Mr.
+Brock's kindness," he thought; "and I shall never see Mr. Brock
+again. It is useless and hopeless; but he asks me to do it,
+and it shall be done. A moment's look at her will be enough--a
+moment's look at her with his letter in my hand--and a line to
+tell him that the woman is here!"
+
+Again he stood hesitating at the half-opened door; again the
+cruel necessity of writing his farewell to Allan stopped him,
+and stared him in the face.
+
+He looked aside doubtingly at the rector's letter. "I will write
+the two together," he said. "One may help the other." His face
+flushed deep as the words escaped him. He was conscious of doing
+what he had not done yet--of voluntarily putting off the evil
+hour; of making Mr. Brock the pretext for gaining the last
+respite left, the respite of time.
+
+The only sound that reached him through the open door was the
+sound of Allan stirring noisily in the next room. He stepped at
+once into the empty corridor, and meeting no one on the stairs,
+made his way out of the house. The dread that his resolution to
+leave Allan might fail him if he saw Allan again was as vividly
+present to his mind in the morning as it had been all through the
+night. He drew a deep breath of relief as he descended the house
+steps--relief at having escaped the friendly greeting of the
+morning, from the one human creature whom he loved!
+
+He entered the shrubbery with Mr. Brock's letter in his hand,
+and took the nearest way that led to the major's cottage. Not
+the slightest recollection was in his mind of the talk which had
+found its way to his ears during the night. His one reason for
+determining to see the woman was the reason which the rector
+had put in his mind. The one remembrance that now guided him
+to the place in which she lived was the remembrance of Allan's
+exclamation when he first identified the governess with the
+figure at the pool.
+
+Arrived at the gate of the cottage, he stopped. The thought
+struck him that he might defeat his own object if he looked at
+the rector's questions in the woman's presence. Her suspicions
+would be probably roused, in the first instance, by his asking
+to see her (as he had determined to ask, with or without an
+excuse), and the appearance of the letter in his hand might
+confirm them.
+
+She might defeat him by instantly leaving the room. Determined
+to fix the description in his mind first, and then to confront
+her, he opened the letter; and, turning away slowly by the side
+of the house, read the seven questions which he felt absolutely
+assured beforehand the woman's face would answer.
+
+In the morning quiet of the park slight noises traveled far.
+A slight noise disturbed Midwinter over the letter.
+
+He looked up and found himself on the brink of a broad grassy
+trench, having the park on one side and the high laurel hedge
+of an inclosure on the other. The inclosure evidently surrounded
+the back garden of the cottage, and the trench was intended to
+protect it from being damaged by the cattle grazing in the park.
+
+Listening carefully as the slight sound which had disturbed him
+grew fainter, he recognized in it the rustling of women's
+dresses. A few paces ahead, the trench was crossed by a bridge
+(closed by a wicket gate) which connected the garden with the
+park. He passed through the gate, crossed the bridge, and,
+opening a door at the other end, found himself in a summer-house
+thickly covered with creepers, and commanding a full view of the
+garden from end to end.
+
+He looked, and saw the figures of two ladies walking slowly away
+from him toward the cottage. The shorter of the two failed to
+occupy his attention for an instant; he never stopped to think
+whether she was or was not the major's daughter. His eyes were
+riveted on the other figure--the figure that moved over the
+garden walk with the long, lightly falling dress and the easy,
+seductive grace. There, presented exactly as be had seen her once
+already--there, with her back again turned on him, was the Woman
+at the pool!
+
+There was a chance that they might take another turn in the
+garden--a turn back toward the summer-house. On that chance
+Midwinter waited. No consciousness of the intrusion that he
+was committing had stopped him at the door of the summer-house,
+and no consciousness of it troubled him even now. Every finer
+sensibility in his nature, sinking under the cruel laceration of
+the past night, had ceased to feel. The dogged resolution to do
+what he had come to do was the one animating influence left alive
+in him. He acted, he even looked, as the most stolid man living
+might have acted and looked in his place. He was self-possessed
+enough, in the interval of expectation before governess and pupil
+reached the end of the walk, to open Mr. Brock's letter, and to
+fortify his memory by a last look at the paragraph which
+described her face.
+
+He was still absorbed over the description when he heard the
+smooth rustle of the dresses traveling toward him again. Standing
+in the shadow of the summer-house, he waited while she lessened
+the distance between them. With her written portrait vividly
+impressed on his mind, and with the clear light of the morning to
+help him, his eyes questioned her as she came on; and these were
+the answers that her face gave him back.
+
+The hair in the rector's description was light brown and not
+plentiful. This woman's hair, superbly luxuriant in its growth,
+was of the one unpardonably remarkable shade of color which the
+prejudice of the Northern nations never entirely forgives--it was
+_red_! The forehead in the rector's description was high, narrow,
+and sloping backward from the brow; the eyebrows were faintly
+marked; and the eyes small, and in color either gray or hazel.
+This woman's forehead was low, upright, and broad toward the
+temples; her eyebrows, at once strongly and delicately marked,
+were a shade darker than her hair; her eyes, large, bright, and
+well opened, were of that purely blue color, without a tinge
+in it of gray or green, so often presented to our admiration in
+pictures and books, so rarely met with in the living face. The
+nose in the rector's description was aquiline. The line of this
+woman's nose bent neither outward nor inward: it was the
+straight, delicately molded nose (with the short upper lip
+beneath) of the ancient statues and busts. The lips in the
+rector's description were thin and the upper lip long; the
+complexion was of a dull, sickly paleness; the chin retreating
+and the mark of a mole or a scar on the left side of it. This
+woman's lips were full, rich, and sensual. Her complexion was
+the lovely complexion which accompanies such hair as hers--so
+delicately bright in its rosier tints, so warmly and softly white
+in its gentler gradations of color on the forehead and the neck.
+Her chin, round and dimpled, was pure of the slightest blemish
+in every part of it, and perfectly in line with her forehead
+to the end. Nearer and nearer, and fairer and fairer she came,
+in the glow of the morning light--the most startling, the most
+unanswerable contradiction that eye could see or mind conceive
+to the description in the rector's letter.
+
+Both governess and pupil were close to the summer-house before
+they looked that way, and noticed Midwinter standing inside.
+The governess saw him first.
+
+"A friend of yours, Miss Milroy?" she asked, quietly, without
+starting or betraying any sign of surprise.
+
+Neelie recognized him instantly. Prejudiced against Midwinter
+by his conduct when his friend had introduced him at the cottage,
+she now fairly detested him as the unlucky first cause of her
+misunderstanding with Allan at the picnic. Her face flushed
+and she drew back from the summerhouse with an expression of
+merciless surprise.
+
+"He is a friend of Mr. Armadale's," she replied sharply. "I don't
+know what he wants, or why he is here."
+
+"A friend of Mr. Armadale's!" The governess's face lighted up
+with a suddenly roused interest as she repeated the words, She
+returned Midwinter's look, still steadily fixed on her, with
+equal steadiness on her side.
+
+"For my part," pursued Neelie, resenting Midwinter's
+insensibility to her presence on the scene, "I think it a great
+liberty to treat papa's garden as if it were the open park!"
+
+The governess turned round, and gently interposed.
+
+"My dear Miss Milroy," she remonstrated, "there are certain
+distinctions to be observed. This gentleman is a friend of Mr.
+Armadale's. You could hardly express yourself more strongly
+if he was a perfect stranger."
+
+"I express my opinion," retorted Neelie, chafing under the
+satirically indulgent tone in which the governess addressed her.
+"It's a matter of taste, Miss Gwilt; and tastes differ." She
+turned away petulantly, and walked back by herself to the
+cottage.
+
+"She is very young," said Miss Gwilt, appealing with a smile
+to Midwinter's forbearance; "and, as you must see for yourself,
+sir, she is a spoiled child." She paused--showed, for an instant
+only, her surprise at Midwinter's strange silence and strange
+persistency in keeping his eyes still fixed on her--then set
+herself, with a charming grace and readiness, to help him out of
+the false position in which he stood. "As you have extended your
+walk thus far," she resumed, "perhaps you will kindly favor me,
+on your return, by taking a message to your friend? Mr. Armadale
+has been so good as to invite me to see the Thorpe Ambrose
+gardens this morning. Will you say that Major Milroy permits me
+to accept the invitation (in company with Miss Milroy) between
+ten and eleven o'clock?" For a moment her eyes rested, with a
+renewed look of interest, on Midwinter's face. She waited, still
+in vain, for an answering word from him--smiled, as if his
+extraordinary silence amused rather than angered her--and
+followed her pupil back to the cottage.
+
+
+It was only when the last trace of her had disappeared that
+Midwinter roused himself, and attempted to realize the position
+in which he stood. The revelation of her beauty was in no respect
+answerable for the breathless astonishment which had held him
+spell-bound up to this moment. The one clear impression she had
+produced on him thus far began and ended with his discovery of
+the astounding contradiction that her face offered, in one
+feature after another, to the description in Mr. Brock's letter.
+All beyond this was vague and misty--a dim consciousness of a
+tall, elegant woman, and of kind words, modestly and gracefully
+spoken to him, and nothing more.
+
+He advanced a few steps into the garden without knowing why--
+stopped, glancing hither and thither like a man lost--recognized
+the summer-house by an effort, as if years had elapsed since he
+had seen it--and made his way out again, at last, into the park.
+Even here, he wandered first in one direction, then in another.
+His mind was still reeling under the shock that had fallen on it;
+his perceptions were all confused. Something kept him
+mechanically in action, walking eagerly without a motive,
+walking he knew not where.
+
+A far less sensitively organized man might have been overwhelmed,
+as he was overwhelmed now, by the immense, the instantaneous
+revulsion of feeling which the event of the last few minutes had
+wrought in his mind.
+
+At the memorable instant when he had opened the door of the
+summer-house, no confusing influence troubled his faculties.
+In all that related to his position toward his friend, he had
+reached an absolutely definite conclusion by an absolutely
+definite process of thought. The whole strength of the motive
+which had driven him into the resolution to part from Allan
+rooted itself in the belief that he had seen at Hurle Mere the
+fatal fulfillment of the first Vision of the Dream. And this
+belief, in its turn, rested, necessarily, on the conviction that
+the woman who was the one survivor of the tragedy in Madeira
+must be also inevitably the woman whom he had seen standing in
+the Shadow's place at the pool. Firm in that persuasion, he had
+himself compared the object of his distrust and of the rector's
+distrust with the description written by the rector himself--a
+description, carefully minute, by a man entirely trustworthy--and
+his own eyes had informed him that the woman whom he had seen at
+the Mere, and the woman whom Mr. Brock had identified in London,
+were not one, but Two. In the place of the Dream Shadow, there
+had stood, on the evidence of the rector's letter, not the
+instrument of the Fatality--but a stranger!
+
+No such doubts as might have troubled a less superstitious man,
+were started in _his_ mind by the discovery that had now opened
+on him.
+
+It never occurred to him to ask himself whether a stranger might
+not be the appointed instrument of the Fatality, now when the
+letter had persuaded him that a stranger had been revealed as
+the figure in the dream landscape. No such idea entered or could
+enter his mind. The one woman whom _his_ superstition dreaded
+was the woman who had entwined herself with the lives of the two
+Armadales in the first generation, and with the fortunes of the
+two Armadales in the second--who was at once the marked object of
+his father's death-bed warning, and the first cause of the family
+calamities which had opened Allan's way to the Thorpe Ambrose
+estate--the woman, in a word, whom he would have known
+instinctively, but for Mr. Brock's letter, to be the woman whom
+he had now actually seen.
+
+Looking at events as they had just happened, under the influence
+of the misapprehension into which the rector had innocently
+misled him, his mind saw and seized its new conclusion
+instantaneously, acting precisely as it had acted in the past
+time of his interview with Mr. Brock at the Isle of Man.
+
+Exactly as he had once declared it to be an all-sufficient
+refutation of the idea of the Fatality, that he had never met
+with the timber-ship in any of his voyages at sea, so he now
+seized on the similarly derived conclusion, that the whole claim
+of the Dream to a supernatural origin stood self-refuted by the
+disclosure of a stranger in the Shadow's place. Once started from
+this point--once encouraged to let his love for Allan influence
+him undividedly again, his mind hurried along the whole resulting
+chain of thought at lightning speed. If the Dream was proved
+to be no longer a warning from the other world, it followed
+inevitably that accident and not fate had led the way to the
+night on the Wreck, and that all the events which had happened
+since Allan and he had parted from Mr. Brock were events in
+themselves harmless, which his superstition had distorted from
+their proper shape. In less than a moment his mobile imagination
+had taken him back to the morning at Castletown when he had
+revealed to the rector the secret of his name; when he had
+declared to the rector, with his father's letter before his eyes,
+the better faith that was in him. Now once more he felt his heart
+holding firmly by the bond of brotherhood between Allan and
+himself; now once more he could say with the eager sincerity
+of the old time, "If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart,
+the thought of leaving him is wrong!" As that nobler conviction
+possessed itself again of his mind--quieting the tumult, clearing
+the confusion within him--the house at Thorpe Ambrose, with Allan
+on the steps, waiting, looking for him, opened on his eyes
+through the trees. A sense of illimitable relief lifted his eager
+spirit high above the cares, and doubts, and fears that had
+oppressed it so long, and showed him once more the better and
+brighter future of his early dreams. His eyes filled with tears,
+and he pressed the rector's letter, in his wild, passionate way,
+to his lips, as he looked at Allan through the vista of the
+trees. "But for this morsel of paper," he thought, "my life might
+have been one long sorrow to me, and my father's crime might have
+parted us forever!"
+
+
+Such was the result of the stratagem which had shown the
+housemaid's face to Mr. Brock as the face of Miss Gwilt. And
+so--by shaking Midwinter's trust in his own superstition, in the
+one case in which that superstition pointed to the truth--did
+Mother Oldershaw's cunning triumph over difficulties and dangers
+which had never been contemplated by Mother Oldershaw herself.
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MISS GWILT AMONG THE QUICKSANDS.
+
+1. _From the Rev. Decimus Brock to Ozias Midwinter_.
+
+"Thursday.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--No words can tell what a relief it was to me
+to get your letter this morning, and what a happiness I honestly
+feel in having been thus far proved to be in the wrong. The
+precautions you have taken in case the woman should still confirm
+my apprehensions by venturing herself at Thorpe Ambrose seem to
+me to be all that can be desired. You are no doubt sure to hear
+of her from one or other of the people in the lawyer's office,
+whom you have asked to inform you of the appearance of a stranger
+in the town.
+
+"I am the more pleased at finding how entirely I can trust you
+in this matter; for I am likely to be obliged to leave Allan's
+interests longer than I supposed solely in your hands. My visit
+to Thorpe Ambrose must, I regret to say, be deferred for two
+months. The only one of my brother-clergymen in London who is
+able to take my duty for me cannot make it convenient to remove
+with his family to Somersetshire before that time. I have no
+alternative but to finish my business here, and be back at my
+rectory on Saturday next. If anything happens, you will, of
+course, instantly communicate with me; and, in that case, be
+the inconvenience what it may, I must leave home for Thorpe
+Ambrose. If, on the other hand, all goes more smoothly than my
+own obstinate apprehensions will allow me to suppose, then Allan
+(to whom I have written) must not expect to see me till this day
+two months.
+
+"No result has, up to this time, rewarded our exertions to
+recover the trace lost at the railway. I will keep my letter
+open, however, until post time, in case the next few hours bring
+any news.
+
+"Always truly yours,
+
+DECIMUS BROCK.
+
+"P. S.--I have just heard from the lawyers. They have found out
+the name the woman passed by in London. If this discovery (not
+a very important one, I am afraid) suggests any new course of
+proceeding to you, pray act on it at once. The name is--Miss
+Gwilt."
+
+2. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
+
+The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Saturday, June 28.
+
+"If you will promise not to be alarmed, Mamma Oldershaw, I will
+begin this letter in a very odd way, by copying a page of a
+letter written by somebody else. You have an excellent memory,
+and you may not have forgotten that I received a note from Major
+Milroy's mother (after she had engaged me as governess) on Monday
+last. It was dated and signed; and here it is, as far as the
+first page: 'June 23d, 1851. Dear Madam--Pray excuse my troubling
+you, before you go to Thorpe Ambrose, with a word more about the
+habits observed in my son's household. When I had the pleasure
+of seeing you at two o'clock to-day, in Kingsdown Crescent, I had
+another appointment in a distant part of London at three; and,
+in the hurry of the moment, one or two little matters escaped me
+which I think I ought to impress on your attention.' The rest
+of the letter is not of the slightest importance, but the lines
+that I have just copied are well worthy of all the attention you
+can bestow on them. They have saved me from discovery, my dear,
+before I have been a week in Major Milroy's service!
+
+"It happened no later than yesterday evening, and it began and
+ended in this manner:
+
+"There is a gentleman here, (of whom I shall have more to say
+presently) who is an intimate friend of young Armadale's, and
+who bears the strange name of Midwinter. He contrived yesterday
+to speak to me alone in the park. Almost as soon as he opened
+his lips, I found that my name had been discovered in London
+(no doubt by the Somersetshire clergyman); and that Mr. Midwinter
+had been chosen (evidently by the same person) to identify the
+Miss Gwilt who had vanished from Brompton with the Miss Gwilt
+who had appeared at Thorpe Ambrose. You foresaw this danger, I
+remember; but you could scarcely have imagined that the exposure
+would threaten me so soon.
+
+"I spare you the details of our conversation to come to the end.
+Mr. Midwinter put the matter very delicately, declaring, to my
+great surprise, that he felt quite certain himself that I was not
+the Miss Gwilt of whom his friend was in search; and that he only
+acted as he did out of regard to the anxiety of a person whose
+wishes he was bound to respect. Would I assist him in setting
+that anxiety completely at rest, as far as I was concerned, by
+kindly answering one plain question--which he had no other right
+to ask me than the right my indulgence might give him? The lost
+'Miss Gwilt' had been missed on Monday last, at two o'clock, in
+the crowd on the platform of the North-western Railway, in Euston
+Square. Would I authorize him to say that on that day, and at
+that hour, the Miss Gwilt who was Major Milroy's governess had
+never been near the place?
+
+"I need hardly tell you that I seized the fine opportunity he had
+given me of disarming all future suspicion. I took a high tone
+on the spot, and met him with the old lady's letter. He politely
+refused to look at it. I insisted on his looking at it. 'I don't
+choose to be mistaken,' I said, 'for a woman who may be a bad
+character, because she happens to bear, or to have assumed, the
+same name as mine. I insist on your reading the first part of
+this letter for my satisfaction, if not for your own.' He was
+obliged to comply; and there was the proof, in the old lady's
+handwriting, that, at two o'clock on Monday last, she and I were
+together in Kingsdown Crescent, which any directory would tell
+him is a 'crescent' in Bayswater! I leave you to imagine his
+apologies, and the perfect sweetness with which I received them.
+
+"I might, of course, if I had not preserved the letter, have
+referred him to you, or to the major's mother, with similar
+results. As it is, the object has been gained without trouble or
+delay. _I have been proved not to be myself_; and one of the many
+dangers that threatened me at Thorpe Ambrose is a danger blown
+over from this moment. Your house-maid's face may not be a very
+handsome one; but there is no denying that it has done us
+excellent service.
+
+
+"So much for the past; now for the future. You shall hear how I
+get on with the people about me; and you shall judge for yourself
+what the chances are for and against my becoming mistress of
+Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+"Let me begin with young Armadale--because it is beginning with
+good news. I have produced the right impression on him already,
+and Heaven knows _that_ is nothing to boast of! Any moderately
+good-looking woman who chose to take the trouble could make him
+fall in love with her. He is a rattle-pated young fool--one of
+those noisy, rosy, light-haired, good-tempered men whom I
+particularly detest. I had a whole hour alone with him in a boat,
+the first day I came here, and I have made good use of my time, I
+can tell you, from that day to this. The only difficulty with him
+is the difficulty of concealing my own feelings, especially when
+he turns my dislike of him into downright hatred by sometimes
+reminding me of his mother. I really never saw a man whom I
+could use so ill, if I had the opportunity. He will give me the
+opportunity, I believe, if no accident happens, sooner than we
+calculated on. I have just returned from a party at the great
+house, in celebration of the rent-day dinner, and the squire's
+attentions to me, and my modest reluctance to receive them, have
+already excited general remark.
+
+"My pupil, Miss Milroy, comes next. She, too, is rosy and
+foolish; and, what is more, awkward and squat and freckled, and
+ill-tempered and ill-dressed. No fear of _her_, though she hates
+me like poison, which is a great comfort, for I get rid of her
+out of lesson time and walking time. It is perfectly easy to see
+that she has made the most of her opportunities with young
+Armadale (opportunities, by-the-by, which we never calculated
+on), and that she has been stupid enough to let him slip through
+her fingers. When I tell you that she is obliged, for the sake
+of appearances, to go with her father and me to the little
+entertainments at Thorpe Ambrose, and to see how young Armadale
+admires me, you will understand the kind of place I hold in her
+affections. She would try me past all endurance if I didn't see
+that I aggravate her by keeping my temper, so, of course, I keep
+it. If I do break out, it will be over our lessons--not over our
+French, our grammar, history, and globes--but over our music.
+No words can say how I feel for her poor piano. Half the musical
+girls in England ought to have their fingers chopped off in the
+interests of society, and, if I had my way, Miss Milroy's fingers
+should be executed first.
+
+"As for the major, I can hardly stand higher in his estimation
+than I stand already. I am always ready to make his breakfast,
+and his daughter is not. I can always find things for him when
+he loses them, and his daughter can't. I never yawn when he
+proses, and his daughter does. I like the poor dear harmless
+old gentleman, so I won't say a word more about him.
+
+"Well, here is a fair prospect for the future surely? My good
+Oldershaw, there never was a prospect yet without an ugly place
+in it. _My_ prospect has two ugly places in it. The name of one
+of them is Mrs. Milroy, and the name of the other is Mr.
+Midwinter.
+
+"Mrs. Milroy first. Before I had been five minutes in the
+cottage, on the day of my arrival, what do you think she did?
+She sent downstairs and asked to see me. The message startled me
+a little, after hearing from the old lady, in London, that her
+daughter-in-law was too great a sufferer to see anybody; but,
+of course, when I got her message, I had no choice but to go up
+stairs to the sick-room. I found her bedridden with an incurable
+spinal complaint, and a really horrible object to look at, but
+with all her wits about her; and, if I am not greatly mistaken,
+as deceitful a woman, with as vile a temper, as you could find
+anywhere in all your long experience. Her excessive politeness,
+and her keeping her own face in the shade of the bed-curtains
+while she contrived to keep mine in the light, put me on my guard
+the moment I entered the room. We were more than half an hour
+together, without my stepping into any one of the many clever
+little traps she laid for me. The only mystery in her behavior,
+which I failed to see through at the time, was her perpetually
+asking me to bring her things (things she evidently did not want)
+from different parts of the room.
+
+"Since then events have enlightened me. My first suspicions were
+raised by overhearing some of the servants' gossip; and I have
+been confirmed in my opinion by the conduct of Mrs. Milroy's
+nurse.
+
+"On the few occasions when I have happened to be alone with
+the major, the nurse has also happened to want something of her
+master, and has invariably forgotten to announce her appearance
+by knocking, at the door. Do you understand now why Mrs. Milroy
+sent for me the moment I got into the house, and what she wanted
+when she kept me going backward and forward, first for one thing
+and then for another? There is hardly an attractive light in
+which my face and figure can be seen, in which that woman's
+jealous eyes have not studied them already. I am no longer
+puzzled to know why the father and daughter started, and looked
+at each other, when I was first presented to them; or why the
+servants still stare at me with a mischievous expectation in
+their eyes when I ring the bell and ask them to do anything.
+It is useless to disguise the truth, Mother Oldershaw, between
+you and me. When I went upstairs into that sickroom, I marched
+blindfold into the clutches of a jealous woman. If Mrs. Milroy
+_can_ turn me out of the house, Mrs. Milroy _will_; and, morning
+and night, she has nothing else to do in that bed prison of hers
+but to find out the way.
+
+"In this awkward position, my own cautious conduct is admirably
+seconded by the dear old major's perfect insensibility. His
+wife's jealousy of him is as monstrous a delusion as any that
+could be found in a mad-house; it is the growth of her own vile
+temper, under the aggravation of an incurable illness. The poor
+man hasn't a thought beyond his mechanical pursuits; and I don't
+believe he knows at this moment whether I am a handsome woman or
+not. With this chance to help me, I may hope to set the nurse's
+intrusions and the mistress's contrivances at defiance--for a
+time, at any rate. But you know what a jealous woman is, and I
+think I know what Mrs. Milroy is; and I own I shall breathe more
+freely on the day when young Armadale opens his foolish lips to
+some purpose, and sets the major advertising for a new governess.
+
+"Armadale's name reminds me of Armadale's friend. There is more
+danger threatening in that quarter; and, what is worse, I don't
+feel half as well armed beforehand against Mr. Midwinter as I do
+against Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"Everything about this man is more or less mysterious, which
+I don't like, to begin with. How does he come to be in the
+confidence of the Somersetshire clergyman? How much has that
+clergyman told him? How is it that he was so firmly persuaded,
+when he spoke to me in the park, that I was not the Miss Gwilt
+of whom his friend was in search? I haven't the ghost of an
+answer to give to any of those three questions. I can't even
+discover who he is, or how he and young Armadale first became
+acquainted. I hate him. No, I don't; I only want to find out
+about him. He is very young, little and lean, and active and
+dark, with bright black eyes which say to me plainly, 'We
+belong to a man with brains in his head and a will of his own;
+a man who hasn't always been hanging about a country house, in
+attendance on a fool.' Yes; I am positively certain Mr. Midwinter
+has done something or suffered something in his past life, young
+as he is; and I would give I don't know what to get at it. Don't
+resent my taking up so much space in my writing about him. He
+has influence enough over young Armadale to be a very awkward
+obstacle in my way, unless I can secure his good opinion at
+starting.
+
+"Well, you may ask, and what is to prevent your securing his good
+opinion? I am sadly afraid, Mother Oldershaw, I have got it on
+terms I never bargained for I am sadly afraid the man is in love
+with me already.
+
+"Don't toss your head and say, 'Just like her vanity!' After
+the horrors I have gone through, I have no vanity left; and
+a man who admires me is a man who makes me shudder. There was
+a time, I own--Pooh! what am I writing? Sentiment, I declare!
+Sentiment to _you_! Laugh away, my dear. As for me, I neither
+laugh nor cry; I mend my pen, and get on with my--what do
+the men call it?--my report.
+
+"The only thing worth inquiring is, whether I am right or wrong
+in my idea of the impression I have made on him.
+
+"Let me see; I have been four times in his company. The first
+time was in the major's garden, where we met unexpectedly, face
+to face. He stood looking at me, like a man petrified, without
+speaking a word. The effect of my horrid red hair, perhaps? Quite
+likely; let us lay it on my hair. The second time was in going
+over the Thorpe Ambrose grounds, with young Armadale on one side
+of me, and my pupil (in the sulks) on the other. Out comes Mr.
+Midwinter to join us, though he had work to do in the steward's
+office, which he had never been known to neglect on any other
+occasion. Laziness, possibly? or an attachment to Miss Milroy?
+I can't say; we will lay it on Miss Milroy, if you like; I only
+know he did nothing but look at _me_. The third time was at the
+private interview in the park, which I have told you of already.
+I never saw a man so agitated at putting a delicate question to
+a woman in my life. But _that_ might have been only awkwardness;
+and his perpetually looking back after me when we had parted
+might have been only looking back at the view. Lay it on the
+view; by all means, lay it on the view! The fourth time was this
+very evening, at the little party. They made me play; and, as the
+piano was a good one, I did my best. All the company crowded
+round me, and paid me their compliments (my charming pupil paid
+hers, with a face like a cat's just before she spits), except Mr.
+Midwinter. _He_ waited till it was time to go, and then he caught
+me alone for a moment in the hall. There was just time for him to
+take my hand, and say two words. Shall I tell you _how_ he took
+my hand, and what his voice sounded like when he spoke? Quite
+needless! You have always told me that the late Mr. Oldershaw
+doted on you. Just recall the first time he took your hand, and
+whispered a word or two addressed to your private ear. To what
+did you attribute his behavior that occasion? I have no doubt, if
+you had been playing on the piano in the course of the evening,
+you would have attributed it entirely to the music!
+
+"No! you may take my word for it, the harm is done. _This_ man is
+no rattle-pated fool, who changes his fancies as readily as he
+changes his clothes. The fire that lights those big black eyes of
+his is not an easy fire, when a woman has once kindled it, for
+that woman to put out. I don't wish to discourage you; I don't
+say the changes are against us. But with Mrs. Milroy threatening
+me on one side, and Mr. Midwinter on the other, the worst of all
+risks to run is the risk of losing time. Young Armadale has
+hinted already, as well as such a lout can hint, at a private
+interview! Miss Milroy's eyes are sharp, and the nurse's eyes are
+sharper; and I shall lose my place if either of them find me out.
+No matter! I must take my chance, and give him the interview.
+Only let me get him alone, only let me escape the prying eyes of
+the women, and--if his friend doesn't come between us--I answer
+for the result!
+
+"In the meantime, have I anything more to tell you? Are there any
+other people in our way at Thorpe Ambrose? Not another creature!
+None of the resident families call here, young Armadale being,
+most fortunately, in bad odor in the neighborhood. There are no
+handsome highly-bred women to come to the house, and no persons
+of consequence to protest against his attentions to a governess.
+The only guests he could collect at his party to-night were the
+lawyer and his family (a wife, a son, and two daughters), and a
+deaf old woman and _her_ son--all perfectly unimportant people,
+and all obedient humble servants of the stupid young squire.
+
+"Talking of obedient humble servants, there is one other person
+established here, who is employed in the steward's office--a
+miserable, shabby, dilapidated old man, named Bashwood. He is a
+perfect stranger to me, and I am evidently a perfect stranger to
+him, for he has been asking the house-maid at the cottage who I
+am. It is paying no great compliment to myself to confess it, but
+it is not the less true that I produced the most extraordinary
+impression on this feeble old creature the first time he saw me.
+He turned all manner of colors, and stood trembling and staring
+at me, as if there was something perfectly frightful in my face.
+I felt quite startled for the moment, for, of all the ways in
+which men have looked at me, no man ever looked at me in that way
+before. Did you ever see the boa constrictor fed at the
+Zoological Gardens? They put a live rabbit into his cage, and
+there is a moment when the two creatures look at each other. I
+declare Mr. Bashwood reminded me of the rabbit.
+
+"Why do I mention this? I don't know why. Perhaps I have been
+writing too long, and my head is beginning to fail me. Perhaps
+Mr. Bashwood's manner of admiring me strikes my fancy by its
+novelty. Absurd! I am exciting myself, and troubling you about
+nothing. Oh, what a weary, long letter I have written! and how
+brightly the stars look at me through the window, and how awfully
+quiet the night is! Send me some more of those sleeping drops,
+and write me one of your nice, wicked, amusing letters. You shall
+hear from me again as soon as I know a little better how it is
+all likely to end. Good-night, and keep a corner in your stony
+old heart for
+
+L. G."
+
+3. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Diana Street, Pimlico, Monday.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--I am in no state of mind to write you an amusing
+letter. Your news is very discouraging, and the recklessness of
+your tone quite alarms me. Consider the money I have already
+advanced, and the interests we both have at stake. Whatever else
+you are, don't be reckless, for Heaven's sake!
+
+"What can I do? I ask myself, as a woman of business, what can
+I do to help you? I can't give you advice, for I am not on the
+spot, and I don't know how circumstances may alter from one day
+to another. Situated as we are now, I can only be useful in one
+way. I can discover a new obstacle that threatens you, and I
+think I can remove it.
+
+"You say, with great truth, that there never was a prospect yet
+without an ugly place in it, and that there are two ugly places
+in your prospect. My dear, there may be _three_ ugly places, if
+I don't bestir myself to prevent it; and the name of the third
+place will be--Brock! Is it possible you can refer, as you have
+done, to the Somersetshire clergyman, and not see that the
+progress you make with young Armadale will be, sooner or later,
+reported to him by young Armadale's friend? Why, now I think of
+it, you are doubly at the parson's mercy! You are at the mercy
+of any fresh suspicion which may bring him into the neighborhood
+himself at a day's notice; and you are at the mercy of his
+interference the moment he hears that the squire is committing
+himself with a neighbor's governess. If I can do nothing else,
+I can keep this additional difficulty out of your way. And oh,
+Lydia, with what alacrity I shall exert myself, after the manner
+in which the old wretch insulted me when I told him that pitiable
+story in the street! I declare I tingle with pleasure at this new
+prospect of making a fool of Mr. Brock.
+
+"And how is it to be done? Just as we have done it already, to be
+sure. He has lost 'Miss Gwilt' (otherwise my house-maid), hasn't
+he? Very well. He shall find her again, wherever he is now,
+suddenly settled within easy reach of him. As long as _she_ stops
+in the place, _he_ will stop in it; and as we know he is not at
+Thorpe Ambrose, there you are free of him! The old gentleman's
+suspicions have given us a great deal of trouble so far. Let us
+turn them to some profitable account at last; let us tie him, by
+his suspicions, to my house-maid's apron-string. Most refreshing.
+Quite a moral retribution, isn't it?
+
+"The only help I need trouble you for is help you can easily
+give. Find out from Mr. Midwinter where the parson is now,
+and let me know by return of post. If he is in London, I will
+personally assist my housemaid in the necessary mystification
+of him. If he is anywhere else, I will send her after him,
+accompanied by a person on whose discretion I can implicitly
+rely.
+
+"You shall have the sleeping drops to-morrow. In the meantime,
+I say at the end what I said at the beginning--no recklessness.
+Don't encourage poetical feelings by looking at the stars; and
+don't talk about the night being awfully quiet. There are people
+(in observatories) paid to look at the stars for you; leave it to
+them. And as for the night, do what Providence intended you to do
+with the night when Providence provided you with eyelids--go to
+sleep in it. Affectionately yours,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+4. _From the Reverend Decimus Brock to Ozias Midwinter_.
+
+"Bascombe Rectory, West Somerset, Thursday, July 8.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--One line before the post goes out, to relieve
+you of all sense of responsibility at Thorpe Ambrose, and to make
+my apologies to the lady who lives as governess in Major Milroy's
+family.
+
+"_The_ Miss Gwilt--or perhaps I ought to say, the woman calling
+herself by that name--has, to my unspeakable astonishment, openly
+made her appearance here, in my own parish! She is staying at the
+inn, accompanied by a plausible-looking man, who passes as her
+brother. What this audacious proceeding really means--unless it
+marks a new step in the conspiracy against Allan, taken under new
+advice--is, of course, more than I can yet find out.
+
+"My own idea is, that they have recognized the impossibility of
+getting at Allan, without finding me (or you) as an obstacle in
+their way; and that they are going to make a virtue of necessity
+by boldly trying to open their communications through me. The man
+looks capable of any stretch of audacity; and both he and the
+woman had the impudence to bow when I met them in the village
+half an hour since. They have been making inquiries already about
+Allan's mother here, where her exemplary life may set their
+closest scrutiny at defiance. If they will only attempt to extort
+money, as the price of the woman's silence on the subject of poor
+Mrs. Armadale's conduct in Madeira at the time of her marriage,
+they will find me well prepared for them beforehand. I have
+written by this post to my lawyers to send a competent man to
+assist me, and he will stay at the rectory, in any character
+which he thinks it safest to assume under present circumstances.
+
+"You shall hear what happens in the next day or two.
+
+"Always truly yours, DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE CLOUDING OF THE SKY.
+
+Nine days had passed, and the tenth day was nearly at an end,
+since Miss Gwilt and her pupil had taken their morning walk in
+the cottage garden.
+
+The night was overcast. Since sunset, there had been signs in
+the sky from which the popular forecast had predicted rain. The
+reception-rooms at the great house were all empty and dark. Allan
+was away, passing the evening with the Milroys; and Midwinter was
+waiting his return--not where Midwinter usually waited, among the
+books in the library, but in the little back room which Allan's
+mother had inhabited in the last days of her residence at Thorpe
+Ambrose.
+
+Nothing had been taken away, but much had been added to the room,
+since Midwinter had first seen it. The books which Mrs. Armadale
+had left behind her, the furniture, the old matting on the floor,
+the old paper on the walls, were all undisturbed. The statuette
+of Niobe still stood on its bracket, and the French window still
+opened on the garden. But now, to the relics left by the mother,
+were added the personal possessions belonging to the son. The
+wall, bare hitherto, was decorated with water-color drawings--
+Jwith a portrait of Mrs. Armadale supported on one side by a view
+of the old house in Somersetshire, and on the other by a picture
+of the yacht. Among the books which bore in faded ink Mrs.
+Armadale's inscriptions, "From my father," were other books
+inscribed in the same handwriting, in brighter ink, "To my son."
+Hanging to the wall, ranged on the chimney-piece, scattered over
+the table, were a host of little objects, some associated with
+Allan's past life, others necessary to his daily pleasures and
+pursuits, and all plainly testifying that the room which he
+habitually occupied at Thorpe Ambrose was the very room which had
+once recalled to Midwinter the second vision of the dream. Here,
+strangely unmoved by the scene around him, so lately the object
+of his superstitious distrust, Allan's friend now waited
+composedly for Allan's return; and here, more strangely still,
+he looked on a change in the household arrangements, due in the
+first instance entirely to himself. His own lips had revealed
+the discovery which he had made on the first morning in the new
+house; his own voluntary act had induced the son to establish
+himself in the mother's room.
+
+Under what motives had he spoken the words? Under no motives
+which were not the natural growth of the new interests and the
+new hopes that now animated him.
+
+The entire change wrought in his convictions by the memorable
+event that had brought him face to face with Miss Gwilt was
+a change which it was not in his nature to hide from Allan's
+knowledge. He had spoken openly, and had spoken as it was in his
+character to speak. The merit of conquering his superstition was
+a merit which he shrank from claiming, until he had first
+unsparingly exposed that superstition in its worst and weakest
+aspects to view.
+
+It was only after he had unreservedly acknowledged the impulse
+under which he had left Allan at the Mere, that he had taken
+credit to himself for the new point of view from which he could
+now look at the Dream. Then, and not till then, he had spoken
+of the fulfillment of the first Vision as the doctor at the Isle
+of Man might have spoken of it. He had asked, as the doctor might
+have asked, Where was the wonder of their seeing a pool at
+sunset, when they had a whole network of pools within a few
+hours' drive of them? and what was there extraordinary in
+discovering a woman at the Mere, when there were roads that led
+to it, and villages in its neighborhood, and boats employed on
+it, and pleasure parties visiting it? So again, he had waited
+to vindicate the firmer resolution with which he looked to the
+future, until he had first revealed all that he now saw himself
+of the errors of the past. The abandonment of his friend's
+interests, the unworthiness of the confidence that had given him
+the steward's place, the forgetfulness of the trust that Mr.
+Brock had reposed in him all implied in the one idea of leaving
+Allan--were all pointed out. The glaring self-contradictions
+betrayed in accepting the Dream as the revelation of a fatality,
+and in attempting to escape that fatality by an exertion of
+free-will--in toiling to store up knowledge of the steward's
+duties for the future, and in shrinking from letting the future
+find him in Allan's house--were, in their turn, unsparingly
+exposed. To every error, to every inconsistency, he resolutely
+confessed, before he ventured on the last simple appeal which
+closed all, "Will you trust me in the future? Will you forgive
+and forget the past?"
+
+A man who could thus open his whole heart, without one lurking
+reserve inspired by consideration for himself, was not a man to
+forget any minor act of concealment of which his weakness might
+have led him to be guilty toward his friend. It lay heavy on
+Midwinter's conscience that he had kept secret from Allan a
+discovery which he ought in Allan's dearest interests to have
+revealed--the discovery of his mother's room.
+
+But one doubt still closed his lips--the doubt whether Mrs.
+Armadale's conduct in Madeira had been kept secret on her return
+to England.
+
+Careful inquiry, first among the servants, then among the
+tenantry, careful consideration of the few reports current at the
+time, as repeated to him by the few persons left who remembered
+them, convinced him at last that the family secret had been
+successfully kept within the family limits. Once satisfied that
+whatever inquiries the son might make would lead to no disclosure
+which could shake his respect for his mother's memory, Midwinter
+had hesitated no longer. He had taken Allan into the room, and
+had shown him the books on the shelves, and all that the writing
+in the books disclosed. He had said plainly, "My one motive for
+not telling you this before sprang from my dread of interesting
+you in the room which I looked at with horror as the second of
+the scenes pointed at in the Dream. Forgive me this also, and you
+will have forgiven me all."
+
+With Allan's love for his mother's memory, but one result could
+follow such an avowal as this. He had liked the little room from
+the first, as a pleasant contrast to the oppressive grandeur of
+the other rooms at Thorpe Ambrose, and, now that he knew what
+associations were connected with it, his resolution was at once
+taken to make it especially his own. The same day, all his
+personal possessions were collected and arranged in his mother's
+room--in Midwinter's presence, and with Midwinter's assistance
+given to the work.
+
+Under those circumstances had the change now wrought in the
+household arrangements been produced; and in this way had
+Midwinter's victory over his own fatalism--by making Allan the
+daily occupant of a room which he might otherwise hardly ever
+have entered--actually favored the fulfillment of the Second
+Vision of the Dream.
+
+
+The hour wore on quietly as Allan's friend sat waiting for
+Allan's return. Sometimes reading, sometimes thinking placidly,
+he whiled away the time. No vexing cares, no boding doubts,
+troubled him now. The rent-day, which he had once dreaded, had
+come and gone harmlessly. A friendlier understanding had been
+established between Allan and his tenants; Mr. Bashwood had
+proved himself to be worthy of the confidence reposed in him;
+the Pedgifts, father and son, had amply justified their client's
+good opinion of them. Wherever Midwinter looked, the prospect
+was bright, the future was without a cloud.
+
+He trimmed the lamp on the table beside him and looked out at the
+night. The stable clock was chiming the half-hour past eleven as
+he walked to the window, and the first rain-drops were beginning
+to fall. He had his hand on the bell to summon the servant, and
+send him over to the cottage with an umbrella, when he was
+stopped by hearing the familiar footstep on the walk outside.
+
+"How late you are!" said Midwinter, as Allan entered through the
+open French window. "Was there a party at the cottage?"
+
+"No! only ourselves. The time slipped away somehow." He answered
+in lower tones than usual, and sighed as he took his chair.
+
+"You seem to be out of spirits?" pursued Midwinter. "What's the
+matter?"
+
+Allan hesitated. "I may as well tell you," he said, after a
+moment. "It's nothing to be ashamed of; I only wonder you haven't
+noticed it before! There's a woman in it, as usual--I'm in love."
+
+Midwinter laughed. "Has Miss Milroy been more charming to-night
+than ever?" he asked, gayly.
+
+"Miss Milroy!" repeated Allan. "What are you thinking of! I'm not
+in love with Miss Milroy."
+
+"Who is it, then?"
+
+"Who is it! What a question to ask! Who can it be but Miss
+Gwilt?"
+
+There was a sudden silence. Allan sat listlessly, with his hands
+in his pockets, looking out through the open window at the
+falling rain. If he had turned toward his friend when he
+mentioned Miss Gwilt's name he might possibly have been a little
+startled by the change he would have seen in Midwinter's face.
+
+"I suppose you don't approve of it?" he said, after waiting a
+little.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"It's too late to make objections," proceeded Allan. "I really
+mean it when I tell you I'm in love with her."
+
+"A fortnight since you were in love with Miss Milroy," said the
+other, in quiet, measured tones.
+
+"Pooh! a mere flirtation. It's different this time. I'm in
+earnest about Miss Gwilt."
+
+He looked round as he spoke. Midwinter turned his face aside on
+the instant, and bent it over a book.
+
+"I see you don't approve of the thing," Allan went on. "Do you
+object to her being only a governess? You can't do that, I'm
+sure. If you were in my place, her being only a governess
+wouldn't stand in the way with _you_?"
+
+"No," said Midwinter; "I can't honestly say it would stand in
+the way with me." He gave the answer reluctantly, and pushed his
+chair back out of the light of the lamp.
+
+"A governess is a lady who is not rich," said Allan, in an
+oracular manner; "and a duchess is a lady who is not poor. And
+that's all the difference I acknowledge between them. Miss Gwilt
+is older than I am--I don't deny that. What age do you guess her
+at, Midwinter? I say, seven or eight and twenty. What do you
+say?"
+
+"Nothing. I agree with you."
+
+"Do you think seven or eight and twenty is too old for me? If you
+were in love with a woman yourself, you wouldn't think seven or
+eight and twenty too old--would you?"
+
+"I can't say I should think it too old, if--"
+
+"If you were really fond of her?"
+
+Once more there was no answer.
+
+"Well," resumed Allan, "if there's no harm in her being only a
+governess, and no harm in her being a little older than I am,
+what's the objection to Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"I have made no objection."
+
+"I don't say you have. But you don't seem to like the notion of
+it, for all that."
+
+There was another pause. Midwinter was the first to break the
+silence this time.
+
+"Are you sure of yourself, Allan?" he asked, with his face bent
+once more over the book. "Are you really attached to this lady?
+Have you thought seriously already of asking her to be your
+wife?"
+
+"I am thinking seriously of it at this moment," said Allan. "I
+can't be happy--I can't live without her. Upon my soul, I worship
+the very ground she treads on!"
+
+"How long--" His voice faltered, and he stopped. "How long," he
+reiterated, "have you worshipped the very ground she treads on?"
+
+"Longer than you think for. I know I can trust you with all my
+secrets--"
+
+"Don't trust me!"
+
+"Nonsense! I _will_ trust you. There is a little difficulty in
+the way which I haven't mentioned yet. It's a matter of some
+delicacy, and I want to consult you about it. Between ourselves,
+I have had private opportunities with Miss Gwilt--"
+
+Midwinter suddenly started to his feet, and opened the door.
+
+"We'll talk of this to-morrow," he said. "Good-night."
+
+Allan looked round in astonishment. The door was closed again,
+and he was alone in the room.
+
+"He has never shaken hands with me!" exclaimed Allan, looking
+bewildered at the empty chair.
+
+As the words passed his lips the door opened, and Midwinter
+appeared again.
+
+"We haven't shaken hands," he said, abruptly. "God bless you,
+Allan! We'll talk of it to-morrow. Good-night."
+
+Allan stood alone at the window, looking out at the pouring rain.
+He felt ill at ease, without knowing why. "Midwinter's ways get
+stranger and stranger," he thought. "What can he mean by putting
+me off till to-morrow, when I wanted to speak to him to-night?"
+He took up his bedroom candle a little impatiently, put it down
+again, and, walking back to the open window, stood looking out in
+the direction of the cottage. "I wonder if she's thinking of me?"
+he said to himself softly.
+
+She _was_ thinking of him. She had just opened her desk to write
+to Mrs. Oldershaw; and her pen had that moment traced the opening
+line: "Make your mind easy. I have got him!"
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+EXIT.
+
+It rained all through the night, and when the morning came it was
+raining still.
+
+Contrary to his ordinary habit, Midwinter was waiting in the
+breakfast-room when Allan entered it. He looked worn and weary,
+but his smile was gentler and his manner more composed than
+usual. To Allan's surprise he approached the subject of the
+previous night's conversation of his own accord as soon as the
+servant was out of the room.
+
+"I am afraid you thought me very impatient and very abrupt with
+you last night," he said. "I will try to make amends for it this
+morning. I will hear everything you wish to say to me on the
+subject of Miss Gwilt."
+
+"I hardly like to worry you," said Allan. "You look as if you had
+had a bad night's rest."
+
+"I have not slept well for some time past," replied Midwinter,
+quietly. "Something has been wrong with me. But I believe I have
+found out the way to put myself right again without troubling the
+doctors. Late in the morning I shall have something to say to you
+about this. Let us get back first to what you were talking of
+last night. You were speaking of some difficulty--" He hesitated,
+and finished the sentence in a tone so low that Allan failed to
+hear him. "Perhaps it would be better," he went on, "if, instead
+of speaking to me, you spoke to Mr. Brock?"
+
+"I would rather speak to _you_," said Allan. "But tell me first,
+was I right or wrong last night in thinking you disapproved of my
+falling in love with Miss Gwilt?"
+
+Midwinter's lean, nervous fingers began to crumble the bread in
+his plate. His eyes looked away from Allan for the first time.
+
+"If you have any objection," persisted Allan, "I should like to
+hear it."
+
+Midwinter suddenly looked up again, his cheeks turning ashy pale,
+and his glittering black eyes fixed full on Allan's face.
+
+"You love her," he said. "Does _she_ love _you_?"
+
+"You won't think me vain?" returned Allan. "I told you yesterday
+I had had private opportunities with her--"
+
+Midwinter's eyes dropped again to the crumbs on his plate. "I
+understand," he interposed, quickly. "You were wrong last night.
+I had no objections to make."
+
+"Don't you congratulate me?" asked Allan, a little uneasily.
+"Such a beautiful woman! such a clever woman!"
+
+Midwinter held out his hand. "I owe you more than mere
+congratulations," he said. "In anything which is for your
+happiness I owe you help." He took Allan's hand, and wrung it
+hard. "Can I help you?" he asked, growing paler and paler as he
+spoke.
+
+"My dear fellow," exclaimed Allan, "what is the matter with you?
+Your hand is as cold as ice."
+
+Midwinter smiled faintly. "I am always in extremes," he said;
+"my hand was as hot as fire the first time you took it at the old
+west-country inn. Come to that difficulty which you have not come
+to yet. You are young, rich, your own master--and she loves you.
+What difficulty can there be?"
+
+Allan hesitated. "I hardly know how to put it," he replied. "As
+you said just now, I love her, and she loves me; and yet there
+is a sort of strangeness between us. One talks a good deal about
+one's self when one is in love, at least I do. I've told her all
+about myself and my mother, and how I came in for this place, and
+the rest of it. Well--though it doesn't strike me when we are
+together--it comes across me now and then, when I'm away from
+her, that she doesn't say much on her side. In fact, I know no
+more about her than you do."
+
+"Do you mean that you know nothing about Miss Gwilt's family
+and friends?"
+
+"That's it, exactly."
+
+"Have you never asked her about them?"
+
+"I said something of the sort the other day," returned Allan:
+"and I'm afraid, as usual, I said it in the wrong way. She
+looked--I can't quite tell you how; not exactly displeased,
+but--oh, what things words are! I'd give the world, Midwinter,
+if I could only find the right word when I want it as well as
+you do."
+
+"Did Miss Gwilt say anything to you in the way of a reply?"
+
+"That's just what I was coming to. She said, 'I shall have a
+melancholy story to tell you one of these days, Mr. Armadale,
+about myself and my family; but you look so happy, and the
+circumstances are so distressing, that I have hardly the heart to
+speak of it now.' Ah, _she_ can express herself--with the tears
+in her eyes, my dear fellow, with the tears in her eyes! Of
+course, I changed the subject directly. And now the difficulty is
+how to get back to it, delicately, without making her cry again.
+We _must_ get back to it, you know. Not on my account; I am quite
+content to marry her first and hear of her family misfortunes,
+poor thing, afterward. But I know Mr. Brock. If I can't satisfy
+him about her family when I write to tell him of this (which, of
+course, I must do), he will be dead against the whole thing. I'm
+my own master, of course, and I can do as I like about it. But
+dear old Brock was such a good friend to my poor mother, and he
+has been such a good friend to me--you see what I mean, don't
+you?"
+
+"Certainly, Allan; Mr. Brock has been your second father. Any
+disagreement between you about such a serious matter as this
+would be the saddest thing that could happen. You ought to
+satisfy him that Miss Gwilt is (what I am sure Miss Gwilt will
+prove to be) worthy, in every way worthy--" His voice sank in
+spite of him, and he left the sentence unfinished.
+
+"Just my feeling in the matter!" Allan struck in, glibly. "Now we
+can come to what I particularly wanted to consult you about. If
+this was your case, Midwinter, you would be able to say the right
+words to her--you would put it delicately, even though you were
+putting it quite in the dark. I can't do that. I'm a blundering
+sort of fellow; and I'm horribly afraid, if I can't get some hint
+at the truth to help me at starting, of saying something to
+distress her. Family misfortunes are such tender subjects to
+touch on, especially with such a refined woman, such a
+tender-hearted woman, as Miss Gwilt. There may have been some
+dreadful death in the family--some relation who has disgraced
+himself--some infernal cruelty which has forced the poor thing
+out on the world as a governess. Well, turning it over in my
+mind, it struck me that the major might be able to put me on the
+right tack. It is quite possible that he might have been informed
+of Miss Gwilt's family circumstances before he engaged her, isn't
+it?"
+
+"It is possible, Allan, certainly."
+
+"Just my feeling again! My notion is to speak to the major. If I
+could only get the story from him first, I should know so much
+better how to speak to Miss Gwilt about it afterward. You advise
+me to try the major, don't you?"
+
+There was a pause before Midwinter replied. When he did answer,
+it was a little reluctantly.
+
+"I hardly know how to advise you, Allan," he said. "This is a
+very delicate matter."
+
+"I believe you would try the major, if you were in my place,"
+returned Allan, reverting to his inveterately personal way of
+putting the question.
+
+"Perhaps I might," said Midwinter, more and more unwillingly.
+"But if I did speak to the major, I should be very careful, in
+your place, not to put myself in a false position. I should be
+very careful to let no one suspect me of the meanness of prying
+into a woman's secrets behind her back."
+
+Allan's face flushed. "Good heavens, Midwinter," he exclaimed,
+"who could suspect me of that?"
+
+"Nobody, Allan, who really knows you."
+
+"The major knows me. The major is the last man in the world to
+misunderstand me. All I want him to do is to help me (if he can)
+to speak about a delicate subject to Miss Gwilt, without hurting
+her feelings. Can anything be simpler between two gentlemen?"
+
+Instead of replying, Midwinter, still speaking as constrainedly
+as ever, asked a question on his side. "Do you mean to tell Major
+Milroy," he said, "what your intentions really are toward Miss
+Gwilt?"
+
+Allan's manner altered. He hesitated, and looked confused.
+
+"I have been thinking of that," he replied; "and I mean to feel
+my way first, and then tell him or not afterward, as matters turn
+out?"
+
+A proceeding so cautious as this was too strikingly inconsistent
+with Allan's character not to surprise any one who knew him.
+Midwinter showed his surprise plainly.
+
+"You forget that foolish flirtation of mine with Miss Milroy,"
+Allan went on, more and more confusedly. "The major may have
+noticed it, and may have thought I meant--well, what I didn't
+mean. It might be rather awkward, mightn't it, to propose to his
+face for his governess instead of his daughter?"
+
+He waited for a word of answer, but none came. Midwinter opened
+his lips to speak, and suddenly checked himself. Allan, uneasy
+at his silence, doubly uneasy under certain recollections of the
+major's daughter which the conversation had called up, rose from
+the table and shortened the interview a little impatiently.
+
+"Come! come!" he said, "don't sit there looking unutterable
+things; don't make mountains out of mole-hills. You have such
+an old, old head, Midwinter, on those young shoulders of yours!
+Let's have done with all these _pros_ and _cons_. Do you mean to
+tell me in plain words that it won't do to speak to the major?"
+
+"I can't take the responsibility, Allan, of telling you that.
+To be plainer still, I can't feel confident of the soundness of
+any advice I may give you in--in our present position toward each
+other. All I am sure of is that I cannot possibly be wrong in
+entreating you to do two things."
+
+"What are they?"
+
+"If you speak to Major Milroy, pray remember the caution I have
+given you! Pray think of what you say before you say it!"
+
+"I'll think, never fear! What next?"
+
+"Before you take any serious step in this matter, write and tell
+Mr. Brock. Will you promise me to do that?"
+
+"With all my heart. Anything more?"
+
+"Nothing more. I have said my last words."
+
+Allan led the way to the door. "Come into my room," he said, "and
+I'll give you a cigar. The servants will be in here directly to
+clear away, and I want to go on talking about Miss Gwilt."
+
+"Don't wait for me," said Midwinter; "I'll follow you in a minute
+or two."
+
+He remained seated until Allan had closed the door, then rose,
+and took from a corner of the room, where it lay hidden behind
+one of the curtains, a knapsack ready packed for traveling. As he
+stood at the window thinking, with the knapsack in his hand, a
+strangely old, care-worn look stole over his face: he seemed to
+lose the last of his youth in an instant.
+
+
+What the woman's quicker insight had discovered days since, the
+man's slower perception had only realized in the past night. The
+pang that had wrung him when he heard Allan's avowal had set the
+truth self-revealed before Midwinter for the first time. He had
+been conscious of looking at Miss Gwilt with new eyes and a new
+mind, on the next occasion when they met after the memorable
+interview in Major Milroy's garden; but he had never until now
+known the passion that she had roused in him for what it really
+was. Knowing it at last, feeling it consciously in full
+possession of him, he had the courage which no man with a happier
+experience of life would have possessed--the courage to recall
+what Allan had confided to him, and to look resolutely at the
+future through his own grateful remembrances of the past.
+
+Steadfastly, through the sleepless hours of the night, he had
+bent his mind to the conviction that he must conquer the passion
+which had taken possession of him, for Allan's sake; and that the
+one way to conquer it was--to go. No after-doubt as to the
+sacrifice had troubled him when morning came; and no after-doubt
+troubled him now. The one question that kept him hesitating was
+the question of leaving Thorpe Ambrose. Though Mr. Brock's letter
+relieved him from all necessity of keeping watch in Norfolk for a
+woman who was known to be in Somersetshire; though the duties of
+the steward's office were duties which might be safely left in
+Mr. Bashwood's tried and trustworthy hands--still, admitting
+these considerations, his mind was not easy at the thought of
+leaving Allan, at a time when a crisis was approaching in Allan's
+life.
+
+He slung the knapsack loosely over his shoulder and put the
+question to his conscience for the last time. "Can you trust
+yourself to see her, day by day as you must see her--can you
+trust yourself to hear him talk of her, hour by hour, as you must
+hear him--if you stay in this house?" Again the answer came, as
+it had come all through the night. Again his heart warned him, in
+the very interests of the friendship that he held sacred, to go
+while the time was his own; to go before the woman who had
+possessed herself of his love had possessed herself of his power
+of self-sacrifice and his sense of gratitude as well.
+
+He looked round the room mechanically before he turned to leave
+it. Every remembrance of the conversation that had just taken
+place between Allan and himself pointed to the same conclusion,
+and warned him, as his own conscience had warned him, to go.
+
+Had he honestly mentioned any one of the objections which he, or
+any man, must have seen to Allan's attachment? Had he--as his
+knowledge of his friend's facile character bound him to
+do--warned Allan to distrust his own hasty impulses, and to test
+himself by time and absence, before he made sure that the
+happiness of his whole life was bound up in Miss Gwilt? No. The
+bare doubt whether, in speaking of these things, he could feel
+that he was speaking disinterestedly, had closed his lips, and
+would close his lips for the future, till the time for speaking
+had gone by. Was the right man to restrain Allan the man who
+would have given the world, if he had it, to stand in Allan's
+place? There was but one plain course of action that an honest
+man and a grateful man could follow in the position in which he
+stood. Far removed from all chance of seeing her, and from all
+chance of hearing of her--alone with his own faithful
+recollection of what he owed to his friend--he might hope to
+fight it down, as he had fought down the tears in his childhood
+under his gypsy master's stick; as he had fought down the misery
+of his lonely youth time in the country bookseller's shop. "I
+must go," he said, as he turned wearily from the window, "before
+she comes to the house again. I must go before another hour is
+over my head."
+
+With that resolution he left the room; and, in leaving it, took
+the irrevocable step from Present to Future.
+
+
+The rain was still falling. The sullen sky, all round the
+horizon, still lowered watery and dark, when Midwinter, equipped
+for traveling, appeared in Allan's room.
+
+"Good heavens!" cried Allan, pointing to the knapsack, "what does
+_that_ mean?"
+
+"Nothing very extraordinary," said Midwinter. "It only
+means--good-by."
+
+"Good-by!" repeated Allan, starting to his feet in astonishment.
+
+Midwinter put him back gently into his chair, and drew a seat
+near to it for himself.
+
+"When you noticed that I looked ill this morning," he said, "I
+told you that I had been thinking of a way to recover my health,
+and that I meant to speak to you about it later in the day. That
+latter time has come. I have been out of sorts, as the phrase is,
+for some time past. You have remarked it yourself, Allan, more
+than once; and, with your usual kindness, you have allowed it to
+excuse many things in my conduct which would have been otherwise
+unpardonable, even in your friendly eyes."
+
+"My dear fellow," interposed Allan, "you don't mean to say you
+are going out on a walking tour in this pouring rain!"
+
+"Never mind the rain," rejoined Midwinter. "The rain and I are
+old friends. You know something, Allan, of the life I led before
+you met with me. From the time when I was a child, I have been
+used to hardship and exposure. Night and day, sometimes for
+months together, I never had my head under a roof. For years and
+years, the life of a wild animal--perhaps I ought to say, the
+life of a savage--was the life I led, while you were at home and
+happy. I have the leaven of the vagabond--the vagabond animal, or
+the vagabond man, I hardly know which--in me still. Does it
+distress you to hear me talk of myself in this way? I won't
+distress you. I will only say that the comfort and the luxury of
+our life here are, at times, I think, a little too much for a man
+to whom comforts and luxuries come as strange things. I want
+nothing to put me right again but more air and exercise; fewer
+good breakfasts and dinners, my dear friend, than I get here. Let
+me go back to some of the hardships which this comfortable house
+is expressly made to shut out. Let me meet the wind and weather
+as I used to meet them when I was a boy; let me feel weary again
+for a little while, without a carriage near to pick me up; and
+hungry when the night falls, with miles of walking between my
+supper and me. Give me a week or two away, Allan--up northward,
+on foot, to the Yorkshire moors--and I promise to return to
+Thorpe Ambrose, better company for you and for your friends. I
+shall be back before you have time to miss me. Mr. Bashwood will
+take care of the business in the office; it is only for a
+fortnight, and it is for my own good--let me go!"
+
+"I don't like it," said Allan. "I don't like your leaving me in
+this sudden manner. There's something so strange and dreary about
+it. Why not try riding, if you want more exercise; all the horses
+in the stables are at your disposal. At all events, you can't
+possibly go to-day. Look at the rain!"
+
+Midwinter looked toward the window, and gently shook his head.
+
+"I thought nothing of the rain," he said, "when I was a mere
+child, getting my living with the dancing dogs--why should I
+think anything of it now? _My_ getting wet, and _your_ getting
+wet, Allan, are two very different things. When I was a
+fisherman's boy in the Hebrides, I hadn't a dry thread on me for
+weeks together. "
+
+"But you're not in the Hebrides now," persisted Allan; "and I
+expect our friends from the cottage to-morrow evening. You can't
+start till after to-morrow. Miss Gwilt is going to give us some
+more music, and you know you like Miss Gwilt's playing."
+
+Midwinter turned aside to buckle the straps of his knapsack.
+"Give me another chance of hearing Miss Gwilt when I come back,"
+he said, with his head down, and his fingers busy at the straps.
+
+"You have one fault, my dear fellow, and it grows on you,"
+remonstrated Allan; "when you have once taken a thing into our
+head, you're the most obstinate man alive. There's no persuading
+you to listen to reason. If you _will_ go," added Allan, suddenly
+rising, as Midwinter took up his hat and stick in silence, "I
+have half a mind to go with you, and try a little roughing it
+too!"
+
+"Go with _me_!" repeated Midwinter, with a momentary bitterness
+in his tone, "and leave Miss Gwilt!"
+
+Allan sat down again, and admitted the force of the objection in
+significant silence. Without a word more on his side, Midwinter
+held out his hand to take leave. They were both deeply moved, and
+each was anxious to hide his agitation from the other. Allan took
+the last refuge which his friend's firmness left to him: he tried
+to lighten the farewell moment by a joke.
+
+"I'll tell you what," he said, "I begin to doubt if you're quite
+cured yet of your belief in the Dream. I suspect you're running
+away from me, after all!"
+
+Midwinter looked at him, uncertain whether he was in jest or
+earnest. "What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"What did you tell me," retorted Allan, "when you took me in here
+the other day, and made a clean breast of it? What did you say
+about this room, and the second vision of the dream? By Jupiter!"
+he exclaimed, starting to his feet once more, "now I look again,
+here _is_ the Second Vision! There's the rain pattering against
+the window-there's the lawn and the garden outside--here am I
+where I stood in the Dream--and there are you where the Shadow
+stood. The whole scene complete, out-of-doors and in; and _I've_
+discovered it this time!"
+
+A moment's life stirred again in the dead remains of Midwinter's
+superstition. His color changed, and he eagerly, almost fiercely,
+disputed Allan's conclusion.
+
+"No!" he said, pointing to the little marble figure on the
+bracket, "the scene is _not_ complete--you have forgotten
+something, as usual. The Dream is wrong this time, thank
+God--utterly wrong! In the vision you saw, the statue was lying
+in fragments on the floor, and you were stooping over them with
+a troubled and an angry mind. There stands the statue safe and
+sound! and you haven't the vestige of an angry feeling in your
+mind, have you?" He seized Allan impulsively by the hand. At the
+same moment the consciousness came to him that he was speaking
+and acting as earnestly as if he still believed in the Dream. The
+color rushed back over his face, and he turned away in confused
+silence.
+
+"What did I tell you?" said Allan, laughing, a little uneasily.
+"That night on the Wreck is hanging on your mind as heavily as
+ever."
+
+"Nothing hangs heavy on me," retorted Midwinter, with a sudden
+outburst of impatience, "but the knapsack on my back, and the
+time I'm wasting here. I'll go out, and see if it's likely to
+clear up."
+
+"You'll come back?" interposed Allan.
+
+Midwinter opened the French window, and stepped out into the
+garden.
+
+"Yes," he said, answering with all his former gentleness of
+manner; "I'll come back in a fortnight. Good-by, Allan; and good
+luck with Miss Gwilt!"
+
+He pushed the window to, and was away across the garden before
+his friend could open it again and follow him.
+
+Allan rose, and took one step into the garden; then checked
+himself at the window, and returned to his chair. He knew
+Midwinter well enough to feel the total uselessness of attempting
+to follow him or to call him back. He was gone, and for two weeks
+to come there was no hope of seeing him again. An hour or more
+passed, the rain still fell, and the sky still threatened. A
+heavier and heavier sense of loneliness and despondency--the
+sense of all others which his previous life had least fitted him
+to understand and endure--possessed itself of Allan's mind. In
+sheer horror of his own uninhabitably solitary house, he rang for
+his hat and umbrella, and resolved to take refuge in the major's
+cottage.
+
+"I might have gone a little way with him," thought Allan, his
+mind still running on Midwinter as he put on his hat. "I should
+like to have seen the dear old fellow fairly started on his
+journey."
+
+He took his umbrella. If he had noticed the face of the servant
+who gave it to him, he might possibly have asked some questions,
+and might have heard some news to interest him in his present
+frame of mind. As it was, he went out without looking at the man,
+and without suspecting that his servants knew more of Midwinter's
+last moments at Thorpe Ambrose than he knew himself. Not ten
+minutes since, the grocer and butcher had called in to receive
+payment of their bills, and the grocer and the butcher had seen
+how Midwinter started on his journey.
+
+The grocer had met him first, not far from the house, stopping
+on his way, in the pouring rain, to speak to a little ragged imp
+of a boy, the pest of the neighborhood. The boy's customary
+impudence had broken out even more unrestrainedly than usual at
+the sight of the gentleman's knapsack. And what had the gentleman
+done in return? He had stopped and looked distressed, and had put
+his two hands gently on the boy's shoulders. The grocer's own
+eyes had seen that; and the grocer's own ears had heard him say,
+"Poor little chap! I know how the wind gnaws and the rain wets
+through a ragged jacket, better than most people who have got
+a good coat on their backs." And with those words he had put his
+hand in his pocket, and had rewarded the boy's impudence with
+a present of a shilling. "Wrong here-abouts," said the grocer,
+touching his forehead. "That's my opinion of Mr. Armadale's
+friend!"
+
+The butcher had seen him further on in the journey, at the other
+end of the town. He had stopped--again in the pouring rain--and
+this time to look at nothing more remarkable than a half-starved
+cur, shivering on a doorstep. "I had my eye on him," said the
+butcher; "and what do you think he did? He crossed the road over
+to my shop, and bought a bit of meat fit for a Christian. Very
+well. He says good-morning, and crosses back again; and, on the
+word of a man, down he goes on his knees on the wet doorstep, and
+out he takes his knife, and cuts up the meat, and gives it to the
+dog. Meat, I tell you again, fit for a Christian! I'm not a hard
+man, ma'am," concluded the butcher, addressing the cook, "but
+meat's meat; and it will serve your master's friend right if he
+lives to want it."
+
+With those old unforgotten sympathies of the old unforgotten time
+to keep him company on his lonely road, he had left the town
+behind him, and had been lost to view in the misty rain. The
+grocer and the butcher had seen the last of him, and had judged a
+great nature, as all natures _are_ judged from the grocer and the
+butcher point of view.
+
+THE END OF THE SECOND BOOK.
+
+BOOK THE THIRD.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MRS. MILROY.
+
+Two days after Midwinter's departure from Thorpe Ambrose, Mrs.
+Milroy, having completed her morning toilet, and having dismissed
+her nurse, rang the bell again five minutes afterward, and on the
+woman's re-appearance asked impatiently if the post had come in.
+
+"Post?" echoed the nurse. "Haven't you got your watch? Don't you
+know that it's a good half-hour too soon to ask for your
+letters?" She spoke with the confident insolence of a servant
+long accustomed to presume on her mistress's weakness and her
+mistress's necessities. Mrs. Milroy, on her side, appeared to be
+well used to her nurses manner; she gave her orders composedly,
+without noticing it.
+
+"When the postman does come," she said, "see him yourself. I am
+expecting a letter which I ought to have had two days since. I
+don't understand it. I'm beginning to suspect the servants."
+
+The nurse smiled contemptuously. "Whom will you suspect next?"
+she asked. "There! don't put yourself out. I'll answer the
+gate-bell this morning; and we'll see if I can't bring you a
+letter when the postman comes." Saying those words, with the tone
+and manner of a woman who is quieting a fractious child, the
+nurse, without waiting to be dismissed, left the room.
+
+Mrs. Milroy turned slowly and wearily on her bed, when she was
+left by herself again, and let the light from the window fall on
+her face. It was the face of a woman who had once been handsome,
+and who was still, so far as years went, in the prime of her
+life. Long-continued suffering of body and long-continued
+irritation of mind had worn her away--in the roughly expressive
+popular phrase--to skin and bone. The utter wreck of her beauty
+was made a wreck horrible to behold, by her desperate efforts to
+conceal the sight of it from her own eyes, from the eyes of her
+husband and her child, from the eyes even of the doctor who
+attended her, and whose business it was to penetrate to the
+truth. Her head, from which the greater part of the hair had
+fallen off; would have been less shocking to see than the
+hideously youthful wig by which she tried to hide the loss. No
+deterioration of her complexion, no wrinkling of her skin, could
+have been so dreadful to look at as the rouge that lay thick on
+her cheeks, and the white enamel plastered on her forehead. The
+delicate lace, and the bright trimming on her dressing-gown, the
+ribbons in her cap, and the rings on her bony fingers, all
+intended to draw the eye away from the change that had passed
+over her, directed the eye to it, on the contrary; emphasized it;
+made it by sheer force of contrast more hopeless and more
+horrible than it really was. An illustrated book of the fashions,
+in which women were represented exhibiting their finery by means
+of the free use of their limbs, lay on the bed, from which she
+had not moved for years without being lifted by her nurse. A
+hand-glass was placed with the book so that she could reach it
+easily. She took up the glass after her attendant had left the
+room, and looked at her face with an unblushing interest and
+attention which she would have been ashamed of herself at the age
+of eighteen.
+
+"Older and older, and thinner and thinner!" she said. "The major
+will soon be a free man; but I'll have that red-haired hussy out
+of the house first!"
+
+She dropped the looking-glass on the counterpane, and clinched
+the hand that held it. Her eyes suddenly riveted themselves on
+a little crayon portrait of her husband hanging on the opposite
+wall; they looked at the likeness with the hard and cruel
+brightness of the eyes of a bird of prey. "Red is your taste in
+your old age is it?" she said to the portrait. "Red hair, and a
+scrofulous complexion, and a padded figure, a ballet-girl's walk,
+and a pickpocket's light fingers. _Miss_ Gwilt! _Miss_, with
+those eyes, and that walk!" She turned her head suddenly on the
+pillow, and burst into a harsh, jeering laugh. "_Miss_!" she
+repeated over and over again, with the venomously pointed
+emphasis of the most merciless of all human forms of
+contempt--the contempt of one woman for another.
+
+The age we live in is an age which finds no human creature
+inexcusable. Is there an excuse for Mrs. Milroy? Let the story
+of her life answer the question.
+
+She had married the major at an unusually early age; and, in
+marrying him, had taken a man for her husband who was old enough
+to be her father--a man who, at that time, had the reputation,
+and not unjustly, of having made the freest use of his social
+gifts and his advantages of personal appearance in the society of
+women. Indifferently educated, and below her husband in station,
+she had begun by accepting his addresses under the influence of
+her own flattered vanity, and had ended by feeling the
+fascination which Major Milroy had exercised over women
+infinitely her mental superiors in his earlier life. He had been
+touched, on his side, by her devotion, and had felt, in his turn,
+the attraction of her beauty, her freshness, and her youth. Up to
+the time when their little daughter and only child had reached
+the age of eight years, their married life had been an unusually
+happy one. At that period the double misfortune fell on the
+household, of the failure of the wife's health, and the almost
+total loss of the husband's fortune; and from that moment the
+domestic happiness of the married pair was virtually at an end.
+
+Having reached the age when men in general are readier, under
+the pressure of calamity, to resign themselves than to resist,
+the major had secured the little relics of his property, had
+retired into the country, and had patiently taken refuge in his
+mechanical pursuits. A woman nearer to him in age, or a woman
+with a better training and more patience of disposition than his
+wife possessed, would have understood the major's conduct, and
+have found consolation in the major's submission. Mrs. Milroy
+found consolation in nothing. Neither nature nor training helped
+her to meet resignedly the cruel calamity which had struck at her
+in the bloom of womanhood and the prime of beauty. The curse of
+incurable sickness blighted her at once and for life.
+
+Suffering can, and does, develop the latent evil that there is
+in humanity, as well as the latent good. The good that was in
+Mrs. Milroy's nature shrank up, under that subtly deteriorating
+influence in which the evil grew and flourished. Month by month,
+as she became the weaker woman physically, she became the worse
+woman morally. All that was mean, cruel, and false in her
+expanded in steady proportion to the contraction of all that
+had once been generous, gentle, and true. Old suspicions of her
+husband's readiness to relapse into the irregularities of his
+bachelor life, which, in her healthier days of mind and body, she
+had openly confessed to him--which she had always sooner or later
+seen to be suspicions that he had not deserved--came back, now
+that sickness had divorced her from him, in the form of that
+baser conjugal distrust which keeps itself cunningly secret;
+which gathers together its inflammatory particles atom by atom
+into a heap, and sets the slowly burning frenzy of jealousy
+alight in the mind. No proof of her husband's blameless and
+patient life that could now be shown to Mrs. Milroy; no appeal
+that could be made to her respect for herself, or for her child
+growing up to womanhood, availed to dissipate the terrible
+delusion born of her hopeless illness, and growing steadily with
+its growth. Like all other madness, it had its ebb and flow, its
+time of spasmodic outburst, and its time of deceitful repose;
+but, active or passive, it was always in her. It had injured
+innocent servants, and insulted blameless strangers. It had
+brought the first tears of shame and sorrow into her daughter's
+eyes, and had set the deepest lines that scored it in her
+husband's face. It had made the secret misery of the little
+household for years; and it was now to pass beyond the family
+limits, and to influence coming events at Thorpe Ambrose, in
+which the future interests of Allan and Allan's friend were
+vitally concerned.
+
+A moment's glance at the posture of domestic affairs in the
+cottage, prior to the engagement of the new governess, is
+necessary to the due appreciation of the serious consequences
+that followed Miss Gwilt's appearance on the scene.
+
+On the marriage of the governess who had lived in his service
+for many years (a woman of an age and an appearance to set even
+Mrs. Milroy's jealousy at defiance), the major had considered
+the question of sending his daughter away from home far more
+seriously than his wife supposed. He was conscious that scenes
+took place in the house at which no young girl should be present;
+but he felt an invincible reluctance to apply the one efficient
+remedy--the keeping his daughter away from home in school time
+and holiday time alike. The struggle thus raised in his mind once
+set at rest, by the resolution to advertise for a new governess,
+Major Milroy's natural tendency to avoid trouble rather than
+to meet it had declared itself in its customary manner. He had
+closed his eyes again on his home anxieties as quietly as usual,
+and had gone back, as he had gone back on hundreds of previous
+occasions, to the consoling society of his old friend the clock.
+
+It was far otherwise with the major's wife. The chance which her
+husband had entirely overlooked, that the new governess who was
+to come might be a younger and a more attractive woman than the
+old governess who had gone, was the first chance that presented
+itself as possible to Mrs. Milroy's mind. She had said nothing.
+Secretly waiting, and secretly nursing her inveterate distrust,
+she had encouraged her husband and her daughter to leave her on
+the occasion of the picnic, with the express purpose of making an
+opportunity for seeing the new governess alone. The governess had
+shown herself; and the smoldering fire of Mrs. Milroy's jealousy
+had burst into flame in the moment when she and the handsome
+stranger first set eyes on each other.
+
+The interview over, Mrs. Milroy's suspicions fastened at once and
+immovably on her husband's mother.
+
+She was well aware that there was no one else in London on whom
+the major could depend to make the necessary inquiries; she was
+well aware that Miss Gwilt had applied for the situation, in
+the first instance, as a stranger answering an advertisement
+published in a newspaper. Yet knowing this, she had obstinately
+closed her eyes, with the blind frenzy of the blindest of all
+the passions, to the facts straight before her; and, looking back
+to the last of many quarrels between them which had ended in
+separating the elder lady and herself, had seized on the
+conclusion that Miss Gwilt's engagement was due to her
+mother-in-law's vindictive enjoyment of making mischief in her
+household. The inference which the very servants themselves,
+witnesses of the family scandal, had correctly drawn--that the
+major's mother, in securing the services of a well-recommended
+governess for her son, had thought it no part of her duty to
+consider that governess's looks in the purely fanciful interests
+of the major's wife--was an inference which it was simply
+impossible to convey into Mrs. Milroy's mind. Miss Gwilt had
+barely closed the sick-room door when the whispered words hissed
+out of Mrs. Milroy's lips, "Before another week is over your
+head, my lady, you go!"
+
+From that moment, through the wakeful night and the weary day,
+the one object of the bedridden woman's life was to procure the
+new governess's dismissal from the house.
+
+The assistance of the nurse, in the capacity of spy, was
+secured--as Mrs. Milroy had been accustomed to secure other extra
+services which her attendant was not bound to render her--by
+a present of a dress from the mistress's wardrobe. One after
+another articles of wearing apparel which were now useless to
+Mrs. Milroy had ministered in this way to feed the nurse's
+greed--the insatiable greed of an ugly woman for fine clothes.
+Bribed with the smartest dress she had secured yet, the household
+spy took her secret orders, and applied herself with a vile
+enjoyment of it to her secret work.
+
+The days passed, the work went on; but nothing had come of it.
+Mistress and servant had a woman to deal with who was a match for
+both of them.
+
+Repeated intrusions on the major, when the governess happened to
+be in the same room with him, failed to discover the slightest
+impropriety of word, look, or action, on either side. Stealthy
+watching and listening at the governess's bedroom door detected
+that she kept a light in her room at late hours of the night, and
+that she groaned and ground her teeth in her sleep--and detected
+nothing more. Careful superintendence in the day-time proved that
+she regularly posted her own letters, instead of giving them to
+the servant; and that on certain occasions, when the occupation
+of her hours out of lesson time and walking time was left at her
+own disposal, she had been suddenly missed from the garden, and
+then caught coming back alone to it from the park. Once and once
+only, the nurse had found an opportunity of following her out of
+the garden, had been detected immediately in the park, and had
+been asked with the most exasperating politeness if she wished
+to join Miss Gwilt in a walk. Small circumstances of this kind,
+which were sufficiently suspicious to the mind of a jealous
+woman, were discovered in abundance. But circumstances, on which
+to found a valid ground of complaint that might be laid before
+the major, proved to be utterly wanting. Day followed day, and
+Miss Gwilt remained persistently correct in her conduct, and
+persistently irreproachable in her relations toward her employer
+and her pupil.
+
+Foiled in this direction, Mrs. Milroy tried next to find an
+assailable place in the statement which the governess's reference
+had made on the subject of the governess's character.
+
+Obtaining from the major the minutely careful report which his
+mother had addressed to him on this topic, Mrs. Milroy read and
+reread it, and failed to find the weak point of which she was in
+search in any part of the letter. All the customary questions on
+such occasions had been asked, and all had been scrupulously and
+plainly answered. The one sole opening for an attack which it was
+possible to discover was an opening which showed itself, after
+more practical matters had been all disposed of, in the closing
+sentences of the letter.
+
+"I was so struck," the passage ran, "by the grace and distinction
+of Miss Gwilt's manners that I took an opportunity, when she was
+out of the room, of asking how she first came to be governess.
+'In the usual way,' I was told. 'A sad family misfortune, in
+which she behaved nobly. She is a very sensitive person, and
+shrinks from speaking of it among strangers--a natural reluctance
+which I have always felt it a matter of delicacy to respect.'
+Hearing this, of course, I felt the same delicacy on my side.
+It was no part of my duty to intrude on the poor thing's private
+sorrows; my only business was to do what I have now done, to make
+sure that I was engaging a capable and respectable governess to
+instruct my grandchild."
+
+After careful consideration of these lines, Mrs. Milroy, having
+a strong desire to find circumstances suspicious, found them
+suspicious accordingly. She determined to sift the mystery of
+Miss Gwilt's family misfortunes to the bottom, on the chance
+of extracting from it something useful to her purpose. There
+were two ways of doing this. She might begin by questioning
+the governess herself, or she might begin by questioning the
+governess's reference. Experience of Miss Gwilt's quickness of
+resource in dealing with awkward questions at their introductory
+interview decided her on taking the latter course. "I'll get the
+particulars from the reference first," thought Mrs. Milroy, "and
+then question the creature herself, and see if the two stories
+agree."
+
+The letter of inquiry was short, and scrupuously to the point.
+
+Mrs. Milroy began by informing her correspondent that the state
+of her health necessitated leaving her daughter entirely under
+the governess's influence and control. On that account she was
+more anxious than most mothers to be thoroughly informed in every
+respect about the person to whom she confided the entire charge
+of an only child; and feeling this anxiety, she might perhaps be
+excused for putting what might be thought, after the excellent
+character Miss Gwilt had received, a somewhat unnecessary
+question. With that preface, Mrs. Milroy came to the point, and
+requested to be informed of the circumstances which had obliged
+Miss Gwilt to go out as a governess.
+
+The letter, expressed in these terms, was posted the same day. On
+the morning when the answer was due, no answer appeared. The next
+morning arrived, and still there was no reply. When the third
+morning came, Mrs. Milroy's impatience had broken loose from all
+restraint. She had rung for the nurse in the manner which has
+been already recorded, and had ordered the woman to be in waiting
+to receive the letters of the morning with her own hands. In this
+position matters now stood; and in these domestic circumstances
+the new series of events at Thorpe Ambrose took their rise.
+
+
+Mrs. Milroy had just looked at her watch, and had just put her
+hand once more to the bell-pull, when the door opened and the
+nurse entered the room.
+
+"Has the postman come?" asked Mrs. Milroy.
+
+The nurse laid a letter on the bed without answering, and waited,
+with unconcealed curiosity, to watch the effect which it produced
+on her mistress.
+
+Mrs. Milroy tore open the envelope the instant it was in her
+hand. A printed paper appeared (which she threw aside),
+surrounding a letter (which she looked at) in her own
+handwriting! She snatched up the printed paper. It was the
+customary Post-office circular, informing her that her letter
+had been duly presented at the right address, and that the person
+whom she had written to was not to be found.
+
+"Something wrong?" asked the nurse, detecting a change in her
+mistress's face.
+
+The question passed unheeded. Mrs. Milroy's writing-desk was
+on the table at the bedside. She took from it the letter which
+the major's mother had written to her son, and turned to the page
+containing the name and address of Miss Gwilt's reference. "Mrs
+Mandeville, 18 Kingsdown Crescent, Bayswater," she read, eagerly
+to herself, and then looked at the address on her own returned
+letter. No error had been committed: the directions were
+identically the same.
+
+"Something wrong?" reiterated the nurse, advancing a step nearer
+to the bed.
+
+"Thank God--yes!" cried Mrs. Milroy, with a sudden outburst of
+exultation. She tossed the Post-office circular to the nurse,
+and beat her bony hands on the bedclothes in an ecstasy of
+anticipated triumph. "Miss Gwilt's an impostor! Miss Gwilt's an
+impostor! If I die for it, Rachel, I'll be carried to the window
+to see the police take her away!"
+
+"It's one thing to say she's an impostor behind her back, and
+another thing to prove it to her face," remarked the nurse. She
+put her hand as she spoke into her apron pocket, and, with a
+significant look at her mistress, silently produced a second
+letter.
+
+"For me?" asked Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"No!" said the nurse; "for Miss Gwilt."
+
+The two women eyed each other, and understood each other without
+another word.
+
+"Where is she?" said Mrs. Milroy.
+
+The nurse pointed in the direction of the park. "Out again, for
+another walk before breakfast--by herself."
+
+Mrs. Milroy beckoned to the nurse to stoop close over her. "Can
+you open it, Rachel?" she whispered.
+
+Rachel nodded.
+
+"Can you close it again, so that nobody would know?"
+
+"Can you spare the scarf that matches your pearl gray dress?"
+asked Rachel.
+
+"Take it!" said Mrs. Milroy, impatiently.
+
+The nurse opened the wardrobe in silence, took the scarf in
+silence, and left the room in silence. In less than five minutes
+she came back with the envelope of Miss Gwilt's letter open in
+her hand.
+
+"Thank you, ma'am, for the scarf," said Rachel, putting the open
+letter composedly on the counterpane of the bed.
+
+Mrs. Milroy looked at the envelope. It had been closed as usual
+by means of adhesive gum, which had been made to give way by the
+application of steam. As Mrs. Milroy took out the letter, her
+hand trembled violently, and the white enamel parted into cracks
+over the wrinkles on her forehead.
+
+Rachel withdrew to the window to keep watch on the park. "Don't
+hurry," she said. "No signs of her yet."
+
+Mrs. Milroy still paused, keeping the all-important morsel of
+paper folded in her hand. She could have taken Miss Gwilt's life,
+but she hesitated at reading Miss Gwilt's letter.
+
+"Are you troubled with scruples?" asked the nurse, with a sneer.
+"Consider it a duty you owe to your daughter."
+
+"You wretch!" said Mrs. Milroy. With that expression of opinion,
+she opened the letter.
+
+It was evidently written in great haste, was undated, and was
+signed in initials only. Thus it ran:
+
+"Diana Street.
+
+"BY DEAR LYDIA--The cab is waiting at the door, and I have only
+a moment to tell you that I am obliged to leave London, on
+business, for three or four days, or a week at longest. My
+letters will be forwarded if you write. I got yours yesterday,
+and I agree with you that it is very important to put him off the
+awkward subject of yourself and your family as long as you safely
+can. The better you know him, the better you will be able to make
+up the sort of story that will do. Once told, you will have to
+stick to it; and, _having_ to stick to it, beware of making it
+complicated, and beware of making it in a hurry. I will write
+again about this, and give you my own ideas. In the meantime,
+don't risk meeting him too often in the park.
+
+"Yours, M. O."
+
+"Well?" asked the nurse, returning to the bedside. "Have you done
+with it?"
+
+"Meeting him in the park!" repeated Mrs. Milroy, with her eyes
+still fastened on the letter. "_Him_! Rachel, where is the
+major?"
+
+"In his own room."
+
+"I don't believe it! "
+
+"Have your own way. I want the letter and the envelope."
+
+"Can you close it again so that she won't know?"
+
+"What I can open I can shut. Anything more?"
+
+"Nothing more."
+
+Mrs. Milroy was left alone again, to review her plan of attack by
+the new light that had now been thrown on Miss Gwilt.
+
+The information that had been gained by opening the governess's
+letter pointed plainly to the conclusion that an adventuress
+had stolen her way into the house by means of a false reference.
+But having been obtained by an act of treachery which it was
+impossible to acknowledge, it was not information that could be
+used either for warning the major or for exposing Miss Gwilt.
+The one available weapon in Mrs. Milroy's hands was the weapon
+furnished by her own returned letter, and the one question to
+decide was how to make the best and speediest use of it.
+
+The longer she turned the matter over in her mind, the more hasty
+and premature seemed the exultation which she had felt at the
+first sight of the Post-office circular. That a lady acting as
+reference to a governess should have quitted her residence
+without leaving any trace behind her, and without even mentioning
+an address to which her letters could be forwarded, was a
+circumstance in itself sufficiently suspicious to be mentioned to
+the major. But Mrs. Milroy, however perverted her estimate of her
+husband might be in some respects, knew enough of his character
+to be assured that, if she told him what had happened, he would
+frankly appeal to the governess herself for an explanation. Miss
+Gwilt's quickness and cunning would, in that case, produce some
+plausible answer on the spot, which the major's partiality would
+be only too ready to accept; and she would at the same time, no
+doubt, place matters in train, by means of the post, for the due
+arrival of all needful confirmation on the part of her accomplice
+in London. To keep strict silence for the present, and to
+institute (without the governess's knowledge) such inquiries as
+might be necessary to the discovery of undeniable evidence, was
+plainly the only safe course to take with such a man as the
+major, and with such a woman as Miss Gwilt. Helpless herself, to
+whom could Mrs. Milroy commit the difficult and dangerous task
+of investigation? The nurse, even if she was to be trusted, could
+not be spared at a day's notice, and could not be sent away
+without the risk of exciting remark. Was there any other
+competent and reliable person to employ, either at Thorpe Ambrose
+or in London? Mrs. Milroy turned from side to side of the bed,
+searching every corner of her mind for the needful discovery, And
+searching in vain. "Oh, if I could only lay my hand on some man I
+could trust!" she thought, despairingly. "If I only knew where to
+look for somebody to help me!"
+
+As the idea passed through her mind, the sound of her daughter's
+voice startled her from the other side of the door.
+
+"May I come in?" asked Neelie.
+
+"What do you want?" returned Mrs. Milroy, impatiently.
+
+"I have brought up your breakfast, mamma."
+
+"My breakfast?" repeated Mrs. Milroy, in surprise. "Why doesn't
+Rachel bring it up as usual?" She considered a moment, and then
+called out, sharply, "Come in!"
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE MAN IS FOUND.
+
+Neelie entered the room, carrying the tray with the tea, the dry
+toast, and the pat of butter which composed the invalid's
+invariable breakfast.
+
+"What does this mean?" asked Mrs. Milroy, speaking and looking as
+she might have spoken and looked if the wrong servant had come
+into the room.
+
+Neelie put the tray down on the bedside table. "I thought I
+should like to bring you up your breakfast, mamma, for once in
+a way," she replied, "and I asked Rachel to let me."
+
+"Come here," said Mrs. Milroy, "and wish me good-morning."
+
+Neelie obeyed. As she stooped to kiss her mother, Mrs. Milroy
+caught her by the arm, and turned her roughly to the light. There
+were plain signs of disturbance and distress in her daughter's
+face. A deadly thrill of terror ran through Mrs. Milroy on the
+instant. She suspected that the opening of the letter had been
+discovered by Miss Gwilt, and that the nurse was keeping out of
+the way in consequence.
+
+"Let me go, mamma," said Neelie, shrinking under her mother's
+grasp. "You hurt me."
+
+"Tell me why you have brought up my breakfast this morning,"
+persisted Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"I have told you, mamma."
+
+"You have not! You have made an excuse; I see it in your face.
+Come! what is it?"
+
+Neelie's resolution gave way before her mother's. She looked
+aside uneasily at the things in the tray. "I have been vexed,"
+she said, with an effort; "and I didn't want to stop in the
+breakfast-room. I wanted to come up here, and to speak to you."
+
+"Vexed? Who has vexed you? What has happened? Has Miss Gwilt
+anything to do with it?"
+
+Neelie looked round again at her mother in sudden curiosity and
+alarm. "Mamma!" she said, "you read my thoughts. I declare you
+frighten me. It _was_ Miss Gwilt."
+
+Before Mrs. Milroy could say a word more on her side, the door
+opened and the nurse looked in.
+
+"Have you got what you want?" she asked, as composedly as usual.
+"Miss, there, insisted on taking your tray up this morning. Has
+she broken anything?"
+
+"Go to the window. I want to speak to Rachel," said Mrs. Milroy.
+
+As soon as her daughter's back was turned, she beckoned eagerly
+to the nurse. "Anything wrong?" she asked, in a whisper. "Do you
+think she suspects us?"
+
+The nurse turned away with her hard, sneering smile. "I told you
+it should be done," she said, "and it _has_ been done. She hasn't
+the ghost of a suspicion. I waited in the room; and I saw her
+take up the letter and open it."
+
+Mrs. Milroy drew a deep breath of relief. "Thank you," she said,
+loud enough for her daughter to hear. "I want nothing more."
+
+The nurse withdrew; and Neelie came back from the window. Mrs.
+Milroy took her by the hand, and looked at her more attentively
+and more kindly than usual. Her daughter interested her that
+morning; for her daughter had something to say on the subject
+of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"I used to think that you promised to be pretty, child," she
+said, cautiously resuming the interrupted conversation in the
+least direct way. "But you don't seem to be keeping your promise.
+You look out of health and out of spirits. What is the matter
+with you?"
+
+If there had been any sympathy between mother and child, Neelie
+might have owned the truth. She might have said frankly: "I am
+looking ill, because my life is miserable to me. I am fond of Mr.
+Armadale, and Mr. Armadale was once fond of me. We had one little
+disagreement, only one, in which I was to blame. I wanted to tell
+him so at the time, and I have wanted to tell him so ever since;
+and Miss Gwilt stands between us and prevents me. She has made us
+like strangers; she has altered him, and taken him away from me.
+He doesn't look at me as he did; he doesn't speak to me as he
+did; he is never alone with me as he used to be; I can't say the
+words to him that I long to say; and I can't write to him, for it
+would look as if I wanted to get him back. It is all over between
+me and Mr. Armadale; and it is that woman's fault. There is
+ill-blood between Miss Gwilt and me the whole day long; and say
+what I may, and do what I may, she always gets the better of me,
+and always puts me in the wrong. Everything I saw at Thorpe
+Ambrose pleased me, everything I did at Thorpe Ambrose made me
+happy, before she came. Nothing pleases me, and nothing makes me
+happy now!" If Neelie had ever been accustomed to ask her
+mother's advice and to trust herself to her mother's love, she
+might have said such words as these. As. it was, the tears came
+into her eyes, and she hung her head in silence.
+
+"Come!" said Mrs. Milroy, beginning to lose patience. "You have
+something to say to me about Miss Gwilt. What is it?"
+
+Neelie forced back her tears, and made an effort to answer.
+
+"She aggravates me beyond endurance, mamma; I can't bear her;
+I shall do something--" Neelie stopped, and stamped her foot
+angrily on the floor. "I shall throw something at her head if we
+go on much longer like this! I should have thrown something this
+morning if I hadn't left the room. Oh, do speak to papa about it!
+Do find out some reason for sending her away! I'll go to
+school--I'll do anything in the world to get rid of Miss Gwilt!"
+
+To get rid of Miss Gwilt! At those words--at that echo from her
+daughter's lips of the one dominant desire kept secret in her own
+heart--Mrs. Milroy slowly raised herself in bed. What did it
+mean? Was the help she wanted coming from the very last of all
+quarters in which she could have thought of looking for it?
+
+"Why do you want to get rid of Miss Gwilt?" she asked. "What have
+you got to complain of?"
+
+"Nothing!" said Neelie. "That's the aggravation of it. Miss Gwilt
+won't let me have anything to complain of. She is perfectly
+detestable; she is driving me mad; and she is the pink of
+propriety all the time. I dare say it's wrong, but I don't
+care--I hate her!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy's eyes questioned her daughter's face as they had
+never questioned it yet. There was something under the surface,
+evidently--something which it might be of vital importance to her
+own purpose to discover--which had not risen into view. She went
+on probing her way deeper and deeper into Neelie's mind, with a
+warmer and warmer interest in Neelie's secret.
+
+"Pour me out a cup of tea," she said; "and don't excite yourself,
+my dear. Why do you speak to _me_ about this? Why don't you speak
+to your father?"
+
+"I have tried to speak to papa," said Neelie. "But it's no use;
+he is too good to know what a wretch she is. She is always on her
+best behavior with him; she is always contriving to be useful to
+him. I can't make him understand why I dislike Miss Gwilt; I
+can't make _you_ understand--I only understand it myself." She
+tried to pour out the tea, and in trying upset the cup. "I'll go
+downstairs again!" exclaimed Neelie, with a burst of tears. "I'm
+not fit for anything; I can't even pour out a cup of tea!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy seized her hand and stopped her. Trifling as it was,
+Neelie's reference to the relations between the major and Miss
+Gwilt had roused her mother's ready jealousy. The restraints
+which Mrs. Milroy had laid on herself thus far vanished in a
+moment--vanished even in the presence of a girl of sixteen, and
+that girl her own child!
+
+"Wait here!" she said, eagerly. "You have come to the right place
+and the right person. Go on abusing Miss Gwilt. I like to hear
+you--I hate her, too!"
+
+"You, mamma!" exclaimed Neelie, looking at her mother in
+astonishment.
+
+For a moment Mrs. Milroy hesitated before she said more. Some
+last-left instinct of her married life in its earlier and happier
+time pleaded hard with her to respect the youth and the sex of
+her child. But jealousy respects nothing; in the heaven above
+and on the earth beneath, nothing but itself. The slow fire
+of self-torment, burning night and day in the miserable woman's
+breast, flashed its deadly light into her eyes, as the next words
+dropped slowly and venomously from her lips.
+
+"If you had had eyes in your head, you would never have gone
+to your father," she said. "Your father has reasons of his own
+for hearing nothing that you can say, or that anybody can say,
+against Miss Gwilt."
+
+Many girls at Neelie's age would have failed to see the meaning
+hidden under those words. It was the daughter's misfortune, in
+this instance, to have had experience enough of the mother to
+understand her. Neelie started back from the bedside, with her
+face in a glow. "Mamma!" she said, "you are talking horribly!
+Papa is the best, and dearest, and kindest--oh, I won't hear it!
+I won't hear it!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy's fierce temper broke out in an instant--broke out
+all the more violently from her feeling herself, in spite of
+herself, to have been in the wrong.
+
+"You impudent little fool!" she retorted, furiously. "Do you
+think I want _you_ to remind me of what I owe to your father? Am
+I to learn how to speak of your father, and how to think of your
+father, and how to love and honor your father, from a forward
+little minx like you! I was finely disappointed, I can tell you,
+when you were born--I wished for a boy, you impudent hussy! If
+you ever find a man who is fool enough to marry you, he will be
+a lucky man if you only love him half as well, a quarter as well,
+a hundred-thousandth part as well, as I loved your father. Ah,
+you can cry when it's too late; you can come creeping back to beg
+your mother's pardon after you have insulted her. You little
+dowdy, half-grown creature! I was handsomer than ever you will be
+when I married your father. I would have gone through fire and
+water to serve your father! If he had asked me to cut off one
+of my arms, I would have done it--I would have done it to please
+him!" She turned suddenly with her face to the wall, forgetting
+her daughter, forgetting her husband, forgetting everything but
+the torturing remembrance of her lost beauty. "My arms!" she
+repeated to herself, faintly. "What arms I had when I was young!"
+She snatched up the sleeve of her dressing-gown furtively, with
+a shudder. "Oh, look at it now! look at it now!"
+
+Neelie fell on her knees at the bedside and hid her face. In
+sheer despair of finding comfort and help anywhere else, she had
+cast herself impulsively on her mother's mercy; and this was how
+it had ended! "Oh, mamma," she pleaded, "you know I didn't mean
+to offend you! I couldn't help it when you spoke so of my father.
+Oh, do, do forgive me!"
+
+Mrs. Milroy turned again on her pillow, and looked at her
+daughter vacantly. "Forgive you?" she repeated, with her mind
+still in the past, groping its way back darkly to the present.
+
+"I beg your pardon, mamma--I beg your pardon on my knees. I am so
+unhappy; I do so want a little kindness! Won't you forgive me?"
+
+"Wait a little," rejoined Mrs. Milroy. "Ah," she said, after an
+interval, "now I know! Forgive you? Yes; I'll forgive you on one
+condition." She lifted Neelie's head, and looked her searchingly
+in the face. "Tell me why you hate Miss Gwilt! You've a reason
+of your own for hating her, and you haven't confessed it yet."
+
+Neelie's head dropped again. The burning color that she was
+hiding by hiding her face showed itself on her neck. Her mother
+saw it, and gave her time.
+
+"Tell me," reiterated Mrs. Milroy, more gently, "why do you hate
+her?"
+
+The answer came reluctantly, a word at a time, in fragments.
+
+"Because she is trying--"
+
+"Trying what?"
+
+"Trying to make somebody who is much--"
+
+"Much what?"
+
+"Much too young for her--"
+
+"Marry her?"
+
+"Yes, mamma."
+
+Breathlessly interested, Mrs. Milroy leaned forward, and twined
+her hand caressingly in her daughter's hair.
+
+"Who is it, Neelie?" she asked, in a whisper.
+
+"You will never say I told you, mamma?"
+
+"Never! Who is it?"
+
+"Mr. Armadale."
+
+Mrs. Milroy leaned back on her pillow in dead silence. The plain
+betrayal of her daughter's first love, by her daughter's own
+lips, which would have absorbed the whole attention of other
+mothers, failed to occupy her for a moment. Her jealousy,
+distorting all things to fit its own conclusions, was busied
+in distorting what she had just heard. "A blind," she thought,
+"which has deceived my girl. It doesn't deceive _me_. Is Miss
+Gwilt likely to succeed?" she asked, aloud. "Does Mr. Armadale
+show any sort of interest in her?"
+
+Neelie looked up at her mother for the first time. The hardest
+part of the confession was over now. She had revealed the truth
+about Miss Gwilt, and she had openly mentioned Allan's name.
+
+"He shows the most unaccountable interest," she said. "It's
+impossible to understand it. It's downright infatuation. I
+haven't patience to talk about it!"
+
+"How do _you_ come to be in Mr. Armadale's secrets?" inquired
+Mrs. Milroy. "Has he informed _you_, of all the people in the
+world, of his interest in Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"Me!" exclaimed Neelie, indignantly. "It's quite bad enough that
+he should have told papa."
+
+At the re-appearance of the major in the narrative, Mrs. Milroy's
+interest in the conversation rose to its climax. She raised
+herself again from the pillow. "Get a chair," she said. "Sit
+down, child, and tell me all about it. Every word, mind--every
+word!"
+
+"I can only tell you, mamma, what papa told me."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Saturday. I went in with papa's lunch to the workshop, and he
+said, 'I have just had a visit from Mr. Armadale; and I want to
+give you a caution while I think of it.' I didn't say anything,
+mamma; I only waited. Papa went on, and told me that Mr. Armadale
+had been speaking to him on the subject of Miss Gwilt, and that
+he had been asking a question about her which nobody in his
+position had a right to ask. Papa said he had been obliged,
+good-humoredly, to warn Mr. Armadale to be a little more
+delicate, and a little more careful next time. I didn't feel much
+interested, mamma; it didn't matter to _me_ what Mr. Armadale
+said or did. Why should I care about it?"
+
+"Never mind yourself," interposed Mrs. Milroy, sharply. "Go on
+with what your father said. What was he doing when he was talking
+about Miss Gwilt? How did he look?"
+
+"Much as usual, mamma. He was walking up and down the workshop;
+and I took his arm and walked up and down with him."
+
+"I don't care what _you_ were doing," said Mrs. Milroy, more and
+more irritably. "Did your father tell you what Mr. Armadale's
+question was, or did he not?"
+
+"Yes, mamma. He said Mr. Armadale began by mentioning that he was
+very much interested in Miss Gwilt, and he then went on to ask
+whether papa could tell him anything about her family
+misfortunes--"
+
+"What!" cried Mrs. Milroy. The word burst from her almost in
+a scream, and the white enamel on her face cracked in all
+directions. "Mr. Armadale said _that_?" she went on, leaning out
+further and further over the side of the bed.
+
+Neelie started up, and tried to put her mother back on the
+pillow.
+
+"Mamma!" she exclaimed, "are you in pain? Are you ill? You
+frighten me!"
+
+"Nothing, nothing, nothing," said Mrs. Milroy. She was too
+violently agitated to make any other than the commonest excuse.
+"My nerves are bad this morning; don't notice it. I'll try the
+other side of the pillow. Go on! go on!. I'm listening, though
+I'm not looking at you." She turned her face to the wall, and
+clinched her trembling hands convulsively beneath the bedclothes.
+"I've got her!" she whispered to herself, under her breath. "I've
+got her at last!"
+
+"I'm afraid I've been talking too much," said Neelie. "I'm afraid
+I've been stopping here too long. Shall I go downstairs, mamma,
+and come back later in the day?"
+
+"Go on," repeated Mrs. Milroy, mechanically. "What did your
+father say next? Anything more about Mr. Armadale?"
+
+"Nothing more, except how papa answered him," replied Neelie.
+"Papa repeated his own words when he told me about it. He said,
+'In the absence of any confidence volunteered by the lady
+herself, Mr. Armadale, all I know or wish to know--and you must
+excuse me for saying, all any one else need know or wish to
+know--is that Miss Gwilt gave me a perfectly satisfactory
+reference before she entered my house.' Severe, mamma, wasn't it?
+I don't pity him in the least; he richly deserved it. The next
+thing was papa's caution to _me_. He told me to check Mr.
+Armadale's curiosity if he applied to me next. As if he was
+likely to apply to me! And as if I should listen to him if he
+did! That's all, mamma. You won't suppose, will you, that I have
+told you this because I want to hinder Mr. Armadale from marrying
+Miss Gwilt? Let him marry her if he pleases; I don't care!"
+said Neelie, in a voice that faltered a little, and with a face
+which was hardly composed enough to be in perfect harmony with
+a declaration of indifference. "All I want is to be relieved from
+the misery of having Miss Gwilt for my governess. I'd rather go
+to school. I should like to go to school. My mind's quite changed
+about all that, only I haven't the heart to tell papa. I don't
+know what's come to me, I don't seem to have heart enough for
+anything now; and when papa takes me on his knee in the evening,
+and says, 'Let's have a talk, Neelie,' he makes me cry. Would you
+mind breaking it to him, mamma, that I've changed my mind, and
+I want to go to school?" The tears rose thickly in her eyes, and
+she failed to see that her mother never even turned on the pillow
+to look round at her.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Milroy, vacantly. "You're a good girl; you
+shall go to school."
+
+The cruel brevity of the reply, and the tone in which it was
+spoken, told Neelie plainly that her mother's attention had been
+wandering far away from her, and that it was useless and needless
+to prolong the interview. She turned aside quietly, without a
+word of remonstrance. It was nothing new in her experience to
+find herself shut out from her mother's sympathies. She looked
+at her eyes in the glass, and, pouring out some cold water,
+bathed her face. "Miss Gwilt shan't see I've been crying!"
+thought Neelie, as she went back to the bedside to take her
+leave. "I've tired you out," mamma," she said, gently. "Let me go
+now; and let me come back a little later when you have had some
+rest."
+
+"Yes," repeated her mother, as mechanically as ever; "a little
+later when I have had some rest."
+
+Neelie left the room. The minute after the door had closed on
+her, Mrs. Milroy rang the bell for her nurse. In the face of the
+narrative she had just heard, in the face of every reasonable
+estimate of probabilities, she held to her own jealous
+conclusions as firmly as ever. "Mr. Armadale may believe her,
+and my daughter may believe her," thought the furious woman.
+"But I know the major; and she can't deceive _me_!"
+
+The nurse came in. "Prop me up," said Mrs. Milroy. "And give me
+my desk. I want to write."
+
+"You're excited," replied the nurse. "You're not fit to write."
+
+"Give me the desk," reiterated Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"Anything more?" asked Rachel, repeating her invariable formula
+as she placed the desk on the bed.
+
+"Yes. Come back in half an hour. I shall want you to take a
+letter to the great house."
+
+The nurse's sardonic composure deserted her for once. "Mercy on
+us!" she exclaimed, with an accent of genuine surprise. "What
+next? You don't mean to say you're going to write--?"
+
+"I am going to write to Mr. Armadale," interposed Mrs. Milroy;
+"and you are going to take the letter to him, and wait for an
+answer; and, mind this, not a living soul but our two selves must
+know of it in the house."
+
+"Why are you writing to Mr. Armadale?" asked Rachel. "And why
+is nobody to know of it but our two selves?"
+
+"Wait," rejoined Mrs. Milroy, "and you will see."
+
+The nurse's curiosity, being a woman's curiosity, declined to
+wait.
+
+"I'll help you with my eyes open," she said; "but I won't help
+you blindfold."
+
+"Oh, if I only had the use of my limbs!" groaned Mrs. Milroy.
+"You wretch, if I could only do without you!"
+
+"You have the use of your head," retorted the impenetrable nurse.
+"And you ought to know better than to trust me by halves, at this
+time of day."
+
+It was brutally put; but it was true--doubly true, after the
+opening of Miss Gwilt's letter. Mrs. Milroy gave way.
+
+"What do you want to know?" she asked. "Tell me, and leave me."
+
+"I want to know what you are writing to Mr. Armadale about?"
+
+"About Miss Gwilt."
+
+"What has Mr. Armadale to do with you and Miss Gwilt?"
+
+Mrs. Milroy held up the letter that had been returned to her by
+the authorities at the Post-office.
+
+"Stoop," she said. "Miss Gwilt may be listening at the door. I'll
+whisper."
+
+The nurse stooped, with her eye on the door. "You know that the
+postman went with this letter to Kingsdown Crescent?" said Mrs.
+Milroy. "And you know that he found Mrs. Mandeville gone away,
+nobody could tell where?"
+
+"Well," whispered Rachel "what next?"
+
+"This, next. When Mr. Armadale gets the letter that I am going to
+write to him, he will follow the same road as the postman; and
+we'll see what happens when he knocks at Mrs. Mandeville's door."
+
+"How do you get him to the door?"
+
+"I tell him to go to Miss Gwilt's reference."
+
+"Is he sweet on Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!" said the nurse. "I see!"
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE BRINK OF DISCOVERY.
+
+The morning of the interview between Mrs. Milroy and her daughter
+at the cottage was a morning of serious reflection for the squire
+at the great house.
+
+Even Allan's easy-tempered nature had not been proof against the
+disturbing influences exercised on it by the events of the last
+three days. Midwinter's abrupt departure had vexed him; and Major
+Milroy's reception of his inquiries relating to Miss Gwilt
+weighed unpleasantly on his mind. Since his visit to the cottage,
+he had felt impatient and ill at ease, for the first time in his
+life, with everybody who came near him. Impatient with Pedgift
+Junior, who had called on the previous evening to announce his
+departure for London, on business, the next day, and to place
+his services at the disposal of his client; ill at ease with Miss
+Gwilt, at a secret meeting with her in the park that morning;
+and ill at ease in his own company, as he now sat moodily smoking
+in the solitude of his room. "I can't live this sort of life much
+longer," thought Allan. "If nobody will help me to put the
+awkward question to Miss Gwilt, I must stumble on some way of
+putting it for myself."
+
+What way? The answer to that question was as hard to find as
+ever. Allan tried to stimulate his sluggish invention by walking
+up and down the room, and was disturbed by the appearance of the
+footman at the first turn.
+
+"Now then! what is it?" he asked, impatiently.
+
+"A letter, sir; and the person waits for an answer."
+
+Allan looked at the address. It was in a strange handwriting.
+He opened the letter, and a little note inclosed in it dropped
+to the ground. The note was directed, still in the strange
+handwriting, to "Mrs. Mandeville, 18 Kingsdown Crescent,
+Bayswater. Favored by Mr. Armadale." More and more surprised,
+Allan turned for information to the signature at the end of
+the letter. It was "Anne Milroy."
+
+"Anne Milroy?" he repeated. "It must be the major's wife. What
+can she possibly want with me?" By way of discovering what she
+wanted, Allan did at last what he might more wisely have done
+at first. He sat down to read the letter.
+
+["Private."] "The Cottage, Monday.
+
+"DEAR SIR--The name at the end of these lines will, I fear,
+recall to you a very rude return made on my part, some time
+since, for an act of neighborly kindness on yours. I can only
+say in excuse that I am a great sufferer, and that, if I was
+ill-tempered enough, in a moment of irritation under severe pain,
+to send back your present of fruit, I have regretted doing so
+ever since. Attribute this letter, if you please, to my desire to
+make some atonement, and to my wish to be of service to our good
+friend and landlord, if I possibly can.
+
+"I have been informed of the question which you addressed to my
+husband, the day before yesterday, on the subject of Miss Gwilt.
+From all I have heard of you, I am quite sure that your anxiety
+to know more of this charming person than you know now is an
+anxiety proceeding from the most honorable motives. Believing
+this, I feel a woman's interest--incurable invalid as I am--in
+assisting you. If you are desirous of becoming acquainted with
+Miss Gwilt's family circumstances without directly appealing
+to Miss Gwilt herself, it rests with you to make the discovery;
+and I will tell you how.
+
+"It so happens that, some few days since, I wrote privately to
+Miss Gwilt's reference on this very subject. I had long observed
+that my governess was singularly reluctant to speak of her family
+and her friends; and, without attributing her silence to other
+than perfectly proper motives, I felt it my duty to my daughter
+to make some inquiry on the subject. The answer that I have
+received is satisfactory as far as it goes. My correspondent
+informs me that Miss Gwilt's story is a very sad one, and that
+her own conduct throughout has been praiseworthy in the extreme.
+The circumstances (of a domestic nature, as I gather) are all
+plainly stated in a collection of letters now in the possession
+of Miss Gwilt's reference. This lady is perfectly willing to let
+me see the letters; but not possessing copies of them, and being
+personally responsible for their security, she is reluctant, if
+it can be avoided, to trust them to the post; and she begs me
+to wait until she or I can find some reliable person who can be
+employed to transmit the packet from her hands to mine.
+
+"Under these circumstances, it has struck me that you might
+possibly, with your interest in the matter, be not unwilling to
+take charge of the papers. If I am wrong in this idea, and if
+you are not disposed, after what I have told you, to go to the
+trouble and expense of a journey to London, you have only to burn
+my letter and inclosure, and to think no more about it. If you
+decide on becoming my envoy, I gladly provide you with the
+necessary introduction to Mrs. Mandeville. You have only, on
+presenting it, to receive the letters in a sealed packet, to send
+them here on your return to Thorpe Ambrose, and to wait an early
+communication from me acquainting you with the result.
+
+"In conclusion, I have only to add that I see no impropriety in
+your taking (if you feel so inclined) the course that I propose
+to you. Miss Gwilt's manner of receiving such allusions as I have
+made to her family circumstances has rendered it unpleasant for
+me (and would render it quite impossible for you) to seek
+information in the first instance from herself. I am certainly
+justified in applying to her reference; and you are certainly not
+to blame for being the medium of safely transmitting a sealed
+communication with one lady to another. If I find in that
+communication family secrets which cannot honorably be mentioned
+to any third person, I shall, of course, be obliged to keep you
+waiting until I have first appealed to Miss Gwilt. If I find
+nothing recorded but what is to her honor, and what is sure to
+raise her still higher in your estimation, I am undeniably doing
+her a service by taking you into my confidence. This is how I
+look at the matter; but pray don't allow me to influence _you_.
+
+"In any case, I have one condition to make, which I am sure you
+will understand to be indispensable. The most innocent actions
+are liable, in this wicked world, to the worst possible
+interpretation I must, therefore, request that you will consider
+this communication as strictly _private_. I write to you in a
+confidence which is on no account (until circumstances may, in my
+opinion, justify the revelation of it) to extend beyond our two
+selves,
+
+"Believe me, dear sir, truly yours,
+
+"ANNE MILROY."
+
+In this tempting form the unscrupulous ingenuity of the major's
+wife had set the trap. Without a moment's hesitation, Allan
+followed his impulses, as usual, and walked straight into it,
+writing his answer and pursuing his own reflections
+simultaneously in a highly characteristic state of mental
+confusion.
+
+"By Jupiter, this is kind of Mrs. Milroy!" ("My dear madam.")
+"Just the thing I wanted, at the time when I needed it most!"
+("I don't know how to express my sense of your kindness, except
+by saying that I will go to London and fetch the letters with the
+greatest pleasure.") "She shall have a basket of fruit regularly
+every day, all through the season. " ("I will go at once, dear
+madam, and be back to-morrow.") "Ah, nothing like the women for
+helping one when one is in love! This is just what my poor mother
+would have done in Mrs. Milroy's place." ("On my word of honor as
+a gentleman, I will take the utmost care of the letters; and keep
+the thing strictly private, as you request.") "I would have given
+five hundred pounds to anybody who would have put me up to the
+right way to speak to Miss Gwilt; and here is this blessed woman
+does it for nothing." ("Believe me, my dear madam, gratefully
+yours, Allan Armadale.")
+
+Having sent his reply out to Mrs. Milroy's messenger, Allan
+paused in a momentary perplexity. He had an appointment with
+Miss Gwilt in the park for the next morning. It was absolutely
+necessary to let her know that he would be unable to keep it.
+She had forbidden him to write, and he had no chance that day
+of seeing her alone. In this difficulty, he determined to let
+the necessary intimation reach her through the medium of
+a message to the major, announcing his departure for London
+on business, and asking if he could be of service to any member
+of the family. Having thus removed the only obstacle to his
+freedom of action, Allan consulted the time-table, and found,
+to his disappointment, that there was a good hour to spare
+before it would be necessary to drive to the railway station.
+In his existing frame of mind he would infinitely have preferred
+starting for London in a violent hurry.
+
+When the time came at last, Allan, on passing the steward's
+office, drummed at the door, and called through it to Mr.
+Bashwood, "I'm going to town; back to-morrow." There was no
+answer from within; and the servant, interposing, informed his
+master that Mr. Bashwood, having no business to attend to that
+day, had locked up the office, and had left some hours since.
+
+On reaching the station, the first person whom Allan encountered
+was Pedgift Junior, going to London on the legal business which
+he had mentioned on the previous evening at the great house. The
+necessary explanations exchanged, and it was decided that the two
+should travel in the same carriage. Allan was glad to have a
+companion; and Pedgift, enchanted as usual to make himself useful
+to his client, bustled away to get the tickets and see to the
+luggage. Sauntering to and fro on the platform, until his
+faithful follower returned, Allan came suddenly upon no less a
+person than Mr. Bashwood himself, standing back in a corner with
+the guard of the train, and putting a letter (accompanied, to all
+appearance, by a fee) privately into the man's hand.
+
+"Halloo!" cried Allan, in his hearty way. "Something important
+there, Mr. Bashwood, eh?"
+
+If Mr. Bashwood had been caught in the act of committing murder,
+he could hardly have shown greater alarm than he now testified at
+Allan's sudden discovery of him. Snatching off his dingy old hat,
+he bowed bare-headed, in a palsy of nervous trembling from head
+to foot. "No, sir--no, sir; only a little letter, a little
+letter, a little letter," said the deputy-steward, taking refuge
+in reiteration, and bowing himself swiftly backward out of his
+employer's sight.
+
+Allan turned carelessly on his heel. "I wish I could take to that
+fellow," he thought, "but I can't; he's such a sneak! What the
+deuce was there to tremble about? Does he think I want to pry
+into his secrets?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood's secret on this occasion concerned Allan more
+nearly than Allan supposed. The letter which he had just placed
+in charge of the guard was nothing less than a word of warning
+addressed to Mrs. Oldershaw, and written by Miss Gwilt.
+
+"If you can hurry your business" (wrote the major's governess)
+"do so, and come back to London immediately. Things are going
+wrong here, and Miss Milroy is at the bottom of the mischief.
+This morning she insisted on taking up her mother's breakfast,
+always on other occasions taken up by the nurse. They had a long
+confabulation in private; and half an hour later I saw the nurse
+slip out with a letter, and take the path that leads to the great
+house. The sending of the letter has been followed by young
+Armadale's sudden departure for London--in the face of an
+appointment which he had with me for tomorrow morning. This looks
+serious. The girl is evidently bold enough to make a fight of it
+for the position of Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose, and she has
+found out some way of getting her mother to help her. Don't
+suppose I am in the least nervous or discouraged, and don't do
+anything till you hear from me again. Only get back to London,
+for I may have serious need of your assistance in the course of
+the next day or two.
+
+"I send this letter to town (to save a post) by the midday train,
+in charge of the guard. As you insist on knowing every step I
+take at Thorpe Ambrose, I may as well tell you that my messenger
+(for I can't go to the station myself) is that curious old
+creature whom I mentioned to you in my first letter. Ever since
+that time he has been perpetually hanging about here for a look
+at me. I am not sure whether I frighten him or fascinate him;
+perhaps I do both together. All you need care to know is that
+I can trust him with my trifling errands, and possibly, as time
+goes on, with something more. L. G."
+
+
+Meanwhile the train had started from the Thorpe Ambrose station,
+and the squire and his traveling companion were on their way to
+London.
+
+Some men, finding themselves in Allan's company under present
+circumstances, might have felt curious to know the nature of his
+business in the metropolis. Young Pedgift's unerring instinct as
+a man of the world penetrated the secret without the slightest
+difficulty. "The old story," thought this wary old head, wagging
+privately on its lusty young shoulders, "There's a woman in the
+case, as usual. Any other business would have been turned over
+to me." Perfectly satisfied with this conclusion, Mr. Pedgift the
+younger proceeded, with an eye to his professional interest, to
+make himself agreeable to his client in the capacity of volunteer
+courier. He seized on the whole administrative business of the
+journey to London, as he had seized on the whole administrative
+business of the picnic at the Broads. On reaching the terminus,
+Allan was ready to go to any hotel that might be recommended. His
+invaluable solicitor straight-way drove him to a hotel at which
+the Pedgift family had been accustomed to put up for three
+generations.
+
+"You don't object to vegetables, sir?" said the cheerful Pedgift,
+as the cab stopped at a hotel in Covent Garden Market. "Very
+good; you may leave the rest to my grandfather, my father, and
+me. I don't know which of the three is most beloved and respected
+in this house. How d'ye do, William? (Our head-waiter, Mr.
+Armadale.) Is your wife's rheumatism better, and does the little
+boy get on nicely at school? Your master's out, is he? Never
+mind, you'll do. This, William, is Mr. Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose. I have prevailed on Mr. Armadale to try our house. Have
+you got the bedroom I wrote for? Very good. Let Mr. Armadale have
+it instead of me (my grandfather's favorite bedroom, sir; No. 57,
+on the second floor); pray take it; I can sleep anywhere. Will
+you have the mattress on the top of the feather-bed? You hear,
+William? Tell Matilda, the mattress on the top of the
+feather-bed. How is Matilda? Has she got the toothache, as usual?
+The head-chambermaid, Mr. Armadale, and a most extraordinary
+woman; she will _not_ part with a hollow tooth in her lower jaw.
+My grandfather says, 'Have it out;' my father says, 'Have it
+out;' I say, 'Have it out;' and Matilda turns a deaf ear to all
+three of us. Yes, William, yes; if Mr. Armadale approves, this
+sitting-room will do. About dinner, sir? Shall we say, in that
+case, half-past seven? William, half-past seven. Not the least
+need to order anything, Mr. Armadale. The head-waiter has only
+to give my compliments to the cook, and the best dinner in London
+will be sent up, punctual to the minute, as a necessary
+consequence. Say, Mr. Pedgift Junior, if you please, William;
+otherwise, sir, we might get my grandfather's dinner or my
+father's dinner, and they _might_ turn out a little too heavy
+and old-fashioned in their way of feeding for you and me. As to
+the wine, William. At dinner, _my_ Champagne, and the sherry that
+my father thinks nasty. After dinner, the claret with the blue
+seal--the wine my innocent grandfather said wasn't worth sixpence
+a bottle. Ha! ha! poor old boy! You will send up the evening
+papers and the play-bills, just as usual, and--that will do?
+I think, William, for the present. An invaluable servant, Mr.
+Armadale; they're all invaluable servants in this house. We may
+not be fashionable here, sir, but by the Lord Harry we are snug!
+A cab? you would like a cab? Don't stir! I've rung the bell
+twice--that means, Cab wanted in a hurry. Might I ask, Mr.
+Armadale, which way your business takes you? Toward Bayswater?
+Would you mind dropping me in the park? It's a habit of mine when
+I'm in London to air myself among the aristocracy. Yours truly,
+sir, has an eye for a fine woman and a fine horse; and when
+he's in Hyde Park he's quite in his native element." Thus the
+all-accomplished Pedgift ran on; and by these little arts did
+he recommend himself to the good opinion of his client.
+
+When the dinner hour united the traveling companions again in
+their sitting-room at the hotel, a far less acute observer than
+young Pedgift must have noticed the marked change that appeared
+in Allan's manner. He looked vexed and puzzled, and sat drumming
+with his fingers on the dining-table without uttering a word.
+
+"I'm afraid something has happened to annoy you, sir, since we
+parted company in the Park?" said Pedgift Junior. "Excuse the
+question; I only ask it in case I can be of any use."
+
+"Something that I never expected has happened," returned Allan;
+"I don't know what to make of it. I should like to have your
+opinion," he added, after a little hesitation; "that is to say,
+if you will excuse my not entering into any particulars?"
+
+"Certainly!" assented young Pedgift. "Sketch it in outline, sir.
+The merest hint will do; I wasn't born yesterday." ("Oh, these
+women!" thought the youthful philosopher, in parenthesis.)
+
+"Well," began Allan, "you know what I said when we got to this
+hotel; I said I had a place to go to in Bayswater" (Pedgift
+mentally checked off the first point: Case in the suburbs,
+Bayswater); "and a person--that is to say--no--as I said before,
+a person to inquire after." (Pedgift checked off the next point:
+Person in the case. She-person, or he-person? She-person,
+unquestionably!) "Well, I went to the house, and when I asked
+for her--I mean the person--she--that is to say, the person--oh,
+confound it!" cried Allan, "I shall drive myself mad, and you,
+too, if I try to tell my story in this roundabout way. Here it is
+in two words. I went to No. 18 Kingsdown Crescent, to see a lady
+named Mandeville; and, when I asked for her, the servant said
+Mrs. Mandeville had gone away, without telling anybody where, and
+without even leaving an address at which letters could be sent to
+her. There! it's out at last. And what do you think of it now?"
+
+"Tell me first, sir," said the wary Pedgift, "what inquiries you
+made when you found this lady had vanished?"
+
+"Inquiries!" repeated Allan. "I was utterly staggered; I didn't
+say anything. What inquiries ought I to have made?"
+
+Pedgift Junior cleared his throat, and crossed his legs in a
+strictly professional manner.
+
+"I have no wish, Mr. Armadale," he began, "to inquire into your
+business with Mrs. Mandeville--"
+
+"No," interposed Allan, bluntly; "I hope you won't inquire into
+that. My business with Mrs. Mandeville must remain a secret."
+
+"But," pursued Pedgift, laying down the law with the forefinger
+of one hand on the outstretched palm of the other, "I may,
+perhaps, be allowed to ask generally whether your business with
+Mrs. Mandeville is of a nature to interest you in tracing her
+from Kingsdown Crescent to her present residence?"
+
+"Certainly!" said Allan. "I have a very particular reason for
+wishing to see her."
+
+"In that case, sir," returned Pedgift Junior, "there were two
+obvious questions which you ought to have asked, to begin
+with--namely, on what date Mrs. Mandeville left, and how she
+left. Having discovered this, you should have ascertained next
+under what domestic circumstances she went away--whether there
+was a misunderstanding with anybody; say a difficulty about money
+matters. Also, whether she went away alone, or with somebody
+else. Also, whether the house was her own, or whether she only
+lodged in it. Also, in the latter event--"
+
+"Stop! stop! you're making my head swim," cried Allan. "I don't
+understand all these ins and outs. I'm not used to this sort of
+thing."
+
+"I've been used to it myself from my childhood upward, sir,"
+remarked Pedgift. "And if I can be of any assistance, say the
+word."
+
+"You're very kind," returned Allan. "If you could only help me to
+find Mrs. Mandeville; and if you wouldn't mind leaving the thing
+afterward entirely in my hands--?"
+
+"I'll leave it in your hands, sir, with all the pleasure in
+life," said Pedgift Junior. ("And I'll lay five to one," he
+added, mentally, "when the time comes, you'll leave it in mine!")
+"We'll go to Bayswater together, Mr. Armadale, tomorrow morning.
+In the meantime. here's the soup. The case now before the court
+is, Pleasure versus Business. I don't know what you say, sir;
+I say, without a moment's hesitation, Verdict for the plaintiff.
+Let us gather our rosebuds while we may. Excuse my high spirits,
+Mr. Armadale. Though buried in the country, I was made for a
+London life; the very air of the metropolis intoxicates me."
+With that avowal the irresistible Pedgift placed a chair for
+his patron, and issued his orders cheerfully to his viceroy,
+the head-waiter. "Iced punch, William, after the soup. I answer
+for the punch, Mr. Armadale; it's made after a recipe of my
+great-uncle's. He kept a tavern, and founded the fortunes of the
+family. I don't mind telling you the Pedgifts have had a publican
+among them; there's no false pride about me. 'Worth makes the man
+(as Pope says) and want of it the fellow; the rest is all but
+leather and prunella.' I cultivate poetry as well as music, sir,
+in my leisure hours; in fact, I'm more or less on familiar terms
+with the whole of the nine Muses. Aha! here's the punch! The
+memory of my great-uncle, the publican, Mr. Armadale--drunk in
+solemn silence!"
+
+Allan tried hard to emulate his companion's gayety and good
+humor, but with very indifferent success. His visit to Kingsdown
+Crescent recurred ominously again and again to his memory all
+through the dinner, and all through the public amusements to
+which he and his legal adviser repaired at a later hour of the
+evening. When Pedgift Junior put out his candle that night, he
+shook his wary head, and regretfully apostrophized "the women"
+for the second time.
+
+By ten o'clock the next morning the indefatigable Pedgift was on
+the scene of action. To Allan's great relief, he proposed making
+the necessary inquiries at Kingsdown Crescent in his own person,
+while his patron waited near at hand, in the cab which had
+brought them from the hotel. After a delay of little more than
+five minutes, he reappeared, in full possession of all attainable
+particulars. His first proceeding was to request Allan to step
+out of the cab, and to pay the driver. Next, he politely offered
+his arm, and led the way round the corner of the crescent, across
+a square, and into a by-street, which was rendered exceptionally
+lively by the presence of the local cab-stand. Here he stopped,
+and asked jocosely whether Mr. Armadale saw his way now, or
+whether it would be necessary to test his patience by making an
+explanation.
+
+"See my way?" repeated Allan, in bewilderment. "I see nothing
+but a cab-stand."
+
+Pedgift Junior smiled compassionately, and entered on his
+explanation. It was a lodging-house at Kingsdown Crescent, he
+begged to state to begin with. He had insisted on seeing the
+landlady. A very nice person, with all the remains of having been
+a fine girl about fifty years ago; quite in Pedgift's style--if
+he had only been alive at the beginning of the present
+century--quite in Pedgift's style. But perhaps Mr. Armadale would
+prefer hearing about Mrs. Mandeville? Unfortunately, there was
+nothing to tell. There had been no quarreling, and not a farthing
+left unpaid: the lodger had gone, and there wasn't an explanatory
+circumstance to lay hold of anywhere. It was either Mrs.
+Mandeville's way to vanish, or there was something under the
+rose, quite undiscoverable so far. Pedgift had got the date on
+which she left, and the time of day at which she left, and the
+means by which she left. The means might help to trace her. She
+had gone away in a cab which the servant had fetched from the
+nearest stand. The stand was now before their eyes; and the
+waterman was the first person to apply to--going to the waterman
+for information being clearly (if Mr. Armadale would excuse the
+joke) going to the fountain-head. Treating the subject in this
+airy manner, and telling Allan that he would be back in a moment,
+Pedgift Junior sauntered down the street, and beckoned the
+waterman confidentially into the nearest public-house.
+
+In a little while the two re-appeared, the waterman taking
+Pedgift in succession to the first, third, fourth, and sixth
+of the cabmen whose vehicles were on the stand. The longest
+conference was held with the sixth man; and it ended in the
+sudden approach of the sixth cab to the part of the street
+where Allan was waiting.
+
+"Get in, sir," said Pedgift, opening the door; "I've found the
+man. He remembers the lady; and, though he has forgotten the name
+of the street, he believes he can find the place he drove her to
+when he once gets back into the neighborhood. I am charmed to
+inform you, Mr. Armadale, that we are in luck's way so far. I
+asked the waterman to show me the regular men on the stand; and
+it turns out that one of the regular men drove Mrs. Mandeville.
+The waterman vouches for him; he's quite an anomaly--a
+respectable cabman; drives his own horse, and has never been in
+any trouble. These are the sort of men, sir, who sustain one's
+belief in human nature. I've had a look at our friend, and I
+agree with the waterman; I think we can depend on him."
+
+The investigation required some exercise of patience at the
+outset. It was not till the cab had traversed the distance
+between Bayswater and Pimlico that the driver began to slacken
+his pace and look about him. After once or twice retracing its
+course, the vehicle entered a quiet by-street, ending in a dead
+wall, with a door in it; and stopped at the last house on the
+left-hand side, the house next to the wall.
+
+"Here it is, gentlemen," said the man, opening the cab door.
+
+Allan and Allan's adviser both got out, and both looked at the
+house, with the same feeling of instinctive distrust.
+
+Buildings have their physiognomy--especially buildings in great
+cities--and the face of this house was essentially furtive in its
+expression. The front windows were all shut, and the front blinds
+were all drawn down. It looked no larger than the other houses in
+the street, seen in front; but it ran back deceitfully and gained
+its greater accommodation by means of its greater depth. It
+affected to be a shop on the ground-floor; but it exhibited
+absolutely nothing in the space that intervened between the
+window and an inner row of red curtains, which hid the interior
+entirely from view. At one side was the shop door, having more
+red curtains behind the glazed part of it, and bearing a brass
+plate on the wooden part of it, inscribed with the name of
+"Oldershaw." On the other side was the private door, with a bell
+marked Professional; and another brass plate, indicating a
+medical occupant on this side of the house, for the name on it
+was, "Doctor Downward." If ever brick and mortar spoke yet, the
+brick and mortar here said plainly, "We have got our secrets
+inside, and we mean to keep them."
+
+"This can't be the place," said Allan; "there must be some
+mistake."
+
+'You know best, sir," remarked Pedgift Junior, with his sardonic
+gravity. "You know Mrs. Mandeville's habits."
+
+"I!" exclaimed Allan. "You may be surprised to hear it; but Mrs.
+Mandeville is a total stranger to me."
+
+"I'm not in the least surprised to hear it, sir; the landlady at
+Kingsdown Crescent informed me that Mrs. Mandeville was an old
+woman. Suppose we inquire?" added the impenetrable Pedgift,
+looking at the red curtains in the shop window with a strong
+suspicion that Mrs. Mandeville's granddaughter might possibly
+be behind them.
+
+They tried the shop door first. It was locked. They rang. A lean
+and yellow young woman, with a tattered French novel in her hand,
+opened it.
+
+"Good-morning, miss," said Pedgift. "Is Mrs. Mandeville at home?"
+
+The yellow young woman stared at him in astonishment. "No person
+of that name is known here," she answered, sharply, in a foreign
+accent.
+
+"Perhaps they know her at the private door?" suggested Pedgift
+Junior.
+
+"Perhaps they do," said the yellow young woman, and shut the door
+in his face.
+
+"Rather a quick-tempered young person that, sir," said Pedgift.
+"I congratulate Mrs. Mandeville on not being acquainted with
+her." He led the way, as he spoke, to Doctor Downward's side
+of the premises, and rang the bell.
+
+The door was opened this time by a man in a shabby livery. He,
+too, stared when Mrs. Mandeville's name was mentioned; and he,
+too, knew of no such person in the house.
+
+"Very odd," said Pedgift, appealing to Allan.
+
+"What is odd?" asked a softly stepping, softly speaking gentleman
+in black, suddenly appearing on the threshold of the parlor door.
+
+Pedgift Junior politely explained the circumstances, and begged
+to know whether he had the pleasure of speaking to Doctor
+Downward.
+
+The doctor bowed. If the expression may be pardoned, he was
+one of those carefully constructed physicians in whom the
+public--especially the female public--implicitly trust. He had
+the necessary bald head, the necessary double eyeglass, the
+necessary black clothes, and the necessary blandness of manner,
+all complete. His voice was soothing, his ways were deliberate,
+his smile was confidential. What particular branch of his
+profession Doctor Downward followed was not indicated on his
+door-plate; but he had utterly mistaken his vocation if he was
+not a ladies' medical man.
+
+"Are you quite sure there is no mistake about the name?" asked
+the doctor, with a strong underlying anxiety in his manner. "I
+have known very serious inconvenience to arise sometimes from
+mistakes about names. No? There is really no mistake? In that
+case, gentlemen, I can only repeat what my servant has already
+told you. Don't apologize, pray. Good-morning." The doctor
+withdrew as noiselessly as he had appeared; the man in the shabby
+livery silently opened the door; and Allan and his companion
+found themselves in the street again.
+
+"Mr. Armadale," said Pedgift, "I don't know how you feel; I feel
+puzzled."
+
+"That's awkward," returned Allan. "I was just going to ask you
+what we ought to do next."
+
+"I don't like the look of the place, the look of the shop-woman,
+or the look of the doctor," pursued the other. "And yet I can't
+say I think they are deceiving us; I can't say I think they
+really know Mrs. Mandeville's name."
+
+The impressions of Pedgift Junior seldom misled him; and they had
+not misled him in this case. The caution which had dictated Mrs.
+Oldershaw's private removal from Bayswater was the caution which
+frequently overreaches itself. It had warned her to trust nobody
+at Pimlico with the secret of the name she had assumed as Miss
+Gwilt's reference; but it had entirely failed to prepare her for
+the emergency that had really happened. In a word, Mrs. Oldershaw
+had provided for everything except for the one unimaginable
+contingency of an after-inquiry into the character of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"We must do something," said Allan; "it seems useless to stop
+here."
+
+Nobody had ever yet caught Pedgift Junior at the end of his
+resources; and Allan failed to catch him at the end of them now.
+"I quite agree with you, sir," he said; "we must do something.
+We'll cross-examine the cabman."
+
+The cabman proved to be immovable. Charged with mistaking the
+place, he pointed to the empty shop window. "I don't know what
+you may have seen, gentlemen," he remarked; "but there's the only
+shop window I ever saw with nothing at all inside it. _That_
+fixed the place in my mind at the time, and I know it again when
+I see it." Charged with mistaking the person or the day, or the
+house at which he had taken the person up, the cabman proved to
+be still unassailable. The servant who fetched him was marked
+as a girl well known on the stand. The day was marked as the
+unluckiest working-day he had had since the first of the year;
+and the lady was marked as having had her money ready at the
+right moment (which not one elderly lady in a hundred usually
+had), and having paid him his fare on demand without disputing
+it (which not one elderly lady in a hundred usually did). "Take
+my number, gentlemen," concluded the cabman, "and pay me for my
+time; and what I've said to you, I'll swear to anywhere."
+
+Pedgift made a note in his pocket-book of the man's number.
+Having added to it the name of the street, and the names on the
+two brass plates, he quietly opened the cab door. "We are quite
+in the dark, thus far," he said. "Suppose we grope our way back
+to the hotel?"
+
+He spoke and looked more seriously than usual The mere fact of
+"Mrs. Mandeville's" having changed her lodging without telling
+any one where she was going, and without leaving any address
+at which letters could be forwarded to her--which the jealous
+malignity of Mrs. Milroy had interpreted as being undeniably
+suspicious in itself--had produced no great impression on the
+more impartial judgment of Allan's solicitor. People frequently
+left their lodgings in a private manner, with perfectly
+producible reasons for doing so. But the appearance of the place
+to which the cabman persisted in declaring that he had driven
+"Mrs. Mandeville" set the character and proceedings of that
+mysterious lady before Pedgift Junior in a new light. His
+personal interest in the inquiry suddenly strengthened, and he
+began to feel a curiosity to know the real nature of Allan's
+business which he had not felt yet.
+
+"Our next move, Mr. Armadale, is not a very easy move to see,"
+he said, as they drove back to the hotel. "Do you think you could
+put me in possession of any further particulars?"
+
+Allan hesitated; and Pedgift Junior saw that he had advanced a
+little too far. "I mustn't force it," he thought; "I must give it
+time, and let it come of its own accord." "In the absence of any
+other information, sir," he resumed, "what do you say to my
+making some inquiry about that queer shop, and about those two
+names on the door-plate? My business in London, when I leave you,
+is of a professional nature; and I am going into the right
+quarter for getting information, if it is to be got."
+
+"There can't be any harm, I suppose, in making inquiries,"
+replied Allan.
+
+He, too, spoke more seriously than usual; he, too, was beginning
+to feel an all-mastering curiosity to know more. Some vague
+connection, not to be distinctly realized or traced out, began
+to establish itself in his mind between the difficulty of
+approaching Miss Gwilt's family circumstances and the difficulty
+of approaching Miss Gwilt's reference. "I'll get down and walk,
+and leave you to go on to your business," he said. "I want to
+consider a little about this, and a walk and a cigar will help
+me."
+
+"My business will be done, sir, between one and two," said
+Pedgift, when the cab had been stopped, and Allan had got out.
+"Shall we meet again at two o'clock, at the hotel?"
+
+Allan nodded, and the cab drove off.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ALLAN AT BAY.
+
+Two o'clock came; and Pedgift Junior, punctual to his time,
+came with it. His vivacity of the morning had all sparkled out;
+he greeted Allan with his customary politeness, but without his
+customary smile; and, when the headwaiter came in for orders,
+his dismissal was instantly pronounced in words never yet heard
+to issue from the lips of Pedgift in that hotel: "Nothing at
+present."
+
+"You seem to be in low spirits," said Allan. "Can't we get our
+information? Can nobody tell you anything about the house in
+Pimlico?"
+
+"Three different people have told me about it, Mr. Armadale,
+and they have all three said the same thing."
+
+Allan eagerly drew his chair nearer to the place occupied by his
+traveling companion. His reflections in the interval since they
+had last seen each other had not tended to compose him. That
+strange connection, so easy to feel, so hard to trace, between
+the difficulty of approaching Miss Gwilt's family circumstances
+and the difficulty of approaching Miss Gwilt's reference, which
+had already established itself in his thoughts, had by this time
+stealthily taken a firmer and firmer hold on his mind. Doubts
+troubled him which he could neither understand nor express.
+Curiosity filled him, which he half longed and half dreaded to
+satisfy.
+
+"I am afraid I must trouble you with a question or two, sir,
+before I can come to the point," said Pedgift Junior. "I don't
+want to force myself into your confidence. I only want to see
+my way, in what looks to me like a very awkward business. Do you
+mind telling me whether others besides yourself are interested
+in this inquiry of ours?"
+
+"Other people _are_ interested in it," replied Allan. "There's
+no objection to telling you that."
+
+"Is there any other person who is the object of the inquiry
+besides Mrs. Mandeville, herself?" pursued Pedgift, winding
+his way a little deeper into the secret.
+
+"Yes; there is another person," said Allan, answering rather
+unwillingly.
+
+"Is the person a young woman, Mr. Armadale?"
+
+Allan started. "How do you come to guess that?" he began, then
+checked himself, when it was too late. "Don't ask me any more
+questions," he resumed. "I'm a bad hand at defending myself
+against a sharp fellow like you; and I'm bound in honor toward
+other people to keep the particulars of this business to myself."
+
+Pedgift Junior had apparently heard enough for his purpose. He
+drew his chair, in his turn, nearer to Allan. He was evidently
+anxious and embarrassed; but his professional manner began to
+show itself again from sheer force of habit.
+
+"I've done with my questions, sir," he said; "and I have
+something to say now on my side. In my father's absence, perhaps
+you may be kindly disposed to consider me as your legal adviser.
+If you will take my advice, you will not stir another step in
+this inquiry."
+
+"What do you mean?" interposed Allan.
+
+"It is just possible, Mr. Armadale, that the cabman, positive as
+he is, may have been mistaken. I strongly recommend you to take
+it for granted that he _is_ mistaken, and to drop it there."
+
+The caution was kindly intended; but it came too late. Allan did
+what ninety-nine men out of a hundred in his position would have
+done--he declined to take his lawyer's advice.
+
+"Very well, sir," said Pedgift Junior; "if you will have it, you
+must have it."
+
+He leaned forward close to Allan's ear, and whispered what he had
+heard of the house in Pimlico, and of the people who occupied it.
+
+"Don't blame me, Mr. Armadale," he added, when the irrevocable
+words had been spoken. "I tried to spare you."
+
+Allan suffered the shock, as all great shocks are suffered,
+in silence. His first impulse would have driven him headlong
+for refuge to that very view of the cabman's assertion which had
+just been recommended to him, but for one damning circumstance
+which placed itself inexorably in his way. Miss Gwilt's marked
+reluctance to approach the story of her past life rose
+irrepressibly on his memory, in indirect but horrible
+confirmation of the evidence which connected Miss Gwilt's
+reference with the house in Pimlico. One conclusion, and one
+only--the conclusion which any man must have drawn, hearing
+what he had just heard, and knowing no more than he knew--forced
+itself into his mind. A miserable, fallen woman, who had
+abandoned herself in her extremity to the help of wretches
+skilled in criminal concealment, who had stolen her way back to
+decent society and a reputable employment by means of a false
+character, and whose position now imposed on her the dreadful
+necessity of perpetual secrecy and perpetual deceit in relation
+to her past life--such was the aspect in which the beautiful
+governess at Thorpe Ambrose now stood revealed to Allan's eyes!
+
+Falsely revealed, or truly revealed? Had she stolen her way back
+to decent society and a reputable employment by means of a false
+character? She had. Did her position impose on her the dreadful
+necessity of perpetual secrecy and perpetual deceit in relation
+to her past life? It did. Was she some such pitiable victim to
+the treachery of a man unknown as Allan had supposed? _She was no
+such pitiable victim_. The conclusion which Allan had drawn--the
+conclusion literally forced into his mind by the facts before
+him--was, nevertheless, the conclusion of all others that was
+furthest even from touching on the truth. The true story of Miss
+Gwilt's connection with the house in Pimlico and the people who
+inhabited it--a house rightly described as filled with wicked
+secrets, and people rightly represented as perpetually in danger
+of feeling the grasp of the law--was a story which coming events
+were yet to disclose: a story infinitely less revolting, and yet
+infinitely more terrible, than Allan or Allan's companion had
+either of them supposed.
+
+"I tried to spare you, Mr. Armadale," repeated Pedgift. "I was
+anxious, if I could possibly avoid it, not to distress you."
+
+Allan looked up, and made an effort to control himself. "You have
+distressed me dreadfully," he said. "You have quite crushed me
+down. But it is not your fault. I ought to feel you have done me
+a service; and what I ought to do I will do, when I am my own man
+again. There is one thing," Allan added, after a moment's painful
+consideration, "which ought to be understood between us at once.
+The advice you offered me just now was very kindly meant, and
+it was the best advice that could be given. I will take it
+gratefully. We will never talk of this again, if you please;
+and I beg and entreat you will never speak about it to any other
+person. Will you promise me that?"
+
+Pedgift gave the promise with very evident sincerity, but without
+his professional confidence of manner. The distress in Allan's
+face seemed to daunt him. After a moment of very uncharacteristic
+hesitation, he considerately quitted the room.
+
+Left by himself, Allan rang for writing materials, and took out
+of his pocket-book the fatal letter of introduction to "Mrs.
+Mandeville" which he had received from the major's wife.
+
+A man accustomed to consider consequences and to prepare himself
+for action by previous thought would, in Allan's present
+circumstances, have felt some difficulty as to the course which
+it might now be least embarrassing and least dangerous to pursue.
+Accustomed to let his impulses direct him on all other occasions,
+Allan acted on impulse in the serious emergency that now
+confronted him. Though his attachment to Miss Gwilt was nothing
+like the deeply rooted feeling which he had himself honestly
+believed it to be, she had taken no common place in his
+admiration, and she filled him with no common grief when he
+thought of her now. His one dominant desire, at that critical
+moment in his life, was a man's merciful desire to protect from
+exposure and ruin the unhappy woman who had lost her place in
+his estimation, without losing her claim to the forbearance that
+could spare, and to the compassion that could shield her. "I
+can't go back to Thorpe Ambrose; I can't trust myself to speak
+to her, or to see her again. But I can keep her miserable secret;
+and I will!" With that thought in his heart, Allan set himself to
+perform the first and foremost duty which now claimed him--the
+duty of communicating with Mrs. Milroy. If he had possessed a
+higher mental capacity and a clearer mental view, he might have
+found the letter no easy one to write. As it was, he calculated
+no consequences, and felt no difficulty. His instinct warned him
+to withdraw at once from the position in which he now stood
+toward the major's wife, and he wrote what his instinct counseled
+him to write under those circumstances, as rapidly as the pen
+could travel over the paper:
+
+
+"Dunn's Hotel, Covent Garden, Tuesday.
+
+"DEAR MADAM--Pray excuse my not returning to Thorpe Ambrose
+today, as I said I would. Unforeseen circumstances oblige me to
+stop in London. I am sorry to say I have not succeeded in seeing
+Mrs. Mandeville, for which reason I cannot perform your errand;
+and I beg, therefore, with many apologies, to return the letter
+of introduction. I hope you will allow me to conclude by saying
+that I am very much obliged to you for your kindness, and that
+I will not venture to trespass on it any further.
+
+"I remain, dear madam, yours truly,
+
+"ALLAN ARMADALE."
+
+
+In those artless words, still entirely unsuspicious of the
+character of the woman he had to deal with, Allan put the weapon
+she wanted into Mrs. Milroy's hands.
+
+The letter and its inclosure once sealed up and addressed, he was
+free to think of himself and his future. As he sat idly drawing
+lines with his pen on the blotting-paper, the tears came into
+his eyes for the first time--tears in which the woman who had
+deceived him had no share. His heart had gone back to his dead
+mother. "If she had been alive," he thought, "I might have
+trusted _her_, and she would have comforted me." It was useless
+to dwell on it; he dashed away the tears, and turned his
+thoughts, with the heart-sick resignation that we all know,
+to living and present things.
+
+He wrote a line to Mr. Bashwood, briefly informing the deputy
+steward that his absence from Thorpe Ambrose was likely to be
+prolonged for some little time, and that any further instructions
+which might be necessary, under those circumstances, would reach
+him through Mr. Pedgift the elder. This done, and the letters
+sent to the post, his thoughts were forced back once more on
+himself. Again the blank future waited before him to be filled
+up; and again his heart shrank from it to the refuge of the past.
+
+This time other images than the image of his mother filled
+his mind. The one all-absorbing interest of his earlier days
+stirred living and eager in him again. He thought of the sea;
+he thought of his yacht lying idle in the fishing harbor at his
+west-country home. The old longing got possession of him to hear
+the wash of the waves; to see the filling of the sails; to feel
+the vessel that his own hands had helped to build bounding under
+him once more. He rose in his impetuous way to call for the
+time-table, and to start for Somersetshire by the first train,
+when the dread of the questions which Mr. Brock might ask, the
+suspicion of the change which Mr. Brock might see in him, drew
+him back to his chair. "I'll write," he thought, "to have the
+yacht rigged and refitted, and I'll wait to go to Somersetshire
+myself till Midwinter can go with me." He sighed as his memory
+reverted to his absent friend. Never had he felt the void made
+in his life by Midwinter's departure so painfully as he felt it
+now, in the dreariest of all social solitudes--the solitude of
+a stranger in London, left by himself at a hotel.
+
+Before long, Pedgift Junior looked in, with an apology for his
+intrusion. Allan felt too lonely and too friendless not to
+welcome his companion's re-appearance gratefully. "I'm not going
+back to Thorpe Ambrose," he said; "I'm going to stay a little
+while in London. I hope you will be able to stay with me?" To do
+him justice, Pedgift was touched by the solitary position in
+which the owner of the great Thorpe Ambrose estate now appeared
+before him. He had never, in his relations with Allan, so
+entirely forgotten his business interests as he forgot them now.
+
+"You are quite right, sir, to stop here; London's the place to
+divert your mind," said Pedgift, cheerfully. "All business is
+more or less elastic in its nature, Mr. Armadale; I'll spin _my_
+business out, and keep you company with the greatest pleasure.
+We are both of us on the right side of thirty, sir; let's enjoy
+ourselves. What do you say to dining early, and going to the
+play, and trying the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park to-morrow
+morning, after breakfast? If we only live like fighting-cocks,
+and go in perpetually for public amusements, we shall arrive
+in no time at the _mens sana in corpore sano_ of the ancients.
+Don't be alarmed at the quotation, sir. I dabble a little in
+Latin after business hours, and enlarge my sympathies by
+occasional perusal of the Pagan writers, assisted by a crib.
+William, dinner at five; and, as it's particularly important
+to-day, I'll see the cook myself."
+
+The evening passed; the next day passed; Thursday morning came,
+and brought with it a letter for Allan. The direction was in
+Mrs. Milroy's handwriting; and the form of address adopted in
+the letter warned Allan, the moment he opened it, that something
+had gone wrong.
+
+
+["Private."]
+
+"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Wednesday.
+
+"SIR--I have just received your mysterious letter. It has more
+than surprised, it has really alarmed me. After having made the
+friendliest advances to you on my side, I find myself suddenly
+shut out from your confidence in the most unintelligible, and,
+I must add, the most discourteous manner. It is quite impossible
+that I can allow the matter to rest where you have left it. The
+only conclusion I can draw from your letter is that my confidence
+must have been abused in some way, and that you know a great deal
+more than you are willing to tell me. Speaking in the interest
+of my daughter's welfare, I request that you will inform me
+what the circumstances are which have prevented your seeing
+Mrs. Mandeville, and which have led to the withdrawal of the
+assistance that you unconditionally promised me in your letter
+of Monday last.
+
+"In my state of health, I cannot involve myself in a lengthened
+correspondence. I must endeavor to anticipate any objections you
+may make, and I must say all that I have to say in my present
+letter. In the event (which I am most unwilling to consider
+possible) of your declining to accede to the request that I have
+just addressed to you, I beg to say that I shall consider it my
+duty to my daughter to have this very unpleasant matter cleared
+up. If I don't hear from you to my full satisfaction by return
+of post, I shall be obliged to tell my husband that circumstances
+have happened which justify us in immediately testing the
+respectability of Miss Gwilt's reference. And when he asks me
+for my authority, I will refer him to you.
+
+"Your obedient servant, ANNE MILROY."
+
+
+In those terms the major's wife threw off the mask, and left her
+victim to survey at his leisure the trap in which she had caught
+him. Allan's belief in Mrs. Milroy's good faith had been so
+implicitly sincere that her letter simply bewildered him. He saw
+vaguely that he had been deceived in some way, and that Mrs.
+Milroy's neighborly interest in him was not what it had looked on
+the surface; and he saw no more. The threat of appealing to the
+major--on which, with a woman's ignorance of the natures of men,
+Mrs. Milroy had relied for producing its effect--was the only
+part of the letter to which Allan reverted with any satisfaction:
+it relieved instead of alarming him. "If there _is_ to be a
+quarrel," he thought, "it will be a comfort, at any rate, to have
+it out with a man."
+
+Firm in his resolution to shield the unhappy woman whose secret
+he wrongly believed himself to have surprised, Allan sat down to
+write his apologies to the major's wife. After setting up three
+polite declarations, in close marching order, he retired from the
+field. "He was extremely sorry to have offended Mrs. Milroy. He
+was innocent of all intention to offend Mrs. Milroy. And he
+begged to remain Mrs. Milroy's truly." Never had Allan's habitual
+brevity as a letter-writer done him better service than it did
+him now. With a little more skillfulness in the use of his pen,
+he might have given his enemy even a stronger hold on him than
+the hold she had got already.
+
+The interval day passed, and with the next morning's post Mrs.
+Milroy's threat came realized in the shape of a letter from her
+husband. The major wrote less formally than his wife had written,
+but his questions were mercilessly to the point:
+
+
+["Private."]
+
+"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Friday, July 11, 1851.
+
+"DEAR SIR--When you did me the favor of calling here a few days
+since, you asked a question relating to my governess, Miss Gwilt,
+which I thought rather a strange one at the time, and which
+caused, as you may remember, a momentary embarrassment between
+us.
+
+"This morning the subject of Miss Gwilt has been brought to
+my notice again in a manner which has caused me the utmost
+astonishment. In plain words, Mrs. Milroy has informed me
+that Miss Gwilt has exposed herself to the suspicion of having
+deceived us by a false reference. On my expressing the surprise
+which such an extraordinary statement caused me, and requesting
+that it might be instantly substantiated, I was still further
+astonished by being told to apply for all particulars to no less
+a person than Mr. Armadale. I have vainly requested some further
+explanation from Mrs. Milroy; she persists in maintaining
+silence, and in referring me to yourself.
+
+"Under these extraordinary circumstances, I am compelled, in
+justice to all parties, to ask you certain questions which I will
+endeavor to put as plainly as possible, and which I am quite
+ready to believe (from my previous experience of you) that you
+will answer frankly on your side.
+
+"I beg to inquire, in the first place, whether you admit or deny
+Mrs. Milroy's assertion that you have made yourself acquainted
+with particulars relating either to Miss Gwilt or to Miss Gwilt's
+reference, of which I am entirely ignorant? In the second place,
+if you admit the truth of Mrs. Milroy's statement, I request to
+know how you became acquainted with those particulars? Thirdly,
+and lastly, I beg to ask you what the particulars are?
+
+"If any special justification for putting these questions be
+needed--which, purely as a matter of courtesy toward yourself,
+I am willing to admit--I beg to remind you that the most precious
+charge in my house, the charge of my daughter, is confided to
+Miss Gwilt; and that Mrs. Milroy's statement places you, to all
+appearance, in the position of being competent to tell me whether
+that charge is properly bestowed or not.
+
+"I have only to add that, as nothing has thus far occurred to
+justify me in entertaining the slightest suspicion either of my
+governess or her reference, I shall wait before I make any appeal
+to Miss Gwilt until I have received your answer--which I shall
+expect by return of post. Believe me, dear sir, faithfully yours,
+
+"DAVID MILROY."
+
+
+This transparently straightforward letter at once dissipated
+the confusion which had thus far existed in Allan's mind. He saw
+the snare in which he had been caught (though he was still
+necessarily at a loss to understand why it had been set for him)
+as he had not seen it yet. Mrs. Milroy had clearly placed him
+between two alternatives--the alternative of putting himself in
+the wrong, by declining to answer her husband's questions; or the
+alternative of meanly sheltering his responsibility behind the
+responsibility of a woman, by acknowledging to the major's own
+face that the major's wife had deceived him.
+
+In this difficulty Allan acted as usual, without hesitation. His
+pledge to Mrs. Milroy to consider their correspondence private
+still bound him, disgracefully as she had abused it. And his
+resolution was as immovable as ever to let no earthly
+consideration tempt him into betraying Miss Gwilt. "I may have
+behaved like a fool," he thought, "but I won't break my word;
+and I won't be the means of turning that miserable woman adrift
+in the world again."
+
+He wrote to the major as artlessly and briefly as he had written
+to the major's wife. He declared his unwillingness to cause a
+friend and neighbor any disappointment, if he could possibly help
+it. On this occasion he had no other choice. The questions the
+major asked him were questions which he could not consent to
+answer. He was not very clever at explaining himself, and he
+hoped he might be excused for putting it in that way, and saying
+no more.
+
+Monday's post brought with it Major Milroy's rejoinder, and
+closed the correspondence.
+
+
+"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Sunday.
+
+"SIR--Your refusal to answer my questions, unaccompanied as
+it is by even the shadow of an excuse for such a proceeding,
+can be interpreted but in one way. Besides being an implied
+acknowledgment of the correctness of Mrs. Milroy's statement,
+it is also an implied reflection on my governess's character.
+As an act of justice toward a lady who lives under the protection
+of my roof, and who has given me no reason whatever to distrust
+her, I shall now show our correspondence to Miss Gwilt; and I
+shall repeat to her the conversation which I had with Mrs.
+Milroy on the subject, in Mrs. Milroy's presence.
+
+"One word more respecting the future relations between us, and
+I have done. My ideas on certain subjects are, I dare say, the
+ideas of an old-fashioned man. In my time, we had a code of honor
+by which we regulated our actions. According to that code, if a
+man made private inquiries into a lady's affairs, without being
+either her husband, her father, or her brother, he subjected
+himself to the responsibility of justifying his conduct in the
+estimation of others; and, if he evaded that responsibility, he
+abdicated the position of a gentleman. It is quite possible that
+this antiquated way of thinking exists no longer; but it is too
+late for me, at my time of life, to adopt more modern views. I am
+scrupulously anxious, seeing that we live in a country and a time
+in which the only court of honor is a police-court, to express
+myself with the utmost moderation of language upon this the last
+occasion that I shall have to communicate with you. Allow me,
+therefore, merely to remark that our ideas of the conduct which
+is becoming in a gentleman differ seriously; and permit me on
+this account to request that you will consider yourself for the
+future as a stranger to my family and to myself.
+
+"Your obedient servant,
+
+"DAVID MILROY."
+
+
+The Monday morning on which his client received the major's
+letter was the blackest Monday that had yet been marked in
+Pedgift's calendar. When Allan's first angry sense of the tone
+of contempt in which his friend and neighbor pronounced sentence
+on him had subsided, it left him sunk in a state of depression
+from which no efforts made by his traveling companion could rouse
+him for the rest of the day. Reverting naturally, now that his
+sentence of banishment had been pronounced, to his early
+intercourse with the cottage, his memory went back to Neelie,
+more regretfully and more penitently than it had gone back to her
+yet." If _she_ had shut the door on me, instead of her father,"
+was the bitter reflection with which Allan now reviewed the past,
+"I shouldn't have had a word to say against it; I should have
+felt it served me right."
+
+The next day brought another letter--a welcome letter this time,
+from Mr. Brock. Allan had written to Somersetshire on the subject
+of refitting the yacht some days since. The letter had found the
+rector engaged, as he innocently supposed, in protecting his old
+pupil against the woman whom he had watched in London, and whom
+he now believed to have followed him back to his own home. Acting
+under the directions sent to her, Mrs. Oldershaw's house-maid had
+completed the mystification of Mr. Brock. She had tranquilized
+all further anxiety on the rector's part by giving him a written
+undertaking (in the character of Miss Gwilt), engaging never to
+approach Mr. Armadale, either personally or by letter! Firmly
+persuaded that he had won the victory at last, poor Mr. Brock
+answered Allan's note in the highest spirits, expressing some
+natural surprise at his leaving Thorpe Ambrose, but readily
+promising that the yacht should be refitted, and offering the
+hospitality of the rectory in the heartiest manner.
+
+This letter did wonders in raising Allan's spirits. It gave him
+a new interest to look to, entirely disassociated from his past
+life in Norfolk. He began to count the days that were still to
+pass before the return of his absent friend. It was then Tuesday.
+If Midwinter came back from his walking trip, as he had engaged
+to come back, in a fortnight, Saturday would find him at Thorpe
+Ambrose. A note sent to meet the traveler might bring him to
+London the same night; and, if all went well, before another
+week was over they might be afloat together in the yacht.
+
+The next day passed, to Allan's relief, without bringing any
+letters. The spirits of Pedgift rose sympathetically with the
+spirits of his client. Toward dinner time he reverted to the
+_mens sana in corpore sano_ of the ancients, and issued his
+orders to the head-waiter more royally than ever.
+
+Thursday came, and brought the fatal postman with more news from
+Norfolk. A letter-writer now stepped on the scene who had not
+appeared there yet; and the total overthrow of all Allan's plans
+for a visit to Somersetshire was accomplished on the spot.
+
+Pedgift Junior happened that morning to be the first at the
+breakfast table. When Allan came in, he relapsed into his
+professional manner, and offered a letter to his patron with
+a bow performed in dreary silence.
+
+"For me?" inquired Allan, shrinking instinctively from a new
+correspondent.
+
+"For you, sir--from my father," replied Pedgift, "inclosed in one
+to myself. Perhaps you will allow me to suggest, by way of
+preparing you for--for something a little unpleasant--that we
+shall want a particularly good dinner to-day; and (if they're not
+performing any modern German music to-night) I think we should do
+well to finish the evening melodiously at the Opera."
+
+"Something wrong at Thorpe Ambrose?" asked Allen.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Armadale; something wrong at Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+Allan sat down resignedly, and opened the letter.
+
+
+["Private and Confidential."]
+
+"High Street Thorpe Ambrose, 17th July, 1851.
+
+"DEAR SIR--I cannot reconcile it with my sense of duty to your
+interests to leave you any longer in ignorance of reports current
+in this town and its neighborhood, which, I regret to say, are
+reports affecting yourself.
+
+"The first intimation of anything unpleasant reached me on Monday
+last. It was widely rumored in the town that something had gone
+wrong at Major Milroy's with the new governess, and that Mr.
+Armadale was mixed up in it. I paid no heed to this, believing it
+to be one of the many trumpery pieces of scandal perpetually set
+going here, and as necessary as the air they breathe to the
+comfort of the inhabitants of this highly respectable place.
+
+"Tuesday, however, put the matter in a new light. The most
+interesting particulars were circulated on the highest authority.
+On Wednesday, the gentry in the neighborhood took the matter up,
+and universally sanctioned the view adopted by the town. To-day
+the public feeling has reached its climax, and I find myself
+under the necessity of making you acquainted with what has
+happened.
+
+"To begin at the beginning. It is asserted that a correspondence
+took place last week between Major Milroy and yourself; in which
+you cast a very serious suspicion on Miss Gwilt's respectability,
+without defining your accusations and without (on being applied
+to) producing your proofs. Upon this, the major appears to have
+felt it his duty (while assuring his governess of his own firm
+belief in her respectability) to inform her of what had happened,
+in order that she might have no future reason to complain of his
+having had any concealments from her in a matter affecting her
+character. Very magnanimous on the major's part; but you will see
+directly that Miss Gwilt was more magnanimous still. After
+expressing her thanks in a most becoming manner, she requested
+permission to withdraw herself from Major Milroy's service.
+
+"Various reports are in circulation as to the governess's reason
+for taking this step.
+
+"The authorized version (as sanctioned by the resident gentry)
+represents Miss Gwilt to have said that she could not
+condescend--in justice to herself, and in justice to her highly
+respectable reference--to defend her reputation against undefined
+imputations cast on it by a comparative stranger. At the same
+time it was impossible for her to pursue such a course of conduct
+as this, unless she possessed a freedom of action which was quite
+incompatible with her continuing to occupy the dependent position
+of a governess. For that reason she felt it incumbent on her to
+leave her situation. But, while doing this, she was equally
+determined not to lead to any misinterpretation of her motives
+by leaving the neighborhood. No matter at what inconvenience to
+herself, she would remain long enough at Thorpe Ambrose to await
+any more definitely expressed imputations that might be made on
+her character, and to repel them publicly the instant they
+assumed a tangible form.
+
+"Such is the position which this high-minded lady has taken up,
+with an excellent effect on the public mind in these parts. It
+is clearly her interest, for some reason, to leave her situation,
+without leaving the neighborhood. On Monday last she established
+herself in a cheap lodging on the outskirts of the town. And on
+the same day she probably wrote to her reference, for yesterday
+there came a letter from that lady to Major Milroy, full of
+virtuous indignation, and courting the fullest inquiry. The
+letter has been shown publicly, and has immensely strengthened
+Miss Gwilt's position. She is now considered to be quite a
+heroine. The _Thorpe Ambrose Mercury_ has got a leading article
+about her, comparing her to Joan of Arc. It is considered
+probable that she will be referred to in the sermon next Sunday.
+We reckon five strong-minded single ladies in this
+neighborhood--and all five have called on her. A testimonial was
+suggested; but it has been given up at Miss Gwilt's own request,
+and a general movement is now on foot to get her employment as a
+teacher of music. Lastly, I have had the honor of a visit from
+the lady herself, in her capacity of martyr, to tell me, in the
+sweetest manner, that she doesn't blame Mr. Armadale, and that
+she considers him to be an innocent instrument in the hands of
+other and more designing people. I was carefully on my guard with
+her; for I don't altogether believe in Miss Gwilt, and I have my
+lawyer's suspicions of the motive that is at the bottom of her
+present proceedings.
+
+"I have written thus far, my dear sir, with little hesitation or
+embarrassment. But there is unfortunately a serious side to this
+business as well as a ridiculous side; and I must unwillingly
+come to it before I close my letter.
+
+"It is, I think, quite impossible that you can permit yourself
+to be spoken of as you are spoken of now, without stirring
+personally in the matter. You have unluckily made many enemies
+here, and foremost among them is my colleague, Mr. Darch. He has
+been showing everywhere a somewhat rashly expressed letter you
+wrote to him on the subject of letting the cottage to Major
+Milroy instead of to himself, and it has helped to exasperate the
+feeling against you. It is roundly stated in so many words that
+you have been prying into Miss Gwilt's family affairs, with the
+most dishonorable motives; that you have tried, for a profligate
+purpose of your own, to damage her reputation, and to deprive her
+of the protection of Major Milroy's roof; and that, after having
+been asked to substantiate by proof the suspicions that you have
+cast on the reputation of a defenseless woman, you have
+maintained a silence which condemns you in the estimation of all
+honorable men.
+
+"I hope it is quite unnecessary for me to say that I don't attach
+the smallest particle of credit to these infamous reports. But
+they are too widely spread and too widely believed to be treated
+with contempt. I strongly urge you to return at once to this
+place, and to take the necessary measures for defending your
+character, in concert with me, as your legal adviser. I have
+formed, since my interview with Miss Gwilt, a very strong opinion
+of my own on the subject of that lady which it is not necessary
+to commit to paper. Suffice it to say here that I shall have a
+means to propose to you for silencing the slanderous tongues of
+your neighbors, on the success of which I stake my professional
+reputation, if you will only back me by your presence and
+authority.
+
+"It may, perhaps, help to show you the necessity there is
+for your return, if I mention one other assertion respecting
+yourself, which is in everybody's mouth. Your absence is, I
+regret to tell you, attributed to the meanest of all motives.
+It is said that you are remaining in London because you are
+afraid to show your face at Thorpe Ambrose.
+
+"Believe me, dear sir, your faithful servant,
+
+"A. PEDGIFT, Sen."
+
+
+Allan was of an age to feel the sting contained in the last
+sentence of his lawyer's letter. He started to his feet in a
+paroxysm of indignation, which revealed his character to Pedgift
+Junior in an entirely new light.
+
+"Where's the time-table?" cried Allan. "I must go back to Thorpe
+Ambrose by the next train! If it doesn't start directly, I'll
+have a special engine. I must and will go back instantly, and
+I don't care two straws for the expense!"
+
+"Suppose we telegraph to my father, sir?" suggested the judicious
+Pedgift. "It's the quickest way of expressing your feelings, and
+the cheapest."
+
+"So it is," said Allan. "Thank you for reminding me of it.
+Telegraph to them! Tell your father to give every man in Thorpe
+Ambrose the lie direct, in my name. Put it in capital letters,
+Pedgift--put it in capital letters!"
+
+Pedgift smiled and shook his head. If he was acquainted with no
+other variety of human nature, he thoroughly knew the variety
+that exists in country towns.
+
+"It won't have the least effect on them, Mr. Armadale," he
+remarked quietly. "They'll only go on lying harder than ever. If
+you want to upset the whole town, one line will do it. With five
+shillings' worth of human labor and electric fluid, sir (I dabble
+a little in science after business hours), we'll explode a
+bombshell in Thorpe Ambrose!" He produced the bombshell on
+a slip of paper as he spoke: "A. Pedgift, Junior, to A. Pedgift,
+Senior.--Spread it all over the place that Mr. Armadale is coming
+down by the next train."
+
+"More words!" suggested Allan, looking over his shoulder. "Make
+it stronger."
+
+"Leave my father to make it stronger, sir," returned the wary
+Pedgift. "My father is on the spot, and his command of language
+is something quite extraordinary." He rang the bell, and
+dispatched the telegram.
+
+Now that something had been done, Allan subsided gradually
+into a state of composure. He looked back again at Mr. Pedgift's
+letter, and then handed it to Mr. Pedgift's son.
+
+"Can you guess your father's plan for setting me right in the
+neighborhood?" he asked.
+
+Pedgift the younger shook his wise head. "His plan appears to be
+connected in some way, sir, with his opinion of Miss Gwilt."
+
+"I wonder what he thinks of her?" said Allan.
+
+"I shouldn't be surprised, Mr. Armadale," returned Pedgift
+Junior, "if his opinion staggers you a little, when you come to
+hear it. My father has had a large legal experience of the shady
+side of the sex, and he learned his profession at the Old
+Bailey."
+
+Allan made no further inquiries. He seemed to shrink from
+pursuing the subject, after having started it himself. "Let's
+be doing something to kill the time," he said. "Let's pack up
+and pay the bill."
+
+They packed up and paid the bill. The hour came, and the train
+left for Norfolk at last.
+
+While the travelers were on their way back, a somewhat longer
+telegraphic message than Allan's was flashing its way past them
+along the wires, in the reverse direction--from Thorpe Ambrose
+to London. The message was in cipher, and, the signs being
+interpreted, it ran thus: "From Lydia Gwilt to Maria
+Oldershaw.--Good news! He is coming back. I mean to have an
+interview with him. Everything looks well. Now I have left the
+cottage, I have no women's prying eyes to dread, and I can come
+and go as I please. Mr. Midwinter is luckily out of the way.
+I don't despair of becoming Mrs. Armadale yet. Whatever happens,
+depend on my keeping away from London until I am certain of not
+taking any spies after me to your place. I am in no hurry to
+leave Thorpe Ambrose. I mean to be even with Miss Milroy first."
+
+Shortly after that message was received in London, Allan was back
+again in his own house.
+
+It was evening--Pedgift Junior had just left him--and Pedgift
+Senior was expected to call on business in half an hour's time.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+PEDGIFT'S REMEDY.
+
+After waiting to hold a preliminary consultation with his son,
+Mr. Pedgift the elder set forth alone for his interview with
+Allan at the great house.
+
+Allowing for the difference in their ages, the son was, in this
+instance, so accurately the reflection of the father, that
+an acquaintance with either of the two Pedgifts was almost
+equivalent to an acquaintance with both. Add some little height
+and size to the figure of Pedgift Junior, give more breadth and
+boldness to his humor, and some additional solidity and composure
+to his confidence in himself, and the presence and character of
+Pedgift Senior stood, for all general purposes, revealed before
+you.
+
+The lawyer's conveyance to Thorpe Ambrose was his own smart gig,
+drawn by his famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive
+himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities
+in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of
+the sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift
+the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots, in dry weather
+and wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets
+overlapped his hips, and his favorite summer cravat was of light
+spotted muslin, tied in the neatest and smallest of bows. He used
+tobacco like his son, but in a different form. While the younger
+man smoked, the elder took snuff copiously; and it was noticed
+among his intimates that he always held his "pinch" in a state of
+suspense between his box and his nose when he was going to clinch
+a good bargain or to say a good thing. The art of diplomacy
+enters largely into the practice of all successful men in
+the lower branch of the law. Mr. Pedgift's form of diplomatic
+practice had been the same throughout his life, on every occasion
+when he found his arts of persuasion required at an interview
+with another man. He invariably kept his strongest argument,
+or his boldest proposal, to the last, and invariably remembered
+it at the door (after previously taking his leave), as if it was
+a purely accidental consideration which had that instant occurred
+to him. Jocular friends, acquainted by previous experience with
+this form of proceeding, had given it the name of "Pedgift's
+postscript." There were few people in Thorpe Ambrose who did not
+know what it meant when the lawyer suddenly checked his exit
+at the opened door; came back softly to his chair, with his pinch
+of snuff suspended between his box and his nose; said, "By-the-by,
+there's a point occurs to me;" and settled the question off-hand,
+after having given it up in despair not a minute before.
+
+This was the man whom the march of events at Thorpe Ambrose had
+now thrust capriciously into a foremost place. This was the one
+friend at hand to whom Allan in his social isolation could turn
+for counsel in the hour of need.
+
+
+"Good-evening, Mr. Armadale. Many thanks for your prompt
+attention to my very disagreeable letter," said Pedgift Senior,
+opening the conversation cheerfully the moment he entered his
+client's house. "I hope you understand, sir, that I had really
+no choice under the circumstances but to write as I did?"
+
+"I have very few friends, Mr. Pedgift," returned Allan, simply.
+"And I am sure you are one of the few."
+
+"Much obliged, Mr. Armadale. I have always tried to deserve your
+good opinion, and I mean, if I can, to deserve it now. You found
+yourself comfortable, I hope, sir, at the hotel in London? We
+call it Our hotel. Some rare old wine in the cellar, which I
+should have introduced to your notice if I had had the honor of
+being with you. My son unfortunately knows nothing about wine."
+
+Allan felt his false position in the neighborhood far too acutely
+to be capable of talking of anything but the main business of the
+evening. His lawyer's politely roundabout method of approaching
+the painful subject to be discussed between them rather irritated
+than composed him. He came at once to the point, in his own
+bluntly straightforward way.
+
+"The hotel was very comfortable, Mr. Pedgift, and your son was
+very kind to me. But we are not in London now; and I want to talk
+to you about how I am to meet the lies that are being told of me
+in this place. Only point me out any one man," cried Allan, with
+a rising voice and a mounting color--"any one man who says I am
+afraid to show my face in the neighborhood, and I'll horsewhip
+him publicly before another day is over his head!"
+
+Pedgift Senior helped himself to a pinch of snuff, and held it
+calmly in suspense midway between his box and his nose.
+
+"You can horsewhip a man, sir; but you can't horsewhip a
+neighborhood," said the lawyer, in his politely epigrammatic
+manner. "We will fight our battle, if you please, without
+borrowing our weapons of the coachman yet a while, at any rate."
+
+"But how are we to begin?" asked Allan, impatiently. "How am I
+to contradict the infamous things they say of me?"
+
+"There are two ways of stepping out of your present awkward
+position, sir--a short way, and a long way," replied Pedgift
+Senior. "The short way (which is always the best) has occurred to
+me since I have heard of your proceedings in London from my son.
+I understand that you permitted him, after you received my
+letter, to take me into your confidence. I have drawn various
+conclusions from what he has told me, which I may find it
+necessary to trouble you with presently. In the meantime I should
+be glad to know under what circumstances you went to London to
+make these unfortunate inquiries about Miss Gwilt? Was it your
+own notion to pay that visit to Mrs. Mandeville? or were you
+acting under the influence of some other person?"
+
+Allan hesitated. "I can't honestly tell you it was my own
+notion," he replied, and said no more.
+
+"I thought as much!" remarked Pedgift Senior, in high triumph.
+"The short way out of our present difficulty, Mr. Armadale, lies
+straight through that other person, under whose influence you
+acted. That other person must be presented forthwith to public
+notice, and must stand in that other person's proper place.
+The name, if you please, sir, to begin with--we'll come to the
+circumstances directly."
+
+"I am sorry to say, Mr. Pedgift, that we must try the longest
+way, if you have no objection," replied Allan, quietly. "The
+short way happens to be a way I can't take on this occasion."
+
+The men who rise in the law are the men who decline to take No
+for an answer. Mr. Pedgift the elder had risen in the law; and
+Mr. Pedgift the elder now declined to take No for an answer. But
+all pertinacity--even professional pertinacity included--sooner
+or later finds its limits; and the lawyer, doubly fortified as
+he was by long experience and copious pinches of snuff, found
+his limits at the very outset of the interview. It was impossible
+that Allan could respect the confidence which Mrs. Milroy had
+treacherously affected to place in him. But he had an honest
+man's regard for his own pledged word--the regard which looks
+straightforward at the fact, and which never glances sidelong at
+the circumstances--and the utmost persistency of Pedgift Senior
+failed to move him a hairbreadth from the position which he had
+taken up. "No" is the strongest word in the English language,
+in the mouth of any man who has the courage to repeat it often
+enough, and Allan had the courage to repeat it often enough on
+this occasion.
+
+"Very good, sir," said the lawyer, accepting his defeat without
+the slightest loss of temper. "The choice rests with you, and you
+have chosen. We will go the long way. It starts (allow me to
+inform you) from my office; and it leads (as I strongly suspect)
+through a very miry road to--Miss Gwilt."
+
+Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless astonishment.
+
+"If you won't expose the person who is responsible in the first
+instance, sir, for the inquiries to which you unfortunately lent
+yourself," proceeded Mr. Pedgift the elder, "the only other
+alternative, in your present position, is to justify the
+inquiries themselves."
+
+"And how is that to be done?" inquired Allan.
+
+"By proving to the whole neighborhood, Mr. Armadale, what I
+firmly believe to be the truth--that the pet object of the public
+protection is an adventuress of the worst class; an undeniably
+worthless and dangerous woman. In plainer English still, sir,
+by employing time enough and money enough to discover the truth
+about Miss Gwilt."
+
+
+Before Allan could say a word in answer, there was an
+interruption at the door. After the usual preliminary knock,
+one of the servants came in.
+
+"I told you I was not to be interrupted," said Allan, irritably.
+"Good heavens! am I never to have done with them? Another
+letter!"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the man, holding it out. "And," he added,
+speaking words of evil omen in his master's ears, "the person
+waits for an answer."
+
+Allan looked at the address of the letter with a natural
+expectation of encountering the handwriting of the major's wife.
+The anticipation was not realized. His correspondent was plainly
+a lady, but the lady was not Mrs. Milroy.
+
+"Who can it be?" he said, looking mechanically at Pedgift Senior
+as he opened the envelope.
+
+Pedgift Senior gently tapped his snuff-box, and said, without a
+moment's hesitation, "Miss Gwilt."
+
+Allan opened the letter. The first two words in it were the echo
+of the two words the lawyer had just pronounced. It _was_ Miss
+Gwilt!
+
+Once more, Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless
+astonishment.
+
+"I have known a good many of them in my time, sir," explained
+Pedgift Senior, with a modesty equally rare and becoming in a man
+of his age. "Not as handsome as Miss Gwilt, I admit. But quite as
+bad, I dare say. Read your letter, Mr. Armadale--read your
+letter."
+
+Allan read these lines:
+
+
+"Miss Gwilt presents her compliments to Mr. Armadale and begs
+to know if it will be convenient to him to favor her with an
+interview, either this evening or to-morrow morning. Miss Gwilt
+offers no apology for making her present request. She believes
+Mr. Armadale will grant it as an act of justice toward a
+friendless woman whom he has been innocently the means of
+injuring, and who is earnestly desirous to set herself right
+in his estimation."
+
+
+Allan handed the letter to his lawyer in silent perplexity and
+distress.
+
+The face of Mr. Pedgift the elder expressed but one feeling when
+he had read the letter in his turn and had handed it back--a
+feeling of profound admiration. "What a lawyer she would have
+made," he exclaimed, fervently, "if she had only been a man!"
+
+"I can't treat this as lightly as you do, Mr. Pedgift," said
+Allan. "It's dreadfully distressing to me. I was so fond of her,"
+he added, in a lower tone--"I was so fond of her once."
+
+Mr. Pedgift Senior suddenly became serious on his side.
+
+"Do you mean to say, sir, that you actually contemplate seeing
+Miss Gwilt?" he asked, with an expression of genuine dismay.
+
+"I can't treat her cruelly," returned Allan. "I have been the
+means of injuring her--without intending it, God knows! I can't
+treat her cruelly after that! "
+
+"Mr. Armadale," said the lawyer, "you did me the honor, a little
+while since, to say that you considered me your friend. May I
+presume on that position to ask you a question or two, before you
+go straight to your own ruin?"
+
+"Any questions you like," said Allan, looking back at the
+letter--the only letter he had ever received from Miss Gwilt.
+
+"You have had one trap set for you already, sir, and you have
+fallen into it. Do you want to fall into another?"
+
+"You know the answer to that question, Mr. Pedgift, as well as
+I do."
+
+"I'll try again, Mr. Armadale; we lawyers are not easily
+discouraged. Do you think that any statement Miss Gwilt might
+make to you, if you do see her, would be a statement to be relied
+on, after what you and my son discovered in London?"
+
+"She might explain what we discovered in London," suggested
+Allan, still looking at the writing, and thinking of the hand
+that had traced it.
+
+"_Might_ explain it? My dear sir, she is quite certain to explain
+it! I will do her justice: I believe she would make out a case
+without a single flaw in it from beginning to end."
+
+That last answer forced Allan's attention away from the letter.
+The lawyer's pitiless common sense showed him no mercy.
+
+"If you see that woman again, sir," proceeded Pedgift Senior,
+"you will commit the rashest act of folly I ever heard of in all
+my experience. She can have but one object in coming here--to
+practice on your weakness for her. Nobody can say into what false
+step she may not lead you, if you once give her the opportunity.
+You admit yourself that you have been fond of her; your
+attentions to her have been the subject of general remark;
+if you haven't actually offered her the chance of becoming Mrs.
+Armadale, you have done the next thing to it; and knowing all
+this, you propose to see her, and to let her work on you with her
+devilish beauty and her devilish cleverness, in the character of
+your interesting victim! You, who are one of the best matches in
+England! You, who are the natural prey of all the hungry single
+women in the community! I never heard the like of it; I never, in
+all my professional experience, heard the like of it! If you must
+positively put yourself in a dangerous position, Mr. Armadale,"
+concluded Pedgift the elder, with the everlasting pinch of snuff
+held in suspense between his box and his nose, "there's a
+wild-beast show coming to our town next week. Let in the tigress,
+sir; don't let in Miss Gwilt!"
+
+For the third time Allan looked at his lawyer. And for the third
+time his lawyer looked back at him quite unabashed.
+
+"You seem to have a very bad opinion of Miss Gwilt," said Allan.
+
+"The worst possible opinion, Mr. Armadale," retorted Pedgift
+Senior, coolly. "We will return to that when we have sent the
+lady's messenger about his business. Will you take my advice?
+Will you decline to see her?"
+
+"I would willingly decline--it would be so dreadfully distressing
+to both of us," said Allan. "I would willingly decline, if I only
+knew how."
+
+"Bless my soul, Mr. Armadale, it's easy enough! Don't commit
+_you_ yourself in writing. Send out to the messenger, and say
+there's no answer."
+
+The short course thus suggested was a course which Allan
+positively declined to take. "It's treating her brutally,"
+he said; "I can't and won't do it."
+
+Once more the pertinacity of Pedgift the elder found its limits,
+and once more that wise man yielded gracefully to a compromise.
+On receiving his client's promise not to see Miss Gwilt, he
+consented to Allan's committing himself in writing under his
+lawyer's dictation. The letter thus produced was modeled in
+Allan's own style; it began and ended in one sentence. "Mr.
+Armadale presents his compliments to Miss Gwilt, and regrets
+that he cannot have the pleasure of seeing her at Thorpe
+Ambrose." Allan had pleaded hard for a second sentence,
+explaining that he only declined Miss Gwilt's request from
+a conviction that an interview would be needlessly distressing
+on both sides. But his legal adviser firmly rejected the proposed
+addition to the letter. "When you say No to a woman, sir,"
+remarked Pedgift Senior, "always say it in one word. If you give
+her your reasons, she invariably believes that you mean Yes."
+
+Producing that little gem of wisdom from the rich mine of his
+professional experience, Mr. Pedgift the elder sent out the
+answer to Miss Gwilt's messenger, and recommended the servant
+to "see the fellow, whoever he was, well clear of the house."
+
+"Now, sir," said the lawyer, "we will come back, if you like,
+to my opinion of Miss Gwilt. It doesn't at all agree with yours,
+I'm afraid. You think her an object of pity--quite natural at
+your age. I think her an object for the inside of a prison--quite
+natural at mine. You shall hear the grounds on which I have
+formed my opinion directly. Let me show you that I am in earnest
+by putting the opinion itself, in the first place, to a practical
+test. Do you think Miss Gwilt is likely to persist in paying you
+a visit, Mr. Armadale, after the answer you have just sent to
+her?"
+
+"Quite impossible!" cried Allan, warmly. "Miss Gwilt is a lady;
+after the letter I have sent to her, she will never come near me
+again."
+
+"There we join issue, sir," cried Pedgift Senior. "I say she will
+snap her fingers at your letter (which was one of the reasons why
+I objected to your writing it). I say, she is in all probability
+waiting her messenger's return, in or near your grounds at this
+moment. I say, she will try to force her way in here, before
+four-and-twenty hours more are over your head. Egad, sir!" cried
+Mr. Pedgift, looking at his watch, "it's only seven o'clock now.
+She's bold enough and clever enough to catch you unawares this
+very evening. Permit me to ring for the servant--permit me to
+request that you will give him orders immediately to say you are
+not at home. You needn't hesitate, Mr. Armadale! If you're right
+about Miss Gwilt, it's a mere formality. If I'm right, it's a
+wise precaution. Back your opinion, sir," said Mr. Pedgift,
+ringing the bell; "I back mine!"
+
+Allan was sufficiently nettled when the bell rang to feel ready
+to give the order. But when the servant came in, past
+remembrances got the better of him, and the words stuck in his
+throat. "You give the order," he said to Mr. Pedgift, and walked
+away abruptly to the window. "You're a good fellow!" thought the
+old lawyer, looking after him, and penetrating his motive on the
+instant. "The claws of that she-devil shan't scratch you if I can
+help it."
+
+The servant waited inexorably for his orders.
+
+"If Miss Gwilt calls here, either this evening, or at any other
+time," said Pedgift Senior, "Mr. Armadale is not at home. Wait!
+If she asks when Mr. Armadale will be back, you don't know. Wait!
+If she proposes coming in and sitting down, you have a general
+order that nobody is to come in and sit down unless they have a
+previous appointment with Mr. Armadale. Come!" cried old Pedgift,
+rubbing his hands cheerfully when the servant had left the room,
+"I've stopped her out now, at any rate! The orders are all given,
+Mr. Armadale. We may go on with our conversation."
+
+Allan came back from the window. "The conversation is not a very
+pleasant one," he said. "No offense to you, but I wish it was
+over."
+
+"We will get it over as soon as possible, sir," said Pedgift
+Senior, still persisting, as only lawyers and women _can_
+persist, in forcing his way little by little nearer and nearer to
+his own object. "Let us go back, if you please, to the practical
+suggestion which I offered to you when the servant came in with
+Miss Gwilt's note. There is, I repeat, only one way left for you,
+Mr. Armadale, out of your present awkward position. You must
+pursue your inquiries about this woman to an end--on the chance
+(which I consider next to a certainty) that the end will justify
+you in the estimation of the neighborhood."
+
+"I wish to God I had never made any inquiries at all!" said
+Allan. "Nothing will induce me, Mr. Pedgift, to make any more."
+
+"Why?" asked the lawyer.
+
+"Can you ask me why," retorted Allan, hotly, "after your son has
+told you what we found out in London? Even if I had less cause to
+be--to be sorry for Miss Gwilt than I have; even if it was some
+other woman, do you think I would inquire any further into the
+secret of a poor betrayed creature--much less expose it to the
+neighborhood? I should think myself as great a scoundrel as the
+man who has cast her out helpless on the world, if I did anything
+of the kind. I wonder you can ask me the question--upon my soul,
+I wonder you can ask me the question!"
+
+"Give me your hand, Mr. Armadale!" cried Pedgift Senior, warmly;
+"I honor you for being so angry with me. The neighborhood may say
+what it pleases; you're a gentleman, sir, in the best sense
+of the word. Now," pursued the lawyer, dropping Allan's hand,
+and lapsing back instantly from sentiment to business, "just hear
+what I have got to say in my own defense. Suppose Miss Gwilt's
+real position happens to be nothing like what you are generously
+determined to believe it to be?"
+
+"We have no reason to suppose that," said Allan, resolutely.
+
+"Such is your opinion, sir," persisted Pedgift. "Mine, founded on
+what is publicly known of Miss Gwilt's proceedings here, and on
+what I have seen of Miss Gwilt herself, is that she is as far as
+I am from being the sentimental victim you are inclined to make
+her out. Gently, Mr. Armadale! remember that I have put my
+opinion to a practical test, and wait to condemn it off-hand
+until events have justified you. Let me put my points, sir--make
+allowances for me as a lawyer--and let me put my points. You and
+my son are young men; and I don't deny that the circumstances, on
+the surface, appear to justify the interpretation which, as young
+men, you have placed on them. I am an old man--I know that
+circumstances are not always to be taken as they appear on the
+surface--and I possess the great advantage, in the present case,
+of having had years of professional experience among some of the
+wickedest women who ever walked this earth."
+
+Allan opened his lips to protest, and checked himself, in despair
+of producing the slightest effect. Pedgift Senior bowed in polite
+acknowledgment of his client's self-restraint, and took instant
+advantage of it to go on.
+
+"All Miss Gwilt's proceedings," he resumed, "since your
+unfortunate correspondence with the major show me that she
+is an old hand at deceit. The moment she is threatened with
+exposure--exposure of some kind, there can be no doubt, after
+what you discovered in London--she turns your honorable silence
+to the best possible account, and leaves the major's service in
+the character of a martyr. Once out of the house, what does she
+do next? She boldly stops in the neighborhood, and serves three
+excellent purposes by doing so. In the first place, she shows
+everybody that she is not afraid of facing another attack on her
+reputation. In the second place, she is close at hand to twist
+you round her little finger, and to become Mrs. Armadale in spite
+of circumstances, if you (and I) allow her the opportunity. In
+the third place, if you (and I) are wise enough to distrust her,
+she is equally wise on her side, and doesn't give us the first
+great chance of following her to London, and associating her
+with her accomplices. Is this the conduct of an unhappy woman who
+has lost her character in a moment of weakness, and who has been
+driven unwillingly into a deception to get it back again?"
+
+"You put it cleverly," said Allan, answering with marked
+reluctance; "I can't deny that you put it cleverly."
+
+"Your own common sense, Mr. Armadale, is beginning to tell you
+that I put it justly," said Pedgift Senior. "I don't presume
+to say yet what this woman's connection may be with those people
+at Pimlico. All I assert is that it is not the connection you
+suppose. Having stated the facts so far, I have only to add my
+own personal impression of Miss Gwilt. I won't shock you, if
+I can help it; I'll try if I can't put it cleverly again. She
+came to my office (as I told you in my letter), no doubt to make
+friends with your lawyer, if she could; she came to tell me, in
+the most forgiving and Christian manner, that she didn't blame
+_you_."
+
+"Do you ever believe in anybody, Mr. Pedgift?" interposed Allan.
+
+"Sometimes, Mr. Armadale," returned Pedgift the elder, as
+unabashed as ever. "I believe as often as a lawyer can. To
+proceed, sir. When I was in the criminal branch of practice,
+it fell to my lot to take instructions for the defense of women
+committed for trial from the women's own lips. Whatever other
+difference there might be among them, I got, in time, to notice,
+among those who were particularly wicked and unquestionably
+guilty, one point in which they all resembled each other. Tall
+and short, old and young, handsome and ugly, they all had a
+secret self-possession that nothing could shake. On the surface
+they were as different as possible. Some of them were in a state
+of indignation; some of them were drowned in tears; some of them
+were full of pious confidence; and some of them were resolved to
+commit suicide before the night was out. But only put your finger
+suddenly on the weak point in the story told by any one of them,
+and there was an end of her rage, or her tears, or her piety, or
+her despair; and out came the genuine woman, in full possession
+of all her resources with a neat little lie that exactly suited
+the circumstances of the case. Miss Gwilt was in tears,
+sir--becoming tears that didn't make her nose red--and I put my
+finger suddenly on the weak point in _her_ story. Down dropped
+her pathetic pocket-handkerchief from her beautiful blue eyes,
+and out came the genuine woman with the neat little lie that
+exactly suited the circumstances! I felt twenty years younger,
+Mr. Armadale, on the spot. I declare I thought I was in Newgate
+again, with my note-book in my hand, taking my instructions for
+the defense!"
+
+"The next thing you'll say, Mr. Pedgift," cried Allan, angrily,
+"is that Miss Gwilt has been in prison!"
+
+Pedgift Senior calmly rapped his snuff-box, and had his answer
+ready at a moment's notice.
+
+"She may have richly deserved to see the inside of a prison,
+Mr. Armadale; but, in the age we live in, that is one excellent
+reason for her never having been near any place of the kind.
+A prison, in the present tender state of public feeling, for a
+charming woman like Miss Gwilt! My dear sir, if she had attempted
+to murder you or me, and if an inhuman judge and jury had decided
+on sending her to a prison, the first object of modern society
+would be to prevent her going into it; and, if that couldn't be
+done, the next object would be to let her out again as soon as
+possible. Read your newspaper, Mr. Armadale, and you'll find we
+live in piping times for the black sheep of the community--if
+they are only black enough. I insist on asserting, sir, that
+we have got one of the blackest of the lot to deal with in this
+case. I insist on asserting that you have had the rare luck,
+in these unfortunate inquiries, to pitch on a woman who happens
+to be a fit object for inquiry, in the interests of the public
+protection. Differ with me as strongly as you please, but don't
+make up your mind finally about Miss Gwilt until events have put
+those two opposite opinions of ours to the test that I have
+proposed. A fairer test there can't be. I agree with you that no
+lady worthy of the name could attempt to force her way in here,
+after receiving your letter. But I deny that Miss Gwilt is worthy
+of the name; and I say she will try to force her way in here in
+spite of you."
+
+"And I say she won't!" retorted Allan, firmly.
+
+Pedgift Senior leaned back in his chair and smiled. There was
+a momentary silence, and in that silence the door-bell rang.
+
+The lawyer and the client both looked expectantly in the
+direction of the hall.
+
+"No," cried Allan, more angrily than ever.
+
+"Yes!" cried Pedgift Senior, contradicting him with the utmost
+politeness.
+
+They waited the event. The opening of the house door was audible,
+but the room was too far from it for the sound of voices to reach
+the ear as well. After a long interval of expectation, the
+closing of the door was heard at last. Allan rose impetuously
+and rang the bell. Mr. Pedgift the elder sat sublimely calm,
+and enjoyed, with a gentle zest, the largest pinch of snuff
+he had taken yet.
+
+"Anybody for me?" asked Allan, when the servant came in.
+
+The man looked at Pedgift Senior, with an expression of
+unutterable reverence, and answered, "Miss Gwilt."
+
+"I don't want to crow over you, sir," said Mr. Pedgift the elder,
+when the servant had withdrawn. "But what do you think of Miss
+Gwilt _now_?"
+
+Allan shook his head in silent discouragement and distress.
+
+"Time is of some importance, Mr. Armadale. After what has just
+happened, do you still object to taking the course I have had
+the honor of suggesting to you?"
+
+"I can't, Mr. Pedgift," said Allan. "I can't be the means of
+disgracing her in the neighborhood. I would rather be disgraced
+myself--as I am."
+
+"Let me put it in another way, sir. Excuse my persisting. You
+have been very kind to me and my family; and I have a personal
+interest, as well as a professional interest, in you. If you
+can't prevail on yourself to show this woman's character in its
+true light, will you take common precautions to prevent her doing
+any more harm? Will you consent to having her privately watched
+as long as she remains in this neighborhood?"
+
+For the second time Allan shook his head.
+
+"Is that your final resolution, sir?"
+
+"It is, Mr. Pedgift; but I am much obliged to you for your
+advice, all the same."
+
+Pedgift Senior rose in a state of gentle resignation, and took up
+his hat "Good-evening, sir," he said, and made sorrowfully for
+the door. Allan rose on his side, innocently supposing that
+the interview was at an end. Persons better acquainted with the
+diplomatic habits of his legal adviser would have recommended him
+to keep his seat. The time was ripe for "Pedgift's postscript,"
+and the lawyer's indicative snuff-box was at that moment in one
+of his hands, as he opened the door with the other.
+
+"Good-evening," said Allan.
+
+Pedgift Senior opened the door, stopped, considered, closed
+the door again, came back mysteriously with his pinch of snuff
+in suspense between his box and his nose, and repeating his
+invariable formula, "By-the-by, there's a point occurs to me,"
+quietly resumed possession of his empty chair
+
+Allan, wondering, took the seat, in his turn, which he had just
+left. Lawyer and client looked at each other once more, and the
+inexhaustible interview began again.
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PEDGIFT'S POSTSCRIPT.
+
+"I mentioned that a point had occurred to me, sir," remarked
+Pedgift Senior.
+
+"You did," said Allan.
+
+"Would you like to hear what it is, Mr. Armadale?"
+
+"If you please," said Allan.
+
+"With all my heart, sir! This is the point. I attach considerable
+importance--if nothing else can be done--to having Miss Gwilt
+privately looked after, as long as she stops at Thorpe Ambrose.
+It struck me just now at the door, Mr. Armadale, that what you
+are not willing to do for your own security, you might be willing
+to do for the security of another person."
+
+"What other person?" inquired Allan.
+
+"A young lady who is a near neighbor of yours, sir. Shall I
+mention the name in confidence? Miss Milroy."
+
+Allan started, and changed color.
+
+"Miss Milroy!" he repeated. "Can _she_ be concerned in this
+miserable business? I hope not, Mr. Pedgift; I sincerely hope
+not."
+
+"I paid a visit, in your interests, sir, at the cottage this
+morning," proceeded Pedgift Senior. "You shall hear what happened
+there, and judge for yourself. Major Milroy has been expressing
+his opinion of you pretty freely; and I thought it highly
+desirable to give him a caution. It's always the way with those
+quiet addle-headed men: when they do once wake up, there's no
+reasoning with their obstinacy, and no quieting their violence.
+Well, sir, this morning I went to the cottage. The major and Miss
+Neelie were both in the parlor--miss not looking so pretty as
+usual; pale, I thought, pale, and worn, and anxious. Up jumps the
+addle-headed major (I wouldn't give _that_, Mr. Armadale, for
+the brains of a man who can occupy himself for half his lifetime 
+n making a clock!)--up jumps the addle-headed major, in the
+loftiest manner, and actually tries to look me down. Ha! ha! the
+idea of anybody looking _me_ down, at my time of life. I behaved
+like a Christian; I nodded kindly to old What's-o'clock 'Fine
+morning, major,' says I. 'Have you any business with me?' says
+he. 'Just a word,' says I. Miss Neelie, like the sensible girl
+she is, gets up to leave the room; and what does her ridiculous
+father do? He stops her. 'You needn't go, my dear, I have nothing
+to say to Mr. Pedgift,' says this old military idiot, and turns
+my way, and tries to look me down again. 'You are Mr. Armadale's
+lawyer,' says he; 'if you come on any business relating to Mr.
+Armadale, I refer you to my solicitor.' (His solicitor is Darch;
+and Darch has had enough of _me_ in business, I can tell you!)
+'My errand here, major, does certainly relate to Mr. Armadale,'
+says I; 'but it doesn't concern your lawyer--at any rate, just
+yet. I wish to caution you to suspend your opinion of my client,
+or, if you won't do that, to be careful how you express it in
+public. I warn you that our turn is to come, and that you are not
+at the end yet of this scandal about Miss Gwilt.' It struck me
+as likely that he would lose his temper when he found himself
+tackled in that way, and he amply fulfilled my expectations.
+He was quite violent in his language--the poor weak
+creature--actually violent with _me_! I behaved like a Christian
+again; I nodded kindly, and wished him good-morning. When I
+looked round to wish Miss Neelie good-morning, too, she was gone.
+You seem restless, Mr. Armadale," remarked Pedgift Senior, as
+Allan, feeling the sting of old recollections, suddenly started
+out of his chair, and began pacing up and down the room. "I won't
+try your patience much longer, sir; I am coming to the point."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Pedgift," said Allan, returning to his
+seat, and trying to look composedly at the lawyer through the
+intervening image of Neelie which the lawyer had called up.
+
+"Well, sir, I left the cottage," resumed Pedgift Senior. "Just
+as I turned the corner from the garden into the park, whom should
+I stumble on but Miss Neelie herself, evidently on the lookout
+for me. 'I want to speak to you for one moment, Mr. Pedgift!'
+says she. 'Does Mr. Armadale think _me_ mixed up in this matter?'
+She was violently agitated--tears in her eyes, sir, of the sort
+which my legal experience has _not_ accustomed me to see. I quite
+forgot myself; I actually gave her my arm, and led her away
+gently among the trees. (A nice position to find me in, if any
+of the scandal-mongers of the town had happened to be walking
+in that direction!) 'My dear Miss Milroy,' says I, 'why should
+Mr. Armadale think _you_ mixed up in it?' "
+
+"You ought to have told her at once that I thought nothing of
+the kind!" exclaimed Allan, indignantly. "Why did you leave her
+a moment in doubt about it?"
+
+"Because I am a lawyer, Mr. Armadale," rejoined Pedgift Senior,
+dryly. "Even in moments of sentiment, under convenient trees,
+with a pretty girl on my arm, I can't entirely divest myself of
+my professional caution. Don't look distressed, sir, pray! I set
+things right in due course of time. Before I left Miss Milroy,
+I told her, in the plainest terms, no such idea had ever entered
+your head."
+
+"Did she seem relieved?" asked Allan.
+
+"She was able to dispense with the use of my arm, sir," replied
+old Pedgift, as dryly as ever, "and to pledge me to inviolable
+secrecy on the subject of our interview. She was particularly
+desirous that _you_ should hear nothing about it. If you are
+at all anxious on your side to know why I am now betraying her
+confidence, I beg to inform you that her confidence related to
+no less a person than the lady who favored you with a call just
+now--Miss Gwilt."
+
+Allan, who had been once more restlessly pacing the room,
+stopped, and returned to his chair.
+
+"Is this serious?" he asked.
+
+"Most serious, sir," returned Pedgift Senior. "I am betraying
+Miss Neelie's secret, in Miss Neelie's own interest. Let us go
+back to that cautious question I put to her. She found some
+little difficulty in answering it, for the reply involved her in
+a narrative of the parting interview between her governess and
+herself. This is the substance of it. The two were alone when
+Miss Gwilt took leave of her pupil; and the words she used (as
+reported to me by Miss Neelie) were these. She said, 'Your mother
+has declined to allow me to take leave of her. Do you decline
+too?' Miss Neelie's answer was a remarkably sensible one for a
+girl of her age. 'We have not been good friends,' she said, 'and
+I believe we are equally glad to part with each other. But I have
+no wish to decline taking leave of you.' Saying that, she held
+out her hand. Miss Gwilt stood looking at her steadily, without
+taking it, and addressed her in these words: '_You are not Mrs.
+Armadale yet_.' Gently, sir! Keep your temper. It's not at all
+wonderful that a woman, conscious of having her own mercenary
+designs on you, should attribute similar designs to a young lady
+who happens to be your near neighbor. Let me go on. Miss Neelie,
+by her own confession (and quite naturally, I think), was
+excessively indignant. She owns to having answered, 'You
+shameless creature, how dare you say that to me!' Miss Gwilt's
+rejoinder was rather a remarkable one--the anger, on her side,
+appears to have been of the cool, still, venomous kind. 'Nobody
+ever yet injured me, Miss Milroy,' she said, 'without sooner or
+later bitterly repenting it. _You_ will bitterly repent it.' She
+stood looking at her pupil for a moment in dead silence, and then
+left the room. Miss Neelie appears to have felt the imputation
+fastened on her, in connection with you, far more sensitively
+than she felt the threat. She had previously known, as everybody
+had known in the house, that some unacknowledged proceedings of
+yours in London had led to Miss Gwilt's voluntary withdrawal from
+her situation. And she now inferred, from the language addressed
+to her, that she was actually believed by Miss Gwilt to have set
+those proceedings on foot, to advance herself, and to injure her
+governess, in your estimation. Gently, sir, gently! I haven't
+quite done yet. As soon as Miss Neelie had recovered herself, she
+went upstairs to speak to Mrs. Milroy. Miss Gwilt's abominable
+imputation had taken her by surprise; and she went to her mother
+first for enlightenment and advice. She got neither the one nor
+the other. Mrs. Milroy declared she was too ill to enter on the
+subject, and she has remained too ill to enter on it ever since.
+Miss Neelie applied next to her father. The major stopped her the
+moment your name passed her lips: he declared he would never hear
+you mentioned again by any member of his family. She has been
+left in the dark from that time to this, not knowing how she
+might have been misrepresented by Miss Gwilt, or what falsehoods
+you might have been led to believe of her. At my age and in my
+profession, I don't profess to have any extraordinary softness of
+heart. But I do think, Mr. Armadale, that Miss Neelie's position
+deserves our sympathy."
+
+"I'll do anything to help her!" cried Allan, impulsively.
+"You don't know, Mr. Pedgift, what reason I have--" He checked
+himself, and confusedly repeated his first words. "I'll do
+anything," he reiterated earnestly--"anything in the world
+to help her!"
+
+"Do you really mean that, Mr. Armadale? Excuse my asking; but
+you can very materially help Miss Neelie, if you choose!"
+
+"How?" asked Allan. "Only tell me how!"
+
+"By giving me your authority, sir, to protect her from Miss
+Gwilt."
+
+Having fired that shot pointblank at his client, the wise lawyer
+waited a little to let it take its effect before he said any
+more.
+
+Allan's face clouded, and he shifted uneasily from side to side
+of his chair.
+
+"Your son is hard enough to deal with, Mr. Pedgift," he said,
+"and you are harder than your son."
+
+"Thank you, sir," rejoined the ready Pedgift, "in my son's name
+and my own, for a handsome compliment to the firm. If you really
+wish to be of assistance to Miss Neelie," he went on, more
+seriously, "I have shown you the way. You can do nothing to quiet
+her anxiety which I have not done already. As soon as I had
+assured her that no misconception of her conduct existed in your
+mind, she went away satisfied. Her governess's parting threat
+doesn't seem to have dwelt on her memory. I can tell you, Mr.
+Armadale, it dwells on mine! You know my opinion of Miss Gwilt;
+and you know what Miss Gwilt herself has done this very evening
+to justify that opinion even in your eyes. May I ask, after all
+that has passed, whether you think she is the sort of woman who
+can be trusted to confine herself to empty threats?"
+
+The question was a formidable one to answer. Forced steadily
+back from the position which he had occupied at the outset
+of the interview, by the irresistible pressure of plain facts,
+Allan began for the first time to show symptoms of yielding on
+the subject of Miss Gwilt. "Is there no other way of protecting
+Miss Milroy but the way you have mentioned?" he asked, uneasily.
+
+"Do you think the major would listen to you, sir, if you spoke
+to him?" asked Pedgift Senior, sarcastically. "I'm rather afraid
+he wouldn't honor _me_ with his attention. Or perhaps you would
+prefer alarming Miss Neelie by telling her in plain words that we
+both think her in danger? Or, suppose you send me to Miss Gwilt,
+with instructions to inform her that she has done her pupil
+a cruel injustice? Women are so proverbially ready to listen
+to reason; and they are so universally disposed to alter their
+opinions of each other on application--especially when one woman
+thinks that another woman has destroyed her prospect of making a
+good marriage. Don't mind _me_, Mr. Armadale; I'm only a lawyer,
+and I can sit waterproof under another shower of Miss Gwilt's
+tears!"
+
+"Damn it, Mr. Pedgift, tell me in plain words what you want
+to do!" cried Allan, losing his temper at last.
+
+"In plain words, Mr. Armadale, I want to keep Miss Gwilt's
+proceedings privately under view, as long as she stops in this
+neighborhood. I answer for finding a person who will look after
+her delicately and discreetly. And I agree to discontinue even
+this harmless superintendence of her actions, if there isn't good
+reasons shown for continuing it, to your entire satisfaction,
+in a week's time. I make that moderate proposal, sir, in what
+I sincerely believe to be Miss Milroy's interest, and I wait
+your answer, Yes or No."
+
+"Can't I have time to consider?" asked Allan, driven to the last
+helpless expedient of taking refuge in delay.
+
+"Certainly, Mr. Armadale. But don't forget, while you are
+considering, that Miss Milroy is in the habit of walking out
+alone in your park, innocent of all apprehension of danger,
+and that Miss Gwilt is perfectly free to take any advantage
+of that circumstance that Miss Gwilt pleases."
+
+"Do as you like!" exclaimed Allan, in despair. "And, for God's
+sake, don't torment me any longer!"
+
+Popular prejudice may deny it, but the profession of the law
+is a practically Christian profession in one respect at least.
+Of all the large collection of ready answers lying in wait for
+mankind on a lawyer's lips, none is kept in better working order
+than "the soft answer which turneth away wrath." Pedgift Senior
+rose with the alacrity of youth in his legs, and the wise
+moderation of age on his tongue. "Many thanks, sir," he said,
+"for the attention you have bestowed on me. I congratulate you
+on your decision, and I wish you good-evening." This time his
+indicative snuff-box was not in his hand when he opened the door,
+and he actually disappeared without coming back for a second
+postscript.
+
+Allan's head sank on his breast when he was left alone. "If it
+was only the end of the week!" he thought, longingly. "If I only
+had Midwinter back again!"
+
+As that aspiration escaped the client's lips, the lawyer got
+gayly into his gig. "Hie away, old girl!" cried Pedgift Senior,
+patting the fast-trotting mare with the end of his whip. "I never
+keep a lady waiting--and I've got business to-night with one of
+your own sex!"
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE MARTYRDOM OF MISS GWILT.
+
+The outskirts of the little town of Thorpe Ambrose, on the side
+nearest to "the great house," have earned some local celebrity as
+exhibiting the prettiest suburb of the kind to be found in East
+Norfolk. Here the villas and gardens are for the most part built
+and laid out in excellent taste, the trees are in the prime
+of their growth, and the healthy common beyond the houses rises
+and falls in picturesque and delightful variety of broken ground.
+The rank, fashion, and beauty of the town make this place their
+evening promenade; and when a stranger goes out for a drive, if
+he leaves it to the coachman, the coachman starts by way of the
+common as a matter of course.
+
+On the opposite side, that is to say, on the side furthest
+from "the great house," the suburbs (in the year 1851) were
+universally regarded as a sore subject by all persons zealous
+for the reputation of the town.
+
+Here nature was uninviting, man was poor, and social progress,
+as exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably.
+The streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of
+the town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the
+barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders
+hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in
+the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on
+lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they
+were to let for building, raised sickly little crops meanwhile,
+in despair of finding a purchaser to deal with them. All the
+waste paper of the town seemed to float congenially to this
+neglected spot; and all the fretful children came and cried here,
+in charge of all the slatternly nurses who disgraced the place.
+If there was any intention in Thorpe Ambrose of sending a
+worn-out horse to the knacker's, that horse was sure to be found
+waiting his doom in a field on this side of the town. No growth
+flourished in these desert regions but the arid growth of
+rubbish; and no creatures rejoiced but the creatures of the
+night--the vermin here and there in the beds, and the cats
+everywhere on the tiles.
+
+The sun had set, and the summer twilight was darkening. The
+fretful children were crying in their cradles; the horse destined
+for the knacker dozed forlorn in the field of his imprisonment;
+the cats waited stealthily in corners for the coming night.
+But one living figure appeared in the lonely suburb--the figure
+of Mr. Bashwood. But one faint sound disturbed the dreadful
+silence--the sound of Mr. Bashwood's softly stepping feet.
+
+Moving slowly past the heaps of bricks rising at intervals along
+the road, coasting carefully round the old iron and the broken
+tiles scattered here and there in his path, Mr. Bashwood advanced
+from the direction of the country toward one of the unfinished
+streets of the suburb. His personal appearance had been
+apparently made the object of some special attention. His false
+teeth were brilliantly white; his wig was carefully brushed; his
+mourning garments, renewed throughout, gleamed with the hideous
+and slimy gloss of cheap black cloth. He moved with a nervous
+jauntiness, and looked about him with a vacant smile. Having
+reached the first of the skeleton cottages, his watery eyes
+settled steadily for the first time on the view of the street
+before him. The next instant he started; his breath quickened;
+he leaned, trembling and flushing, against the unfinished wall
+at his side. A lady, still at some distance, was advancing toward
+him down the length of the street. "She's coming!" he whispered,
+with a strange mixture of rapture and fear, of alternating color
+and paleness, showing itself in his haggard face. "I wish I was
+the ground she treads on! I wish I was the glove she's got on
+her hand!" He burst ecstatically into those extravagant words,
+with a concentrated intensity of delight in uttering them that
+actually shook his feeble figure from head to foot.
+
+Smoothly and gracefully the lady glided nearer and nearer,
+until she revealed to Mr. Bashwood's eyes, what Mr. Bashwood's
+instincts had recognized in the first instance--the face of Miss
+Gwilt.
+
+She was dressed with an exquisitely expressive economy of outlay.
+The plainest straw bonnet procurable, trimmed sparingly with
+the cheapest white ribbon, was on her head. Modest and tasteful
+poverty expressed itself in the speckless cleanliness and the
+modestly proportioned skirts of her light "print" gown, and in
+the scanty little mantilla of cheap black silk which she wore
+over it, edged with a simple frilling of the same material. The
+luster of her terrible red hair showed itself unshrinkingly in
+a plaited coronet above her forehead, and escaped in one vagrant
+love-lock, perfectly curled, that dropped over her left shoulder.
+Her gloves, fitting her like a second skin, were of the sober
+brown hue which is slowest to show signs of use. One hand lifted
+her dress daintily above the impurities of the road; the other
+held a little nosegay of the commonest garden flowers.
+Noiselessly and smoothly she came on, with a gentle and regular
+undulation of the print gown; with the love-lock softly lifted
+from moment to moment in the evening breeze; with her head
+a little drooped, and her eyes on the ground--in walk, and look,
+and manner, in every casual movement that escaped her, expressing
+that subtle mixture of the voluptuous and the modest which,
+of the many attractive extremes that meet in women, is in a man's
+eyes the most irresistible of all.
+
+"Mr. Bashwood!" she exclaimed, in loud, clear tones indicative
+of the utmost astonishment, "what a surprise to find you here!
+I thought none but the wretched inhabitants ever ventured near
+this side of the town. Hush!" she added quickly, in a whisper.
+"You heard right when you heard that Mr. Armadale was going to
+have me followed and watched. There's a man behind one of the
+houses. We must talk out loud of indifferent things, and look
+as if we had met by accident. Ask me what I am doing. Out loud!
+Directly! You shall never see me again, if you don't instantly
+leave off trembling and do what I tell you!"
+
+She spoke with a merciless tyranny of eye and voice--with a
+merciless use of her power over the feeble creature whom she
+addressed. Mr. Bashwood obeyed her in tones that quavered with
+agitation, and with eyes that devoured her beauty in a strange
+fascination of terror and delight.
+
+"I am trying to earn a little money by teaching music," she said,
+in the voice intended to reach the spy's ears. "If you are able
+to recommend me any pupils, Mr. Bashwood, your good word will
+oblige me. Have you been in the grounds to-day?" she went on,
+dropping her voice again in a whisper. "Has Mr. Armadale been
+near the cottage? Has Miss Milroy been out of the garden? No?
+Are you sure? Look out for them to-morrow, and next day, and next
+day. They are certain to meet and make it up again, and I must
+and will know of it. Hush! Ask me my terms for teaching music.
+What are you frightened about? It's me the man's after--not you.
+Louder than when you asked me what I was doing, just now; louder,
+or I won't trust you any more; I'll go to somebody else!"
+
+Once more Mr. Bashwood obeyed. "Don't be angry with me,"
+he murmured, faintly, when he had spoken the necessary words.
+"My heart beats so you'll kill me!"
+
+You poor old dear!" she whispered back, with a sudden change
+in her manner, with an easy satirical tenderness. "What business
+have you with a heart at your age? Be here to-morrow at the same
+time, and tell me what you have seen in the grounds. My terms are
+only five shillings a lesson," she went on, in her louder tone.
+"I'm sure that's not much, Mr. Bashwood; I give such long
+lessons, and I get all my pupils' music half-price." She suddenly
+dropped her voice again, and looked him brightly into instant
+subjection. "Don't let Mr. Armadale out of your sight to-morrow!
+If that girl manages to speak to him, and if I don't hear of it,
+I'll frighten you to death. If I _do_ hear of it, I'll kiss you!
+Hush! Wish me good-night, and go on to the town, and leave me to
+go the other way. I don't want you--I'm not afraid of the man
+behind the houses; I can deal with him by myself. Say goodnight,
+and I'll let you shake hands. Say it louder, and I'll give you
+one of my flowers, if you'll promise not to fall in love with
+it." She raised her voice again. "Goodnight, Mr. Bashwood! Don't
+forget my terms. Five shillings a lesson, and the lessons last an
+hour at a time, and I get all my pupils' music half-price, which
+is an immense advantage, isn't it?" She slipped a flower into his
+hand--frowned him into obedience, and smiled to reward him for
+obeying, at the same moment--lifted her dress again above the
+impurities of the road--and went on her way with a dainty and
+indolent deliberation, as a cat goes on her way when she has
+exhausted the enjoyment of frightening a mouse.
+
+Left alone, Mr. Bashwood turned to the low cottage wall near
+which he had been standing, and, resting himself on it wearily,
+looked at the flower in his hand.
+
+His past existence had disciplined him to bear disaster and
+insult, as few happier men could have borne them; but it had not
+prepared him to feel the master-passion of humanity, for the
+first time, at the dreary end of his life, in the hopeless decay
+of a manhood that had withered under the double blight of
+conjugal disappointment and parental sorrow. "Oh, if I was only
+young again!" murmured the poor wretch, resting his arms on the
+wall and touching the flower with his dry, fevered lips in a
+stealthy rapture of tenderness. "She might have liked me when I
+was twenty!" He suddenly started back into an erect position, and
+stared about him in vacant bewilderment and terror. "She told me
+to go home," he said, with a startled look. "Why am I stopping
+here?" He turned, and hurried on to the town--in such dread of
+her anger, if she looked round and saw him, that he never so much
+as ventured on a backward glance at the road by which she had
+retired, and never detected the spy dogging her footsteps, under
+cover of the empty houses and the brick-heaps by the roadside.
+
+Smoothly and gracefully, carefully preserving the speckless
+integrity of her dress, never hastening her pace, and never
+looking aside to the right hand or the left, Miss Gwilt pursued
+her way toward the open country. The suburban road branched off
+at its end in two directions. On the left, the path wound through
+a ragged little coppice to the grazing grounds of a neighboring
+farm; on the right, it led across a hillock of waste land to the
+high-road. Stopping a moment to consider, but not showing the spy
+that she suspected him by glancing behind her while there was a
+hiding-place within his reach, Miss Gwilt took the path across
+the hillock. "I'll catch him there," she said to herself, looking
+up quietly at the long straight line of the empty high-road.
+
+Once on the ground that she had chosen for her purpose, she met
+the difficulties of the position with perfect tact and
+self-possession. After walking some thirty yards along the road,
+she let her nosegay drop, half turned round in stooping to pick
+it up, saw the man stopping at the same moment behind her, and
+instantly went on again, quickening her pace little by little,
+until she was walking at the top of her speed. The spy fell into
+the snare laid for him. Seeing the night coming, and fearing that
+he might lose sight of her in the darkness, he rapidly lessened
+the distance between them. Miss Gwilt went on faster and faster
+till she plainly heard his footstep behind her, then stopped,
+turned, and met the man face to face the next moment.
+
+"My compliments to Mr. Armadale," she said, "and tell him I've
+caught you watching me."
+
+"I'm not watching you, miss," retorted the spy, thrown off his
+guard by the daring plainness of the language in which she had
+spoken to him.
+
+Miss Gwilt's eyes measured him contemptuously from head to foot.
+He was a weakly, undersized man. She was the taller, and (quite
+possibly) the stronger of the two.
+
+"Take your hat off, you blackguard, when you speak to a lady,"
+she said, and tossed his hat in an instant, across a ditch by
+which they were standing, into a pool on the other side.
+
+This time the spy was on his guard. He knew as well as Miss Gwilt
+knew the use which might be made of the precious minutes, if he
+turned his back on her and crossed the ditch to recover his hat.
+"It's well for you you're a woman," he said, standing scowling at
+her bareheaded in the fast-darkening light.
+
+Miss Gwilt glanced sidelong down the onward vista of the road,
+and saw, through the gathering obscurity, the solitary figure of
+a man rapidly advancing toward her. Some women would have noticed
+the approach of a stranger at that hour and in that lonely place
+with a certain anxiety. Miss Gwilt was too confident in her own
+powers of persuasion not to count on the man's assistance
+beforehand, whoever he might be, _because_ he was a man. She
+looked back at the spy with redoubled confidence in herself, and
+measured him contemptuously from head to foot for the second
+time.
+
+"I wonder whether I'm strong enough to throw you after your hat?"
+she said. "I'll take a turn and consider it."
+
+She sauntered on a few steps toward the figure advancing along
+the road. The spy followed her close. "Try it," he said,
+brutally. "You're a fine woman; you're welcome to put your arms
+round me if you like." As the words escaped him, he too saw the
+stranger for the first time. He drew back a step and waited. Miss
+Gwilt, on her side, advanced a step and waited, too.
+
+The stranger came on, with the lithe, light step of a practiced
+walker, swinging a stick in his hand and carrying a knapsack on
+his shoulders. A few paces nearer, and his face became visible.
+He was a dark man, his black hair was powdered with dust, and his
+black eyes were looking steadfastly forward along the road before
+him.
+
+Miss Gwilt advanced with the first signs of agitation she had
+shown yet. "Is it possible?" she said, softly. "Can it really be
+you?"
+
+It was Midwinter, on his way back to Thorpe Ambrose, after his
+fortnight among the Yorkshire moors.
+
+He stopped and looked at her, in breathless surprise. The image
+of the woman had been in his thoughts, at the moment when the
+woman herself spoke to him. "Miss Gwilt!" he exclaimed, and
+mechanically held out his hand.
+
+She took it, and pressed it gently. "I should have been glad to
+see you at any time," she said. "You don't know how glad I am to
+see you now. May I trouble you to speak to that man? He has been
+following me, and annoying me all the way from the town."
+
+Midwinter stepped past her without uttering a word. Faint as the
+light was, the spy saw what was coming in his face, and, turning
+instantly, leaped the ditch by the road-side. Before Midwinter
+could follow, Miss Gwilt's hand was on his shoulder.
+
+"No," she said, "you don't know who his employer is."
+
+Midwinter stopped and looked at her.
+
+"Strange things have happened since you left us," she went on.
+"I have been forced to give up my situation, and I am followed
+and watched by a paid spy. Don't ask who forced me out of my
+situation, and who pays the spy--at least not just yet. I can't
+make up my mind to tell you till I am a little more composed.
+Let the wretch go. Do you mind seeing me safe back to my lodging?
+It's in your way home. May I--may I ask for the support of your
+arm? My little stock of courage is quite exhausted." She took his
+arm and clung close to it. The woman who had tyrannized over Mr.
+Bashwood was gone, and the woman who had tossed the spy's hat
+into the pool was gone. A timid, shrinking, interesting creature
+filled the fair skin and trembled on the symmetrical limbs of
+Miss Gwilt. She put her handkerchief to her eyes. "They say
+necessity has no law," she murmured, faintly. "I am treating you
+like an old friend. God knows I want one!"
+
+They went on toward the town. She recovered herself with a
+touching fortitude; she put her handkerchief back in her pocket,
+and persisted in turning the conversation on Midwinter's walking
+tour. "It is bad enough to be a burden on you," she said, gently
+pressing on his arm as she spoke; "I mustn't distress you as
+well. Tell me where you have been, and what you have seen.
+Interest me in your journey; help me to escape from myself."
+
+They reached the modest little lodging in the miserable little
+suburb. Miss Gwilt sighed, and removed her glove before she took
+Midwinter's hand. "I have taken refuge here," she said, simply.
+"It is clean and quiet; I am too poor to want or expect more.
+We must say good-by, I suppose, unless"--she hesitated modestly,
+and satisfied herself by a quick look round that they were
+unobserved--"unless you would like to come in and rest a little?
+I feel so gratefully toward you, Mr. Midwinter! Is there any
+harm, do you think, in my offering you a cup of tea?"
+
+The magnetic influence of her touch was thrilling through him
+while she spoke. Change and absence, to which he had trusted
+to weaken her hold on him, had treacherously strengthened it
+instead. A man exceptionally sensitive, a man exceptionally pure
+in his past life, he stood hand in hand, in the tempting secrecy
+of the night, with the first woman who had exercised over him
+the all-absorbing influence of her sex. At his age, and in
+his position, who could have left her? The man (with a man's
+temperament) doesn't live who could have left her. Midwinter
+went in.
+
+A stupid, sleepy lad opened the house door. Even he, being a male
+creature, brightened under the influence of Miss Gwilt. "The urn,
+John," she said, kindly, "and another cup and saucer. I'll borrow
+your candle to light my candles upstairs, and then I won't
+trouble you any more to-night." John was wakeful and active in an
+instant. "No trouble, miss," he said, with awkward civility. Miss
+Gwilt took his candle with a smile. "How good people are to me!"
+she whispered, innocently, to Midwinter, as she led the way
+upstairs to the little drawing-room on the first floor.
+
+She lit the candles, and, turning quickly on her guest, stopped
+him at the first attempt he made to remove the knapsack from his
+shoulders. "No," she said, gently; "in the good old times there
+were occasions when the ladies unarmed their knights. I claim
+the privilege of unarming _my_ knight." Her dexterous fingers
+intercepted his at the straps and buckles, and she had the dusty
+knapsack off, before he could protest against her touching it.
+
+They sat down at the one little table in the room. It was very
+poorly furnished; but there was something of the dainty neatness
+of the woman who inhabited it in the arrangement of the few poor
+ornaments on the chimney-piece, in the one or two prettily bound
+volumes on the chiffonier, in the flowers on the table, and the
+modest little work-basket in the window. "Women are not all
+coquettes," she said, as she took off her bonnet and mantilla,
+and laid them carefully on a chair. "I won't go into my room,
+and look in my glass, and make myself smart; you shall take me
+just as I am." Her hands moved about among the tea-things with
+a smooth, noiseless activity.
+
+Her magnificent hair flashed crimson in the candle-light, as she
+turned her head hither and thither, searching with an easy grace
+for the things she wanted in the tray. Exercise had heightened
+the brilliancy of her complexion, and had quickened the rapid
+alternations of expression in her eyes--the delicious languor
+that stole over them when she was listening or thinking, the
+bright intelligence that flashed from them softly when she spoke.
+In the lightest word she said, in the least thing she did, there
+was something that gently solicited the heart of the man who sat
+with her. Perfectly modest in her manner, possessed to perfection
+of the graceful restraints and refinements of a lady, she had all
+the allurements that feast the eye, all the siren invitations
+that seduce the sense--a subtle suggestiveness in her silence,
+and a sexual sorcery in her smile.
+
+"Should I be wrong," she asked, suddenly suspending the
+conversation which she had thus far persistently restricted to
+the subject of Midwinter's walking tour, "if I guessed that you
+have something on your mind--something which neither my tea nor
+my talk can charm away? Are men as curious as women? Is the
+something--Me?"
+
+Midwinter struggled against the fascination of looking at her and
+listening to her. "I am very anxious to hear what has happened
+since I have been away," he said. "But I am still more anxious,
+Miss Gwilt, not to distress you by speaking of a painful
+subject."
+
+She looked at him gratefully. "It is for your sake that I have
+avoided the painful subject," she said, toying with her spoon
+among the dregs in her empty cup. "But you will hear about it
+from others, if you don't hear about it from me; and you ought to
+know why you found me in that strange situation, and why you see
+me here. Pray remember one thing, to begin with. I don't blame
+your friend, Mr. Armadale. I blame the people whose instrument
+he is."
+
+Midwinter started. "Is it possible," he began, "that Allan can be
+in any way answerable--?" He stopped, and looked at Miss Gwilt in
+silent astonishment.
+
+She gently laid her hand on his. "Don't be angry with me for only
+telling the truth," she said. "Your friend is answerable for
+everything that has happened to me--innocently answerable, Mr.
+Midwinter, I firmly believe. We are both victims. _He_ is the
+victim of his position as the richest single man in the
+neighborhood; and I am the victim of Miss Milroy's determination
+to marry him."
+
+"Miss Milroy?" repeated Midwinter, more and more astonished.
+"Why, Allan himself told me--" He stopped again.
+
+"He told you that I was the object of his admiration? Poor
+fellow, he admires everybody; his head is almost as empty as
+this," said Miss Gwilt, smiling indicatively into the hollow of
+her cup. She dropped the spoon, sighed, and became serious again.
+"I am guilty of the vanity of having let him admire me," she went
+on, penitently, "without the excuse of being able, on my side,
+to reciprocate even the passing interest that he felt in me.
+I don't undervalue his many admirable qualities, or the excellent
+position he can offer to his wife. But a woman's heart is not to
+be commanded--no, Mr. Midwinter, not even by the fortunate master
+of Thorpe Ambrose, who commands everything else."
+
+She looked him full in the face as she uttered that magnanimous
+sentiment. His eyes dropped before hers, and his dark color
+deepened. He had felt his heart leap in him at the declaration
+of her indifference to Allan. For the first time since they had
+known each other, his interests now stood self-revealed before
+him as openly adverse to the interests of his friend.
+
+"I have been guilty of the vanity of letting Mr. Armadale admire
+me, and I have suffered for it," resumed Miss Gwilt. "If there
+had been any confidence between my pupil and me, I might have
+easily satisfied her that she might become Mrs. Armadale--if she
+could--without having any rivalry to fear on my part. But Miss
+Milroy disliked and distrusted me from the first. She took her
+own jealous view, no doubt, of Mr. Armadale's thoughtless
+attentions to me. It was her interest to destroy the position,
+such as it was, that I held in his estimation; and it is quite
+likely her mother assisted her. Mrs. Milroy had her motive also
+(which I am really ashamed to mention) for wishing to drive me
+out of the house. Anyhow, the conspiracy has succeeded. I have
+been forced (with Mr. Armadale's help) to leave the major's
+service. Don't be angry, Mr. Midwinter! Don't form a hasty
+opinion! I dare say Miss Milroy has some good qualities, though
+I have not found them out; and I assure you again and again
+that I don't blame Mr. Armadale. I only blame the people whose
+instrument he is."
+
+"How is he their instrument? How can he be the instrument of any
+enemy of yours?" asked Midwinter. "Pray excuse my anxiety, Miss
+Gwilt: Allan's good name is as dear to me as my own!"
+
+Miss Gwilt's eyes turned full on him again, and Miss Gwilt's
+heart abandoned itself innocently to an outburst of enthusiasm.
+"How I admire your earnestness!" she said. "How I like your
+anxiety for your friend! Oh, if women could only form such
+friendships! Oh you happy, happy men!" Her voice faltered, and
+her convenient tea-cup absorbed her for the third time. "I would
+give all the little beauty I possess," she said, "if I could only
+find such a friend as Mr. Armadale has found in _you_. I never
+shall, Mr. Midwinter--I never shall. Let us go back to what we
+were talking about. I can only tell you how your friend is
+concerned in my misfortune by telling you something first about
+myself. I am like many other governesses; I am the victim of sad
+domestic circumstances. It may be weak of me, but I have a horror
+of alluding to them among strangers. My silence about my family
+and my friends exposes me to misinterpretation in my dependent
+position. Does it do me any harm, Mr. Midwinter, in your
+estimation?"
+
+"God forbid!" said Midwinter, fervently. "There is no man
+living," he went on, thinking of his own family story, "who has
+better reason to understand and respect your silence than I
+have."
+
+Miss Gwilt seized his hand impulsively. "Oh," she said, "I knew
+it, the first moment I saw you! I knew that you, too, had
+suffered; that you, too, had sorrows which you kept sacred!
+Strange, strange sympathy! I believe in mesmerism--do you?" She
+suddenly recollected herself, and shuddered. "Oh, what have I
+done? What must you think of me?" she exclaimed, as he yielded to
+the magnetic fascination of her touch, and, forgetting everything
+but the hand that lay warm in his own, bent over it and kissed
+it. "Spare me!" she said, faintly, as she felt the burning touch
+of his lips. "I am so friendless--I am so completely at your
+mercy!"
+
+He turned away from her, and hid his face in his hands; he was
+trembling, and she saw it. She looked at him while his face was
+hidden from her; she looked at him with a furtive interest and
+surprise. "How that man loves me!" she thought. "I wonder whether
+there was a time when I might have loved _him_?"
+
+The silence between them remained unbroken for some minutes.
+He had felt her appeal to his consideration as she had never
+expected or intended him to feel it--he shrank from looking at
+her or from speaking to her again.
+
+"Shall I go on with my story?" she asked. "Shall we forget and
+forgive on both sides?" A woman's inveterate indulgence for every
+expression of a man's admiration which keeps within the limits
+of personal respect curved her lips gently into a charming smile.
+She looked down meditatively at her dress, and brushed a crumb
+off her lap with a little flattering sigh. "I was telling you,"
+she went on, "of my reluctance to speak to strangers of my sad
+family story. It was in that way, as I afterward found out, that
+I laid myself open to Miss Milroy's malice and Miss Milroy's
+suspicion. Private inquiries about me were addressed to the lady
+who was my reference--at Miss Milroy's suggestion, in the first
+instance, I have no doubt. I am sorry to say, this is not the
+worst of it. By some underhand means, of which I am quite
+ignorant, Mr. Armadale's simplicity was imposed on; and, when
+application was made secretly to my reference in London, it was
+made, Mr. Midwinter, through your friend."
+
+Midwinter suddenly rose from his chair and looked at her. The
+fascination that she exercised over him, powerful as it was,
+became a suspended influence, now that the plain disclosure came
+plainly at last from her lips. He looked at her, and sat down
+again, like a man bewildered, without uttering a word.
+
+"Remember how weak he is," pleaded Miss Gwilt, gently, "and make
+allowances for him as I do. The trifling accident of his failing
+to find my reference at the address given him seems, I can't
+imagine why, to have excited Mr. Armadale's suspicion. At any
+rate, he remained in London. What he did there, it is impossible
+for me to say. I was quite in the dark; I knew nothing: I
+distrusted nobody; I was as happy in my little round of duties
+as I could be with a pupil whose affections I had failed to win,
+when, one morning, to my indescribable astonishment, Major Milroy
+showed me a correspondence between Mr. Armadale and himself.
+He spoke to me in his wife's presence. Poor creature, I make
+no complaint of her; such affliction as she suffers excuses
+everything. I wish I could give you some idea of the letters
+between Major Milroy and Mr. Armadale; but my head is only
+a woman's head, and I was so confused and distressed at the
+time! All I can tell you is that Mr. Armadale chose to preserve
+silence about his proceedings in London, under circumstances
+which made that silence a reflection on my character. The major
+was most kind; his confidence in me remained unshaken; but could
+his confidence protect me against his wife's prejudice and his
+daughter's ill-will? Oh, the hardness of women to each other!
+Oh, the humiliation if men only knew some of us as we really
+are! What could I do? I couldn't defend myself against mere
+imputations; and I couldn't remain in my situation after a slur
+had been cast on me. My pride (Heaven help me, I was brought up
+like a gentlewoman, and I have sensibilities that are not blunted
+even yet!)--my pride got the better of me, and I left my place.
+Don't let it distress you, Mr. Midwinter! There's a bright side
+to the picture. The ladies in the neighborhood have overwhelmed
+me with kindness; I have the prospect of getting pupils to teach;
+I am spared the mortification of going back to be a burden on my
+friends. The only complaint I have to make is, I think, a just
+one. Mr. Armadale has been back at Thorpe Ambrose for some days.
+I have entreated him, by letter, to grant me an interview; to
+tell me what dreadful suspicions he has of me, and to let me set
+myself right in his estimation. Would you believe it? He has
+declined to see me--under the influence of others, not of his own
+free will, I am sure! Cruel, isn't it? But he has even used me
+more cruelly still; he persists in suspecting me; it is he who is
+having me watched. Oh, Mr. Midwinter, don't hate me for telling
+you what you _must_ know! The man you found persecuting me and
+frightening me tonight was only earning his money, after all, as
+Mr. Armadale's spy."
+
+Once more Midwinter started to his feet; and this time the
+thoughts that were in him found their way into words.
+
+"I can't believe it; I won't believe it!" he exclaimed,
+indignantly. "If the man told you that, the man lied. I beg your
+pardon, Miss Gwilt; I beg your pardon from the bottom of my
+heart. Don't, pray don't think I doubt _you_; I only say there is
+some dreadful mistake. I am not sure that I understand as I ought
+all that you have told me. But this last infamous meanness of
+which you think Allan guilty, I _do_ understand. I swear to you,
+he is incapable of it! Some scoundrel has been taking advantage
+of him; some scoundrel has been using his name. I'll prove it
+to you, if you will only give me time. Let me go and clear it up
+at once. I can't rest; I can't bear to think of it; I can't even
+enjoy the pleasure of being here. Oh," he burst out desperately,
+"I'm sure you feel for me, after what you have said--I feel so
+for _you_!"
+
+He stopped in confusion. Miss Gwilt's eyes were looking at him
+again, and Miss Gwilt's hand had found its way once more into his
+own.
+
+"You are the most generous of living men," she said, softly. "I
+will believe what you tell me to believe. Go," she added, in a
+whisper, suddenly releasing his hand, and turning away from him.
+"For both our sakes, go!"
+
+His heart beat fast; he looked at her as she dropped into a chair
+and put her handkerchief to her eyes. For one moment he
+hesitated; the next, he snatched up his knapsack from the floor,
+and left her precipitately, without a backward look or a parting
+word.
+
+She rose when the door closed on him. A change came over her
+the instant she was alone. The color faded out of her cheeks;
+the beauty died out of her eyes; her face hardened horribly with
+a silent despair. "It's even baser work than I bargained for,"
+she said, "to deceive _him_." After pacing to and fro in the room
+for some minutes, she stopped wearily before the glass over
+the fire-place. "You strange creature!" she murmured, leaning
+her elbows on the mantelpiece, and languidly addressing the
+reflection of herself in the glass. "Have you got any conscience
+left? And has that man roused it?"
+
+The reflection of her face changed slowly. The color returned
+to her cheeks, the delicious languor began to suffuse her eyes
+again. Her lips parted gently, and her quickening breath began
+to dim the surface of the glass. She drew back from it, after a
+moment's absorption in her own thoughts, with a start of terror.
+"What am I doing?" she asked herself, in a sudden panic of
+astonishment. "Am I mad enough to be thinking of him in _that_
+way?"
+
+She burst into a mocking laugh, and opened her desk on the table
+recklessly with a bang. "It's high time I had some talk with
+Mother Jezebel," she said, and sat down to write to Mrs.
+Oldershaw.
+
+"I have met with Mr. Midwinter," she began, "under very lucky
+circumstances; and I have made the most of my opportunity.
+He has just left me for his friend Armadale; and one of two good
+things will happen to-morrow. If they don't quarrel, the doors
+of Thorpe Ambrose will be opened to me again at Mr. Midwinter's
+intercession. If they do quarrel, I shall be the unhappy cause
+of it, and I shall find my way in for myself, on the purely
+Christian errand of reconciling them."
+
+She hesitated at the next sentence, wrote the first few words
+of it, scratched them out again, and petulantly tore the letter
+into fragments, and threw the pen to the other end of the room.
+Turning quickly on her chair, she looked at the seat which
+Midwinter had occupied, her foot restlessly tapping the floor,
+and her handkerchief thrust like a gag between her clinched
+teeth. "Young as you are," she thought, with her mind reviving
+the image of him in the empty chair, "there has been something
+out of the common in _your_ life; and I must and will know it!"
+
+The house clock struck the hour, and roused her. She sighed, and,
+walking back to the glass, wearily loosened the fastenings of her
+dress; wearily removed the studs from the chemisette beneath it,
+and put them on the chimney-piece. She looked indolently at the
+reflected beauties of her neck and bosom, as she unplaited her
+hair and threw it back in one great mass over her shoulders.
+"Fancy," she thought, "if he saw me now!" She turned back to the
+table, and sighed again as she extinguished one of the candles
+and took the other in her hand. "Midwinter?" she said, as she
+passed through the folding-doors of the room to her bed-chamber.
+"I don't believe in his name, to begin with!"
+
+
+The night had advanced by more than an hour before Midwinter was
+back again at the great house.
+
+Twice, well as the homeward way was known to him, he had strayed
+out of the right road. The events of the evening--the interview
+with Miss Gwilt herself, after his fortnight's solitary thinking
+of her; the extraordinary change that had taken place in her
+position since he had seen her last; and the startling assertion
+of Allan's connection with it--had all conspired to throw his
+mind into a state of ungovernable confusion. The darkness of the
+cloudy night added to his bewilderment. Even the familiar gates
+of Thorpe Ambrose seemed strange to him. When he tried to think
+of it, it was a mystery to him how he had reached the place.
+
+The front of the house was dark, and closed for the night.
+Midwinter went round to the back. The sound of men's voices,
+as he advanced, caught his ear. They were soon distinguishable
+as the voices of the first and second footman, and the subject
+of conversation between them was their master.
+
+"I'll bet you an even half-crown he's driven out of the
+neighborhood before another week is over his head," said
+the first footman.
+
+"Done!" said the second. "He isn't as easy driven as you think."
+
+"Isn't he!" retorted the other. "He'll be mobbed if he stops
+here! I tell you again, he's not satisfied with the mess he's got
+into already. I know it for certain, he's having the governess
+watched."
+
+At those words, Midwinter mechanically checked himself before
+he turned the corner of the house. His first doubt of the result
+of his meditated appeal to Allan ran through him like a sudden
+chill. The influence exercised by the voice of public scandal
+is a force which acts in opposition to the ordinary law of
+mechanics. It is strongest, not by concentration, but by
+distribution. To the primary sound we may shut our ears; but the
+reverberation of it in echoes is irresistible. On his way back,
+Midwinter's one desire had been to find Allan up, and to speak
+to him immediately. His one hope now was to gain time to contend
+with the new doubts and to silence the new misgivings; his one
+present anxiety was to hear that Allan had gone to bed. He turned
+the corner of the house, and presented himself before the men
+smoking their pipes in the back garden. As soon as their
+astonishment allowed them to speak, they offered to rouse their
+master. Allan had given his friend up for that night, and had
+gone to bed about half an hour since.
+
+"It was my master's' particular order, sir," said the
+head-footman, "that he was to be told of it if you came back."
+
+"It is _my_ particular request," returned Midwinter, "that you
+won't disturb him."
+
+The men looked at each other wonderingly, as he took his candle
+and left them.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SHE COMES BETWEEN THEM.
+
+Appointed hours for the various domestic events of the day were
+things unknown at Thorpe Ambrose. Irregular in all his habits,
+Allan accommodated himself to no stated times (with the solitary
+exception of dinner-time) at any hour of the day or night. He
+retired to rest early or late, and he rose early or late, exactly
+as he felt inclined. The servants were forbidden to call him;
+and Mrs. Gripper was accustomed to improvise the breakfast as she
+best might, from the time when the kitchen fire was first lighted
+to the time when the clock stood on the stroke of noon.
+
+Toward nine o'clock on the morning after his return Midwinter
+knocked at Allan's door, and on entering the room found it empty.
+After inquiry among the servants, it appeared that Allan had
+risen that morning before the man who usually attended on him was
+up, and that his hot water had been brought to the door by one of
+the house-maids, who was then still in ignorance of Midwinter's
+return. Nobody had chanced to see the master, either on the
+stairs or in the hall; nobody had heard him ring the bell for
+breakfast, as usual. In brief, nobody knew anything about him,
+except what was obviously clear to all--that he was not in the
+house.
+
+Midwinter went out under the great portico. He stood at the head
+of the flight of steps considering in which direction he should
+set forth to look for his friend. Allan's unexpected absence
+added one more to the disquieting influences which still
+perplexed his mind. He was in the mood in which trifles irritate
+a man, and fancies are all-powerful to exalt or depress his
+spirits.
+
+The sky was cloudy; and the wind blew in puffs from the south;
+there was every prospect, to weather-wise eyes, of coming rain.
+While Midwinter was still hesitating, one of the grooms passed
+him on the drive below. The man proved, on being questioned, to
+be better informed about his master's movements than the servants
+indoors. He had seen Allan pass the stables more than an hour
+since, going out by the back way into the park with a nosegay
+in his hand.
+
+A nosegay in his hand? The nosegay hung incomprehensibly on
+Midwinter's mind as he walked round, on the chance of meeting
+Allan, to the back of the house. "What does the nosegay mean?"
+he asked himself, with an unintelligible sense of irritation,
+and a petulant kick at a stone that stood in his way.
+
+It meant that Allan had been following his impulses as usual.
+The one pleasant impression left on his mind after his interview
+with Pedgift Senior was the impression made by the lawyer's
+account of his conversation with Neelie in the park. The anxiety
+that he should not misjudge her, which the major's daughter had
+so earnestly expressed, placed her before Allan's eyes in an
+irresistibly attractive character--the character of the one
+person among all his neighbors who had some respect still left
+for his good opinion. Acutely sensible of his social isolation,
+now that there was no Midwinter to keep him company in the empty
+house, hungering and thirsting in his solitude for a kind word
+and a friendly look, he began to think more and more regretfully
+and more and more longingly of the bright young face so
+pleasantly associated with his first happiest days at Thorpe
+Ambrose. To be conscious of such a feeling as this was, with a
+character like Allan's, to act on it headlong, lead him where it
+might. He had gone out on the previous morning to look for Neelie
+with a peace-offering of flowers, but with no very distinct idea
+of what he should say to her if they met; and failing to find her
+on the scene of her customary walks, he had characteristically
+persisted the next morning in making a second attempt with
+another peace-offering on a larger scale. Still ignorant of
+his friend's return, he was now at some distance from the house,
+searching the park in a direction which he had not tried yet.
+
+After walking out a few hundred yards beyond the stables, and
+failing to discover any signs of Allan, Midwinter retraced his
+steps, and waited for his friend's return, pacing slowly to and
+fro on the little strip of garden ground at the back of the
+house.
+
+From time to time, as he passed it, he looked in absently at
+the room which had formerly been Mrs. Armadale's, which was now
+(through his interposition) habitually occupied by her son--the
+room with the Statuette on the bracket, and the French windows
+opening to the ground, which had once recalled to him the Second
+Vision of the Dream. The Shadow of the Man, which Allan had seen
+standing opposite to him at the long window; the view over a lawn
+and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass;
+the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the
+statue in fragments on the floor--these objects and events of the
+visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all
+superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as
+they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room
+again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think of the
+boat drifting away in the moonlight, and the night's imprisonment
+on the Wrecked Ship!
+
+Toward ten o'clock the well-remembered sound of Allan's voice
+became suddenly audible in the direction of the stables. In a
+moment more he was visible from the garden. His second morning's
+search for Neelie had ended to all appearance in a second defeat
+of his object. The nosegay was still in his hand; and he was
+resignedly making a present of it to one of the coachman's
+children.
+
+Midwinter impulsively took a step forward toward the stables, and
+abruptly checked his further progress.
+
+Conscious that his position toward his friend was altered already
+in relation to Miss Gwilt, the first sight of Allan filled his
+mind with a sudden distrust of the governess's influence over
+him, which was almost a distrust of himself. He knew that he had
+set forth from the moors on his return to Thorpe Ambrose with the
+resolution of acknowledging the passion that had mastered him,
+and of insisting, if necessary, on a second and a longer absence
+in the interests of the sacrifice which he was bent on making to
+the happiness of his friend. What had become of that resolution
+now? The discovery of Miss Gwilt's altered position, and the
+declaration that she had voluntarily made of her indifference to
+Allan, had scattered it to the winds. The first words with which
+he would have met his friend, if nothing had happened to him
+on the homeward way, were words already dismissed from his lips.
+He drew back as he felt it, and struggled, with an instinctive
+loyalty toward Allan, to free himself at the last moment from
+the influence of Miss Gwilt.
+
+Having disposed of his useless nosegay, Allan passed on into the
+garden, and the instant he entered it recognized Midwinter with
+a loud cry of surprise and delight.
+
+"Am I awake or dreaming?" he exclaimed, seizing his friend
+excitably by both hands." You dear old Midwinter, have you sprung
+up out of the ground, or have you dropped from the clouds?"
+
+It was not till Midwinter had explained the mystery of his
+unexpected appearance in every particular that Allan could be
+prevailed on to say a word about himself. When he did speak,
+he shook his head ruefully, and subdued the hearty loudness of
+his voice, with a preliminary look round to see if the servants
+were within hearing.
+
+"I've learned to be cautious since you went away and left me,"
+said Allan. "My dear fellow, you haven't the least notion what
+things have happened, and what an awful scrape I'm in at this
+very moment!"
+
+"You are mistaken, Allan. I have heard more of what has happened
+than you suppose."
+
+"What! the dreadful mess I'm in with Miss Gwilt? the row with
+the major? the infernal scandal-mongering in the neighborhood?
+You don't mean to say--?"
+
+"Yes," interposed Midwinter, quietly; "I have heard of it all."
+
+"Good heavens! how? Did you stop at Thorpe Ambrose on your way
+back? Have you been in the coffee-room at the hotel? Have you met
+Pedgift? Have you dropped into the Reading Rooms, and seen what
+they call the freedom of the press in the town newspaper?"
+
+Midwinter paused before he answered, and looked up at the sky.
+The clouds had been gathering unnoticed over their heads, and
+the first rain-drops were beginning to fall.
+
+"Come in here," said Allan. "We'll go up to breakfast this way."
+He led Midwinter through the open French window into his own
+sitting-room. The wind blew toward that side of the house, and
+the rain followed them in. Midwinter, who was last, turned and
+closed the window.
+
+Allan was too eager for the answer which the weather had
+interrupted to wait for it till they reached the breakfast-room.
+He stopped close at the window, and added two more to his string
+of questions.
+
+"How can you possibly have heard about me and Miss Gwilt?" he
+asked. "Who told you?"
+
+"Miss Gwilt herself," replied Midwinter, gravely.
+
+Allan's manner changed the moment the governess's name passed
+his friend's lips.
+
+"I wish you had heard my story first," he said. "Where did you
+meet with Miss Gwilt?"
+
+There was a momentary pause. They both stood still at the window,
+absorbed in the interest of the moment. They both forgot that
+their contemplated place of shelter from the rain had been the
+breakfast-room upstairs.
+
+"Before I answer your question," said Midwinter, a little
+constrainedly, "I want to ask you something, Allan, on my side.
+Is it really true that you are in some way concerned in Miss
+Gwilt's leaving Major Milroy's service?"
+
+There was another pause. The disturbance which had begun to
+appear in Allan's manner palpably increased.
+
+"It's rather a long story," he began. "I have been taken in,
+Midwinter. I've been imposed on by a person, who--I can't help
+saying it--who cheated me into promising what I oughtn't to have
+promised, and doing what I had better not have done. It isn't
+breaking my promise to tell you. I can trust in your discretion,
+can't I? You will never say a word, will you?"
+
+"Stop!" said Midwinter. "Don't trust me with any secrets which
+are not your own. If you have given a promise, don't trifle with
+it, even in speaking to such an intimate friend as I am." He laid
+his hand gently and kindly on Allan's shoulder. "I can't help
+seeing that I have made you a little uncomfortable," he went on.
+"I can't help seeing that my question is not so easy a one to
+answer as I had hoped and supposed. Shall we wait a little? Shall
+we go upstairs and breakfast first?"
+
+Allan was far too earnestly bent on presenting his conduct to
+his friend in the right aspect to heed Midwinter's suggestion.
+He spoke eagerly on the instant, without moving from the window.
+
+"My dear fellow, it's a perfectly easy question to answer.
+Only"--he hesitated--"only it requires what I'm a bad hand at:
+it requires an explanation."
+
+"Do you mean," asked Midwinter, more seriously, but not less
+gently than before, "that you must first justify yourself, and
+then answer my question?"
+
+"That's it!" said Allan, with an air of relief. "You're hit
+the right nail on the head, just as usual."
+
+Midwinter's face darkened for the first time. "I am sorry to hear
+it," he said, his voice sinking low, and his eyes dropping to the
+ground as he spoke.
+
+The rain was beginning to fall thickly. It swept across the
+garden, straight on the closed windows, and pattered heavily
+against the glass.
+
+"Sorry!" repeated Allan. "My dear fellow, you haven't heard the
+particulars yet. Wait till I explain the thing first."
+
+"You are a bad hand at explanations," said Midwinter, repeating
+Allan's own words. "Don't place yourself at a disadvantage. Don't
+explain it."
+
+Allan looked at him, in silent perplexity and surprise.
+
+"You are my friend--my best and dearest friend," Midwinter went
+on. "I can't bear to let you justify yourself to me as if I was
+your judge, or as if I doubted you." He looked up again at Allan
+frankly and kindly as he said those words. "Besides," he resumed,
+"I think, if I look into my memory, I can anticipate your
+explanation. We had a moment's talk, before I went away, about
+some very delicate questions which you proposed putting to Major
+Milroy. I remember I warned you; I remember I had my misgivings.
+Should I be guessing right if I guessed that those questions have
+been in some way the means of leading you into a false position?
+If it is true that you have been concerned in Miss Gwilt's
+leaving her situation, is it also true--is it only doing you
+justice to believe--that any mischief for which you are
+responsible has been mischief innocently done?"
+
+"Yes," said Allan, speaking, for the first time, a little
+constrainedly on his side. "It is only doing me justice to say
+that." He stopped and began drawing lines absently with his
+finger on the blurred surface of the window-pane. "You're not
+like other people, Midwinter," he resumed, suddenly, with an
+effort; "and I should have liked you to have heard the
+particulars all the same."
+
+"I will hear them if you desire it," returned Midwinter. "But I
+am satisfied, without another word, that you have not willingly
+been the means of depriving Miss Gwilt of her situation. If that
+is understood between you and me, I think we need say no more.
+Besides, I have another question to ask, of much greater
+importance--a question that has been forced on me by what I saw
+with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, last night."
+
+He stopped, recoiling in spite of himself. "Shall we go upstairs
+first?" he asked, abruptly, leading the way to the door, and
+trying to gain time.
+
+It was useless. Once again, the room which they were both free
+to leave, the room which one of them had twice tried to leave
+already, held them as if they were prisoners.
+
+Without answering, without even appearing to have heard
+Midwinter's proposal to go upstairs, Allan followed him
+mechanically as far as the opposite side of the window. There
+he stopped. "Midwinter!" he burst out, in a sudden panic of
+astonishment and alarm, "there seems to be something strange
+between us! You're not like yourself. What is it?"
+
+With his hand on the lock of the door, Midwinter turned, and
+looked back into the room. The moment had come. His haunting fear
+of doing his friend an injustice had shown itself in a restraint
+of word, look, and action which had been marked enough to force
+its way to Allan's notice. The one course left now, in the
+dearest interests of the friendship that united them, was to
+speak at once, and to speak boldly.
+
+"There's something strange between us," reiterated Allan. "For
+God's sake, what is it?"
+
+Midwinter took his hand from the door, and came down again to
+the window, fronting Allan. He occupied the place, of necessity,
+which Allan had just left. It was the side of the window on which
+the Statuette stood. The little figure, placed on its projecting
+bracket, was, close behind him on his right hand. No signs of
+change appeared in the stormy sky. The rain still swept slanting
+across the garden, and pattered heavily against the glass.
+
+"Give me your hand, Allan."
+
+Allan gave it, and Midwinter held it firmly while he spoke.
+
+"There is something strange between us," he said. "There is
+something to be set right which touches you nearly; and it has
+not been set right yet. You asked me just now where I met with
+Miss Gwilt. I met with her on my way back here, upon the
+high-road on the further side of the town. She entreated me to
+protect her from a man who was following and frightening her. I
+saw the scoundrel with my own eyes, and I should have laid hands
+on him, if Miss Gwilt herself had not stopped me. She gave a very
+strange reason for stopping me. She said I didn't know who his
+employer was."
+
+Allan's ruddy color suddenly deepened; he looked aside quickly
+through the window at the pouring rain. At the same moment their
+hands fell apart, and there was a pause of silence on either
+side. Midwinter was the first to speak again.
+
+"Later in the evening," he went on, "Miss Gwilt explained
+herself. She told me two things. She declared that the man whom
+I had seen following her was a hired spy. I was surprised, but
+I could not dispute it. She told me next, Allan--what I believe
+with my whole heart and soul to be a falsehood which has been
+imposed on her as the truth--she told me that the spy was in your
+employment!"
+
+Allan turned instantly from the window, and looked Midwinter full
+in the face again. "I must explain myself this time," he said,
+resolutely.
+
+The ashy paleness peculiar to him in moments of strong emotion
+began to show itself on Midwinter's cheeks.
+
+"More explanations!" he said, and drew back a step, with his eyes
+fixed in a sudden terror of inquiry on Allan's face.
+
+"You don't know what I know, Midwinter. You don't know that what
+I have done has been done with a good reason. And what is more,
+I have not trusted to myself--I have had good advice."
+
+"Did you hear what I said just now?" asked Midwinter,
+incredulously. "You can't--surely, you can't have been attending
+to me?"
+
+"I haven't missed a word," rejoined Allan. "I tell you again, you
+don't know what I know of Miss Gwilt. She has threatened Miss
+Milroy. Miss Milroy is in danger while her governess stops in
+this neighborhood."
+
+Midwinter dismissed the major's daughter from the conversation
+with a contemptuous gesture of his hand.
+
+"I don't want to hear about Miss, Milroy," he said. "Don't mix up
+Miss Milroy-- Good God, Allan, am I to understand that the spy
+set to watch Miss Gwilt was doing his vile work with your
+approval?"
+
+"Once for all, my dear fellow, will you, or will you not, let me
+explain?"
+
+"Explain!" cried Midwinter, his eyes aflame, and his hot Creole
+blood rushing crimson into his face. "Explain the employment of a
+spy? What! after having driven Miss Gwilt out of her situation by
+meddling with her private affairs, you meddle again by the vilest
+of all means--the means of a paid spy? You set a watch on the
+woman whom you yourself told me you loved, only a fortnight
+since--the woman you were thinking of as your wife! I don't
+believe it; I won't believe it. Is my head failing me? Is it
+Allan Armadale I am speaking to? Is it Allan Armadale's face
+looking at me? Stop! you are acting under some mistaken scruple.
+Some low fellow has crept into your confidence, and has done this
+in your name without telling you first."
+
+Allan controlled himself with admirable patience and admirable
+consideration for the temper of his friend. "If you persist in
+refusing to hear me," he said, "I must wait as well as I can till
+my turn comes."
+
+"Tell me you are a stranger to the employment of that man, and
+I will hear you willingly."
+
+"Suppose there should be a necessity, that you know nothing
+about, for employing him?"
+
+"I acknowledge no necessity for the cowardly persecution of
+a helpless woman."
+
+A momentary flush of irritation--momentary, and no more--passed
+over Allan's face. "You mightn't think her quite so helpless,"
+he said, "if you knew the truth."
+
+"Are _you_ the man to tell me the truth?" retorted the other.
+"You who have refused to hear her in her own defense! You who
+have closed the doors of this house against her!"
+
+Allan still controlled himself, but the effort began at last
+to be visible.
+
+"I know your temper is a hot one," he said. "But for all that,
+your violence quite takes me by surprise. I can't account for it,
+unless"--he hesitated a moment, and then finished the sentence
+in his usual frank, outspoken way--"unless you are sweet yourself
+on Miss Gwilt."
+
+Those last words heaped fuel on the fire. They stripped the truth
+instantly of all concealments and disguises, and laid it bare
+to view. Allan's instinct had guessed, and the guiding influence
+stood revealed of Midwinter's interest in Miss Gwilt.
+
+"What right have you to say that?" he asked, with raised voice
+and threatening eyes.
+
+"I told _you_," said Allan, simply, "when I thought I was sweet
+on her myself. Come! come! it's a little hard, I think, even if
+you are in love with her, to believe everything she tells you,
+and not to let me say a word. Is _that_ the way you decide
+between us?"
+
+"Yes, it is!" cried the other, infuriated by Allan's second
+allusion to Miss Gwilt. "When I am asked to choose between
+the employer of a spy and the victim of a spy, I side with
+the victim!"
+
+"Don't try me too hard, Midwinter, I have a temper to lose
+as well as you."
+
+He stopped, struggling with himself. The torture of passion
+in Midwinter's face, from which a less simple and less generous
+nature might have recoiled in horror, touched Allan suddenly with
+an artless distress, which, at that moment, was little less than
+sublime. He advanced, with his eyes moistening, and his hand held
+out. "You asked me for my hand just now," he said, "and I gave it
+you. Will you remember old times, and give me yours, before it's
+too late?"
+
+"No!" retorted Midwinter, furiously. "I may meet Miss Gwilt
+again, and I may want my hand free to deal with your spy!"
+
+He had drawn back along the wall as Allan advanced, until the
+bracket which supported the Statuette was before instead of
+behind him. In the madness of his passion he saw nothing but
+Allan's face confronting him. In the madness of his passion,
+he stretched out his right hand as he answered, and shook it
+threateningly in the air. It struck the forgotten projection of
+the bracket--and the next instant the Statuette lay in fragments
+on the floor.
+
+The rain drove slanting over flower-bed and lawn, and pattered
+heavily against the glass; and the two Armadales stood by the
+window, as the two Shadows had stood in the Second Vision of
+the Dream, with the wreck of the image between them.
+
+Allan stooped over the fragments of the little figure, and lifted
+them one by one from the floor.
+
+"Leave me," he said, without looking up, "or we shall both repent
+it."
+
+Without a word, Midwinter moved back slowly. He stood for the
+second time with his hand on the door, and looked his last at the
+room. The horror of the night on the Wreck had got him once more,
+and the flame of his passion was quenched in an instant.
+
+"The Dream!" he whispered, under his breath. "The Dream again!"
+
+The door was tried from the outside, and a servant appeared with
+a trivial message about the breakfast.
+
+Midwinter looked at the man with a blank, dreadful helplessness
+in his face. "Show me the way out," he said. "The place is dark,
+and the room turns round with me."
+
+The servant took him by the arm, and silently led him out.
+
+As the door closed on them, Allan picked up the last fragment
+of the broken figure. He sat down alone at the table, and hid
+his face in his hands. The self-control which he had bravely
+preserved under exasperation renewed again and again now failed
+him at last in the friendless solitude of his room, and, in the
+first bitterness of feeling that Midwinter had turned against him
+like the rest, he burst into tears.
+
+The moments followed each other, the slow time wore on. Little
+by little the signs of a new elemental disturbance began to show
+themselves in the summer storm. The shadow of a swiftly deepening
+darkness swept over the sky. The pattering of the rain lessened
+with the lessening wind. There was a momentary hush of stillness.
+Then on a sudden the rain poured down again like a cataract, and
+the low roll of thunder came up solemnly on the dying air.
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+SHE KNOWS THE TRUTH.
+
+1. _From Mr. Bashwood to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Thorpe Ambrose, July 20th, 1851.
+
+"DEAR MADAM--I received yesterday, by private messenger, your
+obliging note, in which you direct me to communicate with you
+through the post only, as long as there is reason to believe that
+any visitors who may come to you are likely to be observed. May
+I be permitted to say that I look forward with respectful anxiety
+to the time when I shall again enjoy the only real happiness
+I have ever experienced--the happiness of personally addressing
+you?
+
+"In compliance with your desire that I should not allow this day
+(the Sunday) to pass without privately noticing what went on at
+the great house, I took the keys, and went this morning to the
+steward's office. I accounted for my appearance to the servants
+by informing them that I had work to do which it was important
+to complete in the shortest possible time. The same excuse would
+have done for Mr. Armadale if we had met, but no such meeting
+happened.
+
+"Although I was at Thorpe Ambrose in what I thought good time, I
+was too late to see or hear anything myself of a serious quarrel
+which appeared to have taken place, just before I arrived,
+between Mr. Armadale and Mr. Midwinter.
+
+"All the little information I can give you in this matter
+is derived from one of the servants. The man told me that he
+heard the voices of the two gentlemen loud in Mr. Armadale's
+sitting-room. He went in to announce breakfast shortly afterward,
+and found Mr. Midwinter in such a dreadful state of agitation
+that he had to be helped out of the room. The servant tried to
+take him upstairs to lie down and compose himself. He declined,
+saying he would wait a little first in one of the lower rooms,
+and begging that he might be left alone. The man had hardly got
+downstairs again when he heard the front door opened and closed.
+He ran back, and found that Mr. Midwinter was gone. The rain
+was pouring at the time, and thunder and lightning came soon
+afterward. Dreadful weather certainly to go out in. The servant
+thinks Mr. Midwinter's mind was unsettled. I sincerely hope not.
+Mr. Midwinter is one of the few people I have met with in the
+course of my life who have treated me kindly.
+
+"Hearing that Mr. Armadale still remained in the sitting-room,
+I went into the steward's office (which, as you may remember, is
+on the same side of the house), and left the door ajar, and set
+the window open, waiting and listening for anything that might
+happen. Dear madam, there was a time when I might have thought
+such a position in the house of my employer not a very becoming
+one. Let me hasten to assure you that this is far from being my
+feeling now. I glory in any position which makes me serviceable
+to you.
+
+"The state of the weather seemed hopelessly adverse to that
+renewal of intercourse between Mr. Armadale and Miss Milroy which
+you so confidently anticipate, and of which you are so anxious
+to be made aware. Strangely enough, however, it is actually
+in consequence of the state of the weather that I am now in
+a position to give you the very information you require.
+Mr. Armadale and Miss Milroy met about an hour since. The
+circumstances were as follows:
+
+"Just at the beginning of the thunder-storm, I saw one of the
+grooms run across from the stables, and heard him tap at his
+master's window. Mr. Armadale opened the window and asked what
+was the matter. The groom said he came with a message from the
+coachman's wife. She had seen from her room over the stables
+(which looks on to the park) Miss Milroy quite alone, standing
+for shelter under one of the trees. As that part of the park was
+at some distance from the major's cottage, she had thought that
+her master might wish to send and ask the young lady into the
+house--especially as she had placed herself, with a thunder-storm
+coming on, in what might turn out to be a very dangerous
+position.
+
+"The moment Mr. Armadale understood the man's message, he called
+for the water-proof things and the umbrellas, and ran out
+himself, instead of leaving it to the servants. In a little time
+he and the groom came back with Miss Milroy between them, as well
+protected as could be from the rain.
+
+"I ascertained from one of the women-servants, who had taken the
+young lady into a bedroom, and had supplied her with such dry
+things as she wanted, that Miss Milroy had been afterward shown
+into the drawing-room, and that Mr. Armadale was there with her.
+The only way of following your instructions, and finding out what
+passed between them, was to go round the house in the pelting
+rain, and get into the conservatory (which opens into the
+drawing-room) by the outer door. I hesitate at nothing, dear
+madam, in your service; I would cheerfully get wet every day,
+to please you. Besides, though I may at first sight be thought
+rather an elderly man, a wetting is of no very serious
+consequence to me. I assure you I am not so old as I look, and
+I am of a stronger constitution than appears.
+
+"It was impossible for me to get near enough in the conservatory
+to see what went on in the drawing-room, without the risk of
+being discovered. But most of the conversation reached me, except
+when they dropped their voices. This is the substance of what
+I heard:
+
+"I gathered that Miss Milroy had been prevailed on, against her
+will, to take refuge from the thunder-storm in Mr. Armadale's
+house. She said so, at least, and she gave two reasons. The first
+was that her father had forbidden all intercourse between the
+cottage and the great house. Mr. Armadale met this objection by
+declaring that her father had issued his orders under a total
+misconception of the truth, and by entreating her not to treat
+him as cruelly as the major had treated him. He entered, I
+suspect, into some explanations at this point, but as he dropped
+his voice I am unable to say what they were. His language, when I
+did hear it, was confused and ungrammatical. It seemed, however,
+to be quite intelligible enough to persuade Miss Milroy that
+her father had been acting under a mistaken impression of the
+circumstances. At least, I infer this; for, when I next heard
+the conversation, the young lady was driven back to her second
+objection to being in the house--which was, that Mr. Armadale had
+behaved very badly to her, and that he richly deserved that she
+should never speak to him again.
+
+"In this latter case, Mr. Armadale attempted no defense of any
+kind. He agreed with her that he had behaved badly; he agreed
+with her that he richly deserved she should never speak to him
+again. At the same time he implored her to remember that he
+had suffered his punishment already. He was disgraced in the
+neighborhood; and his dearest friend, his one intimate friend
+in the world, had that very morning turned against him like
+the rest. Far or near, there was not a living creature whom he
+was fond of to comfort him, or to say a friendly word to him.
+He was lonely and miserable, and his heart ached for a little
+kindness--and that was his only excuse for asking Miss Milroy
+to forget and forgive the past.
+
+"I must leave you, I fear, to judge for yourself of the effect
+of this on the young lady; for, though I tried hard, I failed
+to catch what she said. I am almost certain I heard her crying,
+and Mr. Armadale entreating her not to break his heart. They
+whispered a great deal, which aggravated me. I was afterward
+alarmed by Mr. Armadale coming out into the conservatory to pick
+some flowers. He did not come as far, fortunately, as the place
+where I was hidden; and he went in again into the drawing-room,
+and there was more talking (I suspect at close quarters), which
+to my great regret I again failed to catch. Pray forgive me for
+having so little to tell you. I can only add that, when the storm
+cleared off, Miss Milroy went away with the flowers in her hand,
+and with Mr. Armadale escorting her from the house. My own humble
+opinion is that he had a powerful friend at court, all through
+the interview, in the young lady's own liking for him.
+
+"This is all I can say at present, with the exception of one
+other thing I heard, which I blush to mention. But your word is
+law, and you have ordered me to have no concealments from you.
+
+"Their talk turned once, dear madam, on yourself. I think I heard
+the word 'creature' from Miss Milroy; and I am certain that
+Mr. Armadale, while acknowledging that he had once admired you,
+added that circumstances had since satisfied him of 'his folly.'
+I quote his own expression; it made me quite tremble with
+indignation. If I may be permitted to say so, the man who admires
+Miss Gwilt lives in Paradise. Respect, if nothing else, ought to
+have closed Mr. Armadale's lips. He is my employer, I know; but
+after his calling it an act of folly to admire you (though I _am_
+his deputy-steward), I utterly despise him.
+
+"Trusting that I may have been so happy as to give you
+satisfaction thus far, and earnestly desirous to deserve the
+honor of your continued confidence in me, I remain, dear madam,
+
+"Your grateful and devoted servant,
+
+"FELIX BASHWOOD."
+
+2. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Diana Street, Monday, July 21st.
+
+"MY DEAR LYDIA--I trouble you with a few lines. They are written
+under a sense of the duty which I owe to myself, in our present
+position toward each other.
+
+"I am not at all satisfied with the tone of your last two
+letters; and I am still less pleased at your leaving me this
+morning without any letter at all--and this when we had arranged,
+in the doubtful state of our prospects, that I was to hear from
+you every day. I can only interpret your conduct in one way. I
+can only infer that matters at Thorpe Ambrose, having been all
+mismanaged, are all going wrong.
+
+"It is not my present object to reproach you, for why should I
+waste time, language, and paper? I merely wish to recall to your
+memory certain considerations which you appear to be disposed
+to overlook. Shall I put them in the plainest English? Yes; for,
+with all my faults, I am frankness personified.
+
+"In the first place, then, I have an interest in your becoming
+Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose as well as you. Secondly, I have
+provided you (to say nothing of good advice) with all the money
+needed to accomplish our object. Thirdly, I hold your notes of
+hand, at short dates, for every farthing so advanced. Fourthly
+and lastly, though I am indulgent to a fault in the capacity of
+a friend--in the capacity of a woman of business, my dear, I am
+not to be trifled with. That is all, Lydia, at least for the
+present.
+
+"Pray don't suppose I write in anger; I am only sorry and
+disheartened. My state of mind resembles David's. If I had
+the wings of a dove, I would flee away and be at rest.
+
+"Affectionately yours, MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+3. _From Mr. Bashwood to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Thorpe Ambrose, July 21st.
+
+"DEAR MADAM--You will probably receive these lines a few hours
+after my yesterday's communication reaches you. I posted my first
+letter last night, and I shall post this before noon to-day.
+
+"My present object in writing is to give you some more news from
+this house. I have the inexpressible happiness of announcing that
+Mr. Armadale's disgraceful intrusion on your privacy is at an
+end. The watch set on your actions is to be withdrawn this day.
+I write, dear madam, with the tears in my eyes--tears of joy,
+caused by feelings which I ventured to express in my previous
+letter (see first paragraph toward the end). Pardon me this
+personal reference. I can speak to you (I don't know why) so much
+more readily with my pen than with my tongue.
+
+"Let me try to compose myself, and proceed with my narrative.
+
+"I had just arrived at the steward's office this morning, when
+Mr. Pedgift the elder followed me to the great house to see
+Mr. Armadale by special appointment. It is needless to say that
+I at once suspended any little business there was to do, feeling
+that your interests might possibly be concerned. It is also
+most gratifying to add that this time circumstances favored me.
+I was able to stand under the open window and to hear the whole
+interview.
+
+"Mr. Armadale explained himself at once in the plainest terms.
+He gave orders that the person who had been hired to watch you
+should be instantly dismissed. On being asked to explain this
+sudden change of purpose, he did not conceal that it was owing
+to the effect produced on his mind by what had passed between
+Mr. Midwinter and himself on the previous day. Mr. Midwinter's
+language, cruelly unjust as it was, had nevertheless convinced
+him that no necessity whatever could excuse any proceeding so
+essentially base in itself as the employment of a spy, and on
+that conviction he was now determined to act.
+
+"But for your own positive directions to me to conceal nothing
+that passes here in which your name is concerned, I should really
+be ashamed to report what Mr. Pedgift said on his side. He has
+behaved kindly to me, I know. But if he was my own brother, I
+could never forgive him the tone in which he spoke of you, and
+the obstinacy with which he tried to make Mr. Armadale change
+his mind.
+
+"He began by attacking Mr. Midwinter. He declared that Mr.
+Midwinter's opinion was the very worst opinion that could be
+taken; for it was quite plain that you, dear madam, had twisted
+him round your finger. Producing no effect by this coarse
+suggestion (which nobody who knows you could for a moment
+believe), Mr. Pedgift next referred to Miss Milroy, and asked Mr.
+Armadale if he had given up all idea of protecting her. What this
+meant I cannot imagine. I can only report it for your private
+consideration. Mr. Armadale briefly answered that he had his own
+plan for protecting Miss Milroy, and that the circumstances were
+altered in that quarter, or words to a similar effect. Still Mr.
+Pedgift persisted. He went on (I blush to mention) from bad to
+worse. He tried to persuade Mr. Armadale next to bring an action
+at law against one or other of the persons who had been most
+strongly condemning his conduct in the neighborhood, for the
+purpose--I really hardly know how to write it--of getting you
+into the witness-box. And worse yet: when Mr. Armadale still said
+No, Mr. Pedgift, after having, as I suspected by the sound of his
+voice, been on the point of leaving the room, artfully came back,
+and proposed sending for a detective officer from London, simply
+to look at you. 'The whole of this mystery about Miss Gwilt's
+true character,' he said, 'may turn on a question of identity.
+It won't cost much to have a man down from London; and it's
+worth trying whether her face is or is not known at headquarters
+to the police.' I again and again assure you, dearest lady, that
+I only repeat those abominable words from a sense of duty toward
+yourself. I shook--I declare I shook from head to foot when
+I heard them.
+
+"To resume, for there is more to tell you.
+
+"Mr. Armadale (to his credit--I don't deny it, though I don't
+like him) still said No. He appeared to be getting irritated
+under Mr. Pedgift's persistence, and he spoke in a somewhat hasty
+way. 'You persuaded me on the last occasion when we talked about
+this,' he said, 'to do something that I have been since heartily
+ashamed of. You won't succeed in persuading me, Mr. Pedgift,
+a second time.' Those were his words. Mr. Pedgift took him up
+short; Mr. Pedgift seemed to be nettled on his side.
+
+"'If that is the light in which you see my advice, sir,' he
+said, 'the less you have of it for the future, the better. Your
+character and position are publicly involved in this matter
+between yourself and Miss Gwilt; and you persist, at a most
+critical moment, in taking a course of your own, which I believe
+will end badly. After what I have already said and done in this
+very serious case, I can't consent to go on with it with both
+my hands tied, and I can't drop it with credit to myself while
+I remain publicly known as your solicitor. You leave me no
+alternative, sir, but to resign the honor of acting as your legal
+adviser.' 'I am sorry to hear it,' says Mr. Armadale, 'but I have
+suffered enough already through interfering with Miss Gwilt.
+I can't and won't stir any further in the matter.' '_You_ may not
+stir any further in it, sir,' says Mr. Pedgift, 'and _I_ shall
+not stir any further in it, for it has ceased to be a question
+of professional interest to me. But mark my words, Mr. Armadale,
+you are not at the end of this business yet. Some other person's
+curiosity may go on from the point where you (and I) have
+stopped; and some other person's hand may let the broad daylight
+in yet on Miss Gwilt.'
+
+"I report their language, dear madam, almost word for word,
+I believe, as I heard it. It produced an indescribable impression
+on me; it filled me, I hardly know why, with quite a panic of
+alarm. I don't at all understand it, and I understand still less
+what happened immediately afterward.
+
+"Mr. Pedgift's voice, when he said those last words, sounded
+dreadfully close to me. He must have been speaking at the open
+window, and he must, I fear, have seen me under it. I had time,
+before he left the house, to get out quietly from among the
+laurels, but not to get back to the office. Accordingly I walked
+away along the drive toward the lodge, as if I was going on some
+errand connected with the steward's business.
+
+"Before long, Mr. Pedgift overtook me in his gig, and stopped.
+'So _you_ feel some curiosity about Miss Gwilt, do you?' he said.
+'Gratify your curiosity by all means; _I_ don't object to it.'
+I felt naturally nervous, but I managed to ask him what he meant.
+He didn't answer; he only looked down at me from the gig in
+a very odd manner, and laughed. 'I have known stranger things
+happen even than _that_!' he said to himself suddenly, and drove
+off.
+
+"I have ventured to trouble you with this last incident, though
+it may seem of no importance in your eyes, in the hope that
+your superior ability may be able to explain it. My own poor
+faculties, I confess, are quite unable to penetrate Mr. Pedgift's
+meaning. All I know is that he has no right to accuse me of any
+such impertinent feeling as curiosity in relation to a lady whom
+I ardently esteem and admire. I dare not put it in warmer words.
+
+"I have only to add that I am in a position to be of continued
+service to you here if you wish it. Mr. Armadale has just been
+into the office, and has told me briefly that, in Mr. Midwinter's
+continued absence, I am still to act as steward's deputy till
+further notice.
+
+"Believe me, dear madam, anxiously and devotedly yours, FELIX
+BASHWOOD."
+
+4. _From Allan Armadale to the Reverend Decimus Brock_.
+
+Thorpe Ambrose, Tuesday.
+
+"MY DEAR MR. BROCK--I am in sad trouble. Midwinter has quarreled
+with me and left me; and my lawyer has quarreled with me and left
+me; and (except dear little Miss Milroy, who has forgiven me) all
+the neighbors have turned their backs on me. There is a good deal
+about 'me' in this, but I can't help it. I am very miserable
+alone in my own house. Do pray come and see me! You are the only
+old friend I have left, and I do long so to tell you about it.
+
+"N. B.--On my word of honor as a gentleman, I am not to blame.
+Yours affectionately,
+
+"ALLAN ARMADALE.
+
+"P. S.--I would come to you (for this place is grown quite
+hateful to me), but I have a reason for not going too far away
+from Miss Milroy just at present."
+
+5. _From Robert Stapleton to Allan Armadale, Esq._
+
+"Bascombe Rectory, Thursday Morning.
+
+"RESPECTED SIR--I see a letter in your writing, on the table
+along with the others, which I am sorry to say my master is not
+well enough to open. He is down with a sort of low fever. The
+doctor says it has been brought on with worry and anxiety which
+master was not strong enough to bear. This seems likely; for
+I was with him when he went to London last month, and what with
+his own business, and the business of looking after that person
+who afterward gave us the slip, he was worried and anxious all
+the time; and for the matter of that, so was I.
+
+"My master was talking of you a day or two since. He seemed
+unwilling that you should know of his illness, unless he got
+worse. But I think you ought to know of it. At the same time he
+is not worse; perhaps a trifle better. The doctor says he must be
+kept very quiet, and not agitated on any account. So be pleased
+to take no notice of this--I mean in the way of coming to the
+rectory. I have the doctor's orders to say it is not needful,
+and it would only upset my master in the state he is in now.
+
+"I will write again if you wish it. Please accept of my duty,
+and believe me to remain, sir, your humble servant,
+
+"ROBERT STAPLETON.
+
+"P. S.--The yacht has been rigged and repainted, waiting your
+orders. She looks beautiful."
+
+6. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Diana Street, July 24th.
+
+"MISS GWILT--The post hour has passed for three mornings
+following, and has brought me no answer to my letter. Are you
+purposely bent on insulting me? or have you left Thorpe Ambrose?
+In either case, I won't put up with your conduct any longer.
+The law shall bring you to book, if I can't.
+
+"Your first note of hand (for thirty pounds) falls due on Tuesday
+next, the 29th. If you had behaved with common consideration
+toward me, I would have let you renew it with pleasure. As things
+are, I shall have the note presented; and, if it is not paid,
+I shall instruct my man of business to take the usual course.
+
+"Yours, MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+7. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
+
+"5 Paradise Place, Thorpe Ambrose, July 25th.
+
+MRS. OLDERSHAW--The time of your man of business being, no doubt,
+of some value, I write a line to assist him when he takes the
+usual course. He will find me waiting to be arrested in the
+first-floor apartments, at the above address. In my present
+situation, and with my present thoughts, the best service you
+can possibly render me is to lock me up.
+
+"L. G."
+
+8. _From Mrs. Oldershaw to Miss Gwilt_.
+
+"Diana Street, July 26th.
+
+"MY DARLING LYDIA--The longer I live in this wicked world
+the more plainly I see that women's own tempers are the worst
+enemies women have to contend with. What a truly regretful
+style of correspondence we have fallen into! What a sad want
+of self-restraint, my dear, on your side and on mine!
+
+"Let me, as the oldest in years, be the first to make the needful
+excuses, the first to blush for my own want of self-control. Your
+cruel neglect, Lydia, stung me into writing as I did. I am so
+sensitive to ill treatment, when it is inflicted on me by a
+person whom I love and admire; and, though turned sixty, I am
+still (unfortunately for myself) so young at heart. Accept my
+apologies for having made use of my pen, when I ought to have
+been content to take refuge in my pocket-handkerchief. Forgive
+your attached Maria for being still young at heart!
+
+"But oh, my dear--though I own I threatened you--how hard of you
+to take me at my word! How cruel of you, if your debt had been
+ten times what it is, to suppose me capable (whatever I might
+say) of the odious inhumanity of arresting my bosom friend!
+Heavens! have I deserved to be taken at my word in this
+unmercifully exact way, after the years of tender intimacy
+that have united us? But I don't complain; I only mourn over
+the frailty of our common human nature. Let us expect as little
+of each other as possible, my dear; we are both women, and we
+can't help it. I declare, when I reflect on the origin of our
+unfortunate sex--when I remember that we were all originally made
+of no better material than the rib of a man (and that rib of so
+little importance to its possessor that he never appears to have
+missed it afterward), I am quite astonished at our virtues, and
+not in the least surprised at our faults.
+
+"I am wandering a little; I am losing myself in serious thought,
+like that sweet character in Shakespeare who was 'fancy free.'
+One last word, dearest, to say that my longing for an answer
+to this proceeds entirely from my wish to hear from you again
+in your old friendly tone, and is quite unconnected with any
+curiosity to know what you are doing at Thorpe Ambrose--except
+such curiosity as you yourself might approve. Need I add that
+I beg you as a favor to _me_ to renew, on the customary terms?
+I refer to the little bill due on Tuesday next, and I venture
+to suggest that day six weeks.
+
+"Yours, with a truly motherly feeling,
+
+"MARIA OLDERSHAW."
+
+9. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
+
+"Paradise Place, July 27th.
+
+"I have just got your last letter. The brazen impudence of it
+has roused me. I am to be treated like a child, am I?--to be
+threatened first, and then, if threatening fails, to be coaxed
+afterward? You _shall_ coax me; you shall know, my motherly
+friend, the sort of child you have to deal with.
+
+"I had a reason, Mrs. Oldershaw, for the silence which has so
+seriously offended you. I was afraid--actually afraid--to let
+you into the secret of my thoughts. No such fear troubles me
+now. My only anxiety this morning is to make you my best
+acknowledgments for the manner in which you have written to me.
+After carefully considering it, I think the worst turn I can
+possibly do you is to tell you what you are burning to know. So
+here I am at my desk, bent on telling it. If you don't bitterly
+repent, when you are at the end of this letter, not having held
+to your first resolution, and locked me up out of harm's way
+while you had the chance, my name is not Lydia Gwilt.
+
+"Where did my last letter end? I don't remember, and don't care.
+Make it out as you can--I am not going back any further than this
+day week. That is to say, Sunday last.
+
+"There was a thunder-storm in the morning. It began to clear off
+toward noon. I didn't go out: I waited to see Midwinter or to
+hear from him. (Are you surprised at my not writing 'Mr.' before
+his name? We have got so familiar, my dear, that 'Mr.' would be
+quite out of place.) He had left me the evening before, under
+very interesting circumstances. I had told him that his friend
+Armadale was persecuting me by means of a hired spy. He had
+declined to believe it, and had gone straight to Thorpe Ambrose
+to clear the thing up. I let him kiss my hand before he went.
+He promised to come back the next day (the Sunday). I felt I had
+secured my influence over him; and I believed he would keep his
+word.
+
+"Well, the thunder passed away as I told you. The weather cleared
+up; the people walked out in their best clothes; the dinners came
+in from the bakers; I sat dreaming at my wretched little hired
+piano, nicely dressed and looking my best--and still no Midwinter
+appeared. It was late in the afternoon, and I was beginning to
+feel offended, when a letter was brought to me. It had been left
+by a strange messenger who went away again immediately. I looked
+at the letter. Midwinter at last--in writing, instead of in
+person. I began to feel more offended than ever; for, as I told
+you, I thought I had used my influence over him to better
+purpose.
+
+"The letter, when I read it, set my mind off in a new direction.
+It surprised, it puzzled, it interested me. I thought, and
+thought, and thought of him, all the rest of the day.
+
+"He began by asking my pardon for having doubted what I told him.
+Mr. Armadale's own lips had confirmed me. They had quarreled (as
+I had anticipated they would); and he, and the man who had once
+been his dearest friend on earth, had parted forever. So far,
+I was not surprised. I was amused by his telling me in his
+extravagant way that he and his friend were parted forever; and
+I rather wondered what he would think when I carried out my plan,
+and found my way into the great house on pretense of reconciling
+them.
+
+"But the second part of the letter set me thinking. Here it is,
+in his own words.
+
+
+"'It is only by struggling against myself (and no language
+can say how hard the struggle has been) that I have decided
+on writing, instead of speaking to you. A merciless necessity
+claims my future life. I must leave Thorpe Ambrose, I must leave
+England, without hesitating, without stopping to look back.
+There are reasons--terrible reasons, which I have madly trifled
+with--for my never letting Mr. Armadale set eyes on me, or hear
+of me again, after what has happened between us. I must go, never
+more to live under the same roof, never more to breathe the same
+air with that man. I must hide myself from him under an assumed
+name; I must put the mountains and the seas between us. I have
+been warned as no human creature was ever warned before.
+I believe--I dare not tell you why--I believe that, if the
+fascination you have for me draws me back to you, fatal
+consequences will come of it to the man whose life has been so
+strangely mingled with your life and mine--the man who was once
+_your_ admirer and _my_ friend. And yet, feeling this, seeing it
+in my mind as plainly as I see the sky above my head, there is
+a weakness in me that still shrinks from the one imperative
+sacrifice of never seeing you again. I am fighting with it as
+a man fights with the strength of his despair. I have been near
+enough, not an hour since, to see the house where you live, and
+have forced myself away again out of sight of it. Can I force
+myself away further still, now that my letter is written--now,
+when the useless confession escapes me, and I own to loving you
+with the first love I have ever known, with the last love I shall
+ever feel? Let the coming time answer the question; I dare not
+write of it or think of it more.'
+
+
+"Those were the last words. In that strange way the letter ended.
+
+"I felt a perfect fever of curiosity to know what he meant. His
+loving me, of course, was easy enough to understand. But what did
+he mean by saying he had been warned? Why was he never to live
+under the same roof, never to breathe the same air again, with
+young Armadale? What sort of quarrel could it be which obliged
+one man to hide himself from another under an assumed name, and
+to put the mountains and the seas between them? Above all, if
+he came back, and let me fascinate him, why should it be fatal
+to the hateful lout who possesses the noble fortune and lives
+in the great house?
+
+"I never longed in my life as I longed to see him again and put
+these questions to him. I got quite superstitious about it as
+the day drew on. They gave me a sweet-bread and a cherry pudding
+for dinner. I actually tried if he would come back by the stones
+in the plate! He will, he won't, he will, he won't--and so on.
+It ended in 'He won't.' I rang the bell, and had the things taken
+away. I contradicted Destiny quite fiercely. I said, 'He will!'
+and I waited at home for him.
+
+"You don't know what a pleasure it is to me to give you all
+these little particulars. Count up--my bosom friend, my second
+mother--count up the money you have advanced on the chance of
+my becoming Mrs. Armadale, and then think of my feeling this
+breathless interest in another man. Oh, Mrs. Oldershaw, how
+intensely I enjoy the luxury of irritating you!
+
+"The day got on toward evening. I rang again, and sent down to
+borrow a railway time-table. What trains were there to take him
+away on Sunday? The national respect for the Sabbath stood my
+friend. There was only one train, which had started hours before
+he wrote to me. I went and consulted my glass. It paid me the
+compliment of contradicting the divination by cherry-stones.
+My glass said: 'Get behind the window-curtain; he won't pass
+the long lonely evening without coming back again to look at
+the house.' I got behind the window-curtain, and waited with
+his letter in my hand.
+
+"The dismal Sunday light faded, and the dismal Sunday quietness
+in the street grew quieter still. The dusk came, and I heard
+a step coming with it in the silence. My heart gave a little
+jump--only think of my having any heart left! I said to myself:
+'Midwinter!' And Midwinter it was.
+
+"When he came in sight he was walking slowly, stopping
+and hesitating at every two or three steps. My ugly little
+drawing-room window seemed to be beckoning him on in spite
+of himself. After waiting till I saw him come to a standstill,
+a little aside from the house, but still within view of my
+irresistible window, I put on my things and slipped out by the
+back way into the garden. The landlord and his family were at
+supper, and nobody saw me. I opened the door in the wall, and
+got round by the lane into the street. At that awkward moment
+I suddenly remembered, what I had forgotten before, the spy set
+to watch me, who was, no doubt, waiting somewhere in sight of
+the house.
+
+"It was necessary to get time to think, and it was (in my state
+of mind) impossible to let Midwinter go without speaking to him.
+In great difficulties you generally decide at once, if you decide
+at all. I decided to make an appointment with him for the next
+evening, and to consider in the interval how to manage the
+interview so that it might escape observation. This, as I felt
+at the time, was leaving my own curiosity free to torment me
+for four-and-twenty mortal hours; but what other choice had I?
+It was as good as giving up being mistress of Thorpe Ambrose
+altogether, to come to a private understanding with Midwinter
+in the sight and possibly in the hearing of Armadale's spy.
+
+"Finding an old letter of yours in my pocket, I drew back into
+the lane, and wrote on the blank leaf, with the little pencil
+that hangs at my watch-chain: 'I must and will speak to you.
+It is impossible tonight, but be in the street tomorrow at this
+time, and leave me afterward forever, if you like. When you have
+read this, overtake me, and say as you pass, without stopping or
+looking round, "Yes, I promise."'
+
+"I folded up the paper, and came on him suddenly from behind.
+As he started and turned round, I put the note into his hand,
+pressed his hand, and passed on. Before I had taken ten steps I
+heard him behind me. I can't say he didn't look round--I saw his
+big black eyes, bright and glittering in the dusk, devour me from
+head to foot in a moment; but otherwise he did what I told him.
+'I can deny you nothing,' he whispered; 'I promise.' He went on
+and left me. I couldn't help thinking at the time how that brute
+and booby Armadale would have spoiled everything in the same
+situation.
+
+"I tried hard all night to think of a way of making our interview
+of the next evening safe from discovery, and tried in vain. Even
+as early as this, I began to feel as if Midwinter's letter had,
+in some unaccountable manner, stupefied me.
+
+"Monday morning made matters worse. News came from my faithful
+ally, Mr. Bashwood, that Miss Milroy and Armadale had met and
+become friends again. You may fancy the state I was in! An hour
+or two later there came more news from Mr. Bashwood--good news
+this time. The mischievous idiot at Thorpe Ambrose had shown
+sense enough at last to be ashamed of himself. He had decided
+on withdrawing the spy that very day, and he and his lawyer had
+quarreled in consequence.
+
+"So here was the obstacle which I was too stupid to remove for
+myself obligingly removed for me! No more need to fret about the
+coming interview with Midwinter; and plenty of time to consider
+my next proceedings, now that Miss Milroy and her precious swain
+had come together again. Would you believe it, the letter, or
+the man himself (I don't know which), had taken such a hold on me
+that, though I tried and tried, I could think of nothing else;
+and this when I had every reason to fear that Miss Milroy was in
+a fair way of changing her name to Armadale, and when I knew that
+my heavy debt of obligation to her was not paid yet? Was there
+ever such perversity? I can't account for it; can you?
+
+"The dusk of the evening came at last. I looked out of the
+window--and there he was!
+
+"I joined him at once; the people of the house, as before, being
+too much absorbed in their eating and drinking to notice anything
+else. 'We mustn't be seen together here,' I whispered. 'I must go
+on first, and you must follow me.'
+
+"He said nothing in the way of reply. What was going on in
+his mind I can't pretend to guess; but, after coming to his
+appointment, he actually hung back as if he was half inclined
+to go away again.
+
+"'You look as if you were afraid of me,' I said.
+
+"'I _am_ afraid of you,' he answered--'of you, and of myself.'
+
+"It was not encouraging; it was not complimentary. But I was
+in such a frenzy of curiosity by this time that, if he had been
+ruder still, I should have taken no notice of it. I led the way
+a few steps toward the new buildings, and stopped and looked
+round after him.
+
+"'Must I ask it of you as a favor,' I said, 'after your giving
+me your promise, and after such a letter as you have written
+to me?'
+
+"Something suddenly changed him; he was at my side in an instant.
+'I beg your pardon, Miss Gwilt; lead the way where you please.'
+He dropped back a little after that answer, and I heard him say
+to himself, 'What _is_ to be _will_ be. What have I to do with
+it, and what has she?'
+
+"It could hardly have been the words, for I didn't understand
+them--it must have been the tone he spoke in, I suppose, that
+made me feel a momentary tremor. I was half inclined, without
+the ghost of a reason for it, to wish him good-night, and go
+in again. Not much like me, you will say. Not much, indeed!
+It didn't last a moment. Your darling Lydia soon came to her
+senses again.
+
+"I led the way toward the unfinished cottages, and the country
+beyond. It would have been much more to my taste to have had him
+into the house, and have talked to him in the light of the
+candles. But I had risked it once already; and in this
+scandal-mongering place, and in my critical position, I was
+afraid to risk it again. The garden was not to be thought of
+either, for the landlord smokes his pipe there after his supper.
+There was no alternative but to take him away from the town.
+
+"From time to time, I looked back as I went on. There he was,
+always at the same distance, dim and ghost-like in the dusk,
+silently following me.
+
+"I must leave off for a little while. The church bells have
+broken out, and the jangling of them drives me mad. In these
+days, when we have all got watches and clocks, why are bells
+wanted to remind us when the service begins? We don't require
+to be rung into the theater. How excessively discreditable to
+the clergy to be obliged to ring us into the church!
+
+----------
+
+"They have rung the congregation in at last; and I can take up
+my pen, and go on again.
+
+"I was a little in doubt where to lead him to. The high-road was
+on one side of me; but, empty as it looked, somebody might be
+passing when we least expected it. The other way was through
+the coppice. I led him through the coppice.
+
+"At the outskirts of the trees, on the other side, there was
+a dip in the ground with some felled timber lying on it, and a
+little pool beyond, still and white and shining in the twilight.
+The long grazing-grounds rose over its further shore, with the
+mist thickening on them, and a dim black line far away of cattle
+in slow procession going home. There wasn't a living creature
+near; there wasn't a sound to be heard. I sat down on one
+of the felled trees and looked back for him. 'Come,' I said,
+softly--'come and sit by me here.'
+
+"Why am I so particular about all this? I hardly know. The place
+made an unaccountably vivid impression on me, and I can't help
+writing about it. If I end badly--suppose we say on the
+scaffold?--I believe the last thing I shall see, before the
+hangman pulls the drop, will be the little shining pool, and the
+long, misty grazing-grounds, and the cattle winding dimly home in
+the thickening night. Don't be alarmed, you worthy creature! My
+fancies play me strange tricks sometimes; and there is a little
+of last night's laudanum, I dare say, in this part of my letter.
+
+"He came--in the strangest silent way, like a man walking in
+his sleep--he came and sat down by me. Either the night was very
+close, or I was by this time literally in a fever: I couldn't
+bear my bonnet on; I couldn't bear my gloves. The want to look
+at him, and see what his singular silence meant, and the
+impossibility of doing it in the darkening light, irritated my
+nerves, till I thought I should have screamed. I took his hand,
+to try if that would help me. It was burning hot; and it closed
+instantly on mine--you know how. Silence, after _that_, was not
+to be thought of. The one safe way was to begin talking to him
+at once.
+
+"'Don't despise me,' I said. 'I am obliged to bring you to this
+lonely place; I should lose my character if we were seen
+together.'
+
+"I waited a little. His hand warned me once more not to let the
+silence continue. I determined to _make_ him speak to me this
+time.
+
+"'You have interested me, and frightened me,' I went on. 'You
+have written me a very strange letter. I must know what it
+means.'
+
+"'It is too late to ask. _You_ have taken the way, and _I_ have
+taken the way, from which there is no turning back.' He made that
+strange answer in a tone that was quite new to me--a tone that
+made me even more uneasy than his silence had made me the moment
+before. 'Too late,' he repeated--'too late! There is only one
+question to ask me now.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"As I said the words, a sudden trembling passed from his hand
+to mine, and told me instantly that I had better have held my
+tongue. Before I could move, before I could think, he had me
+in his arms. 'Ask me if I love you,' he whispered. At the same
+moment his head sank on my bosom; and some unutterable torture
+that was in him burst its way out, as it does with _us_, in
+a passion of sobs and tears.
+
+"My first impulse was the impulse of a fool. I was on the point
+of making our usual protest and defending myself in our usual
+way. Luckily or unluckily, I don't know which, I have lost the
+fine edge of the sensitiveness of youth; and I checked the first
+movement of my hands, and the first word on my lips. Oh, dear,
+how old I felt, while he was sobbing his heart out on my breast!
+How I thought of the time when he might have possessed himself
+of my love! All he had possessed himself of now was--my waist.
+
+"I wonder whether I pitied him? It doesn't matter if I did. At
+any rate, my hand lifted itself somehow, and my fingers twined
+themselves softly in his hair. Horrible recollections came back
+to me of other times, and made me shudder as I touched him. And
+yet I did it. What fools women are!
+
+"'I won't reproach you,' I said, gently. 'I won't say this is
+a cruel advantage to take of me, in such a position as mine. You
+are dreadfully agitated; I will let you wait a little and compose
+yourself.'
+
+"Having got as far as that, I stopped to consider how I should
+put the questions to him that I was burning to ask. But I was too
+confused, I suppose, or perhaps too impatient to consider. I let
+out what was uppermost in my mind, in the words that came first.
+
+"'I don't believe you love me,' I said. 'You write strange
+things to me; you frighten me with mysteries. What did you mean
+by saying in your letter that it would be fatal to Mr. Armadale
+if you came back to me? What danger can there be to Mr.
+Armadale--?'
+
+"Before I could finish the question, he suddenly lifted his head
+and unclasped his arms. I had apparently touched some painful
+subject which recalled him to himself. Instead of my shrinking
+from _him_, it was he who shrank from _me_. I felt offended with
+him; why, I don't know--but offended I was; and I thanked him
+with my bitterest emphasis for remembering what was due to me,
+_at last_!
+
+"'Do you believe in Dreams?' he burst out, in the most strangely
+abrupt manner, without taking the slightest notice of what I had
+said to him. 'Tell me,' he went on, without allowing me time to
+answer, 'were you, or was any relation of yours, ever connected
+with Allan Armadale's father or mother? Were you, or was anybody
+belonging to you, ever in the island of Madeira?'
+
+"Conceive my astonishment, if you can. I turned cold. In an
+instant I turned cold all over. He was plainly in the secret
+of what had happened when I was in Mrs. Armadale's service
+in Madeira--in all probability before he was born! That was
+startling enough of itself. And he had evidently some reason
+of his own for trying to connect _me_ with those events--which
+was more startling still.
+
+"'No,' I said, as soon as I could trust myself to speak. 'I know
+nothing of his father or mother.'
+
+"'And nothing of the island of Madeira?'
+
+"'Nothing of the island of Madeira.'
+
+"He turned his head away, and began talking to himself.
+
+"'Strange!' he said. 'As certainly as I was in the Shadow's
+place at the window, _she_ was in the Shadow's place at the
+pool!'
+
+"Under other circumstances, his extraordinary behavior might have
+alarmed me. But after his question about Madeira, there was some
+greater fear in me which kept all common alarm at a distance.
+I don't think I ever determined on anything in my life as I
+determined on finding out how he had got his information, and who
+he really was. It was quite plain to me that I had roused some
+hidden feeling in him by my question about Armadale, which was
+as strong in its way as his feeling for _me_. What had become
+of my influence over him?
+
+"I couldn't imagine what had become of it; but I could and did
+set to work to make him feel it again.
+
+"'Don't treat me cruelly,' I said; 'I didn't treat _you_ cruelly
+just now. Oh, Mr. Midwinter, it's so lonely, it's so dark--don't
+frighten me!'
+
+"'Frighten you!' He was close to me again in a moment. 'Frighten
+you!' He repeated the word with as much astonishment as if I had
+woke him from a dream, and charged him with something that he had
+said in his sleep.
+
+"It was on the tip of my tongue, finding how I had surprised
+him, to take him while he was off his guard, and to ask why my
+question about Armadale had produced such a change in his
+behavior to me. But after what had happened already, I was
+afraid to risk returning to the subject too soon. Something or
+other--what they call an instinct, I dare say--warned me to let
+Armadale alone for the present, and to talk to him first about
+himself. As I told you in one of my early letters, I had noticed
+signs and tokens in his manner and appearance which convinced me,
+young as he was, that he had done something or suffered something
+out of the common in his past life. I had asked myself more and
+more suspiciously every time I saw him whether he was what he
+appeared to be; and first and foremost among my other doubts was
+a doubt whether he was passing among us by his real name. Having
+secrets to keep about my own past life, and having gone myself
+in other days by more than one assumed name, I suppose I am all
+the readier to suspect other people when I find something
+mysterious about them. Any way, having the suspicion in my mind,
+I determined to startle him, as he had startled me, by an
+unexpected question on my side--a question about his name.
+
+"While I was thinking, he was thinking; and, as it soon appeared,
+of what I had just said to him. 'I am so grieved to have
+frightened you,' he whispered, with that gentleness and humility
+which we all so heartily despise in a man when he speaks to other
+women, and which we all so dearly like when he speaks to
+ourselves. 'I hardly know what I have been saying,' he went on;
+'my mind is miserably disturbed. Pray forgive me, if you can;
+I am not myself to-night.'
+
+"'I am not angry,' I said; 'I have nothing to forgive. We
+are both imprudent; we are both unhappy.' I laid my head
+on his shoulder. 'Do you really love me?' I asked him, softly,
+in a whisper.
+
+"His arm stole round me again; and I felt the quick beat of his
+heart get quicker and quicker. 'If you only knew!' he whispered
+back; 'if you only knew--' He could say no more. I felt his face
+bending toward mine, and dropped my head lower, and stopped him
+in the very act of kissing me.
+
+"'No,' I said; 'I am only a woman who has taken your fancy.
+You are treating me as if I was your promised wife.'
+
+"'_Be_ my promised wife!' he whispered, eagerly, and tried
+to raise my head. I kept it down. The horror of these old
+remembrances that you know of came back and made me tremble
+a little when he asked me to be his wife. I don't think I was
+actually faint; but something like faintness made me close my
+eyes. The moment I shut them, the darkness seemed to open as if
+lightning had split it; and the ghosts of _those other men_ rose
+in the horrid gap, and looked at me.
+
+"'Speak to me!' he whispered, tenderly. 'My darling, my angel,
+speak to me!'
+
+"His voice helped me to recover myself. I had just sense enough
+left to remember that the time was passing, and that I had not
+put my question to him yet about his name.
+
+"'Suppose I felt for you as you feel for me?' I said. 'Suppose
+I loved you dearly enough to trust you with the happiness of all
+my life to come?'
+
+"I paused a moment to get my breath. It was unbearably still
+and close; the air seemed to have died when the night came.
+
+"'Would you be marrying me honorably,' I went on, 'if you
+married me in your present name?'
+
+"His arm dropped from my waist, and I felt him give one great
+start. After that he sat by me, still, and cold, and silent, as
+if my question had struck him dumb. I put my arm round his neck,
+and lifted my head again on his shoulder. Whatever the spell was
+I had laid on him, my coming closer in that way seemed to break
+it.
+
+"'Who told you?' He stopped. 'No,' he went on, 'nobody can have
+told you. What made you suspect--?' He stopped again.
+
+"'Nobody told me,' I said; 'and I don't know what made me
+suspect. Women have strange fancies sometimes. Is Midwinter
+really your name?'
+
+"'I can't deceive you,' he answered, after another interval
+of silence; 'Midwinter is _not_ really my name.'
+
+"I nestled a little closer to him.
+
+" What _is_ your name?' I asked.
+
+"He hesitated.
+
+"I lifted my face till my cheek just touched his. I persisted,
+with my lips close at his ear:
+
+"'What, no confidence in me even yet! No confidence in the woman
+who has almost confessed she loves you--who has almost consented
+to be your wife!'
+
+"He turned his face to mine. For the second time he tried to kiss
+me, and for the second time I stopped him.
+
+"'If I tell you my name,' he said, 'I must tell you more.'
+
+"I let my cheek touch his again.
+
+"'Why not?' I said. 'How can I love a man--much less marry
+him--if he keeps himself a stranger to me?'
+
+"There was no answering that, as I thought. But he did answer
+it.
+
+"'It is a dreadful story,' he said. 'It may darken all your
+life, if you know it, as it has darkened mine.'
+
+"I put my other arm round him, and persisted. 'Tell it me;
+I'm not afraid; tell it me.'
+
+"He began to yield to my other arm.
+
+"'Will you keep it a sacred secret?' he said. 'Never to be
+breathed--never to be known but to you and me?'
+
+"I promised him it should be a secret. I waited in a perfect
+frenzy of expectation. Twice he tried to begin, and twice his
+courage failed him.
+
+"'I can't!' he broke out in a wild, helpless way. I can't tell
+it!'
+
+"My curiosity, or more likely my temper, got beyond all control.
+He had irritated me till I was reckless what I said or what
+I did. I suddenly clasped him close, and pressed my lips to his.
+'I love you!' I whispered in a kiss. '_Now_ will you tell me?'
+
+"For the moment he was speechless. I don't know whether I did it
+purposely to drive him wild. I don't know whether I did it
+involuntarily in a burst of rage. Nothing is certain but that
+I interpreted his silence the wrong way. I pushed him back from
+me in a fury the instant after I had kissed him. 'I hate you!'
+I said. 'You have maddened me into forgetting myself. Leave me.
+I don't care for the darkness. Leave me instantly, and never see
+me again!'
+
+"He caught me by the hand and stopped me. He spoke in a new
+voice; he suddenly _commanded_, as only men can.
+
+"'Sit down,' he said. 'You have given me back my courage--you
+shall know who I am.'
+
+"In the silence and the darkness all round us, I obeyed him,
+and sat down.
+
+"In the silence and the darkness all round us, he took me
+in his arms again, and told me who he was.
+
+----------
+
+"Shall I trust you with his story? Shall I tell you his real
+name? Shall I show you, as I threatened, the thoughts that have
+grown out of my interview with him and out of all that has
+happened to me since that time?
+
+"Or shall I keep his secret as I promised? and keep my own secret
+too, by bringing this weary, long letter to an end at the very
+moment when you are burning to hear more!
+
+"Those are serious questions, Mrs. Oldershaw--more serious than
+you suppose. I have had time to calm down, and I begin to see,
+what I failed to see when I first took up my pen to write to you,
+the wisdom of looking at consequences. Have I frightened myself
+in trying to frighten _you_? It is possible--strange as it may
+seem, it is really possible.
+
+"I have been at the window for the last minute or two, thinking.
+There is plenty of time for thinking before the post leaves. The
+people are only now coming out of church.
+
+"I have settled to put my letter on one side, and to take a look
+at my diary. In plainer words I must see what I risk if I decide
+on trusting you; and my diary will show me what my head is too
+weary to calculate without help. I have written the story of my
+days (and sometimes the story of my nights) much more regularly
+than usual for the last week, having reasons of my own for being
+particularly careful in this respect under present circumstances.
+If I end in doing what it is now in my mind to do, it would be
+madness to trust to my memory. The smallest forgetfulness of the
+slightest event that has happened from the night of my interview
+with Midwinter to the present time might be utter ruin to me.
+
+"'Utter ruin to her!' you will say. 'What kind of ruin does she
+mean?'
+
+"Wait a little, till I have asked my diary whether I can safely
+tell you."
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
+
+"July 21st, Monday night, eleven o'clock.--Midwinter has just
+left me. We parted by my desire at the path out of the coppice;
+he going his way to the hotel, and I going mine to my lodgings.
+
+"I have managed to avoid making another appointment with him by
+arranging to write to him to-morrow morning. This gives me the
+night's interval to compose myself, and to coax my mind back (if
+I can) to my own affairs. Will the night pass, and the morning
+find me still thinking of the Letter that came to him from his
+father's deathbed? of the night he watched through on the Wrecked
+Ship; and, more than all, of the first breathless moment when he
+told me his real Name?
+
+"Would it help me to shake off these impressions, I wonder, if
+I made the effort of writing them down? There would be no danger,
+in that case, of my forgetting anything important. And perhaps,
+after all, it may be the fear of forgetting something which I
+ought to remember that keeps this story of Midwinter's weighing
+as it does on my mind. At any rate, the experiment is worth
+trying. In my present situation I _must_ be free to think of
+other things, or I shall never find my way through all the
+difficulties at Thorpe Ambrose that are still to come.
+
+"Let me think. What _haunts_ me, to begin with?
+
+"The Names haunt me. I keep saying and saying to myself: Both
+alike!--Christian name and surname both alike! A light-haired
+Allan Armadale, whom I have long since known of, and who is the
+son of my old mistress. A dark-haired Allan Armadale, whom I only
+know of now, and who is only known to others under the name of
+Ozias Midwinter. Stranger still; it is not relationship, it is
+not chance, that has made them namesakes. The father of the light
+Armadale was the man who was _born_ to the family name, and who
+lost the family inheritance. The father of the dark Armadale
+was the man who _took_ the name, on condition of getting the
+inheritance--and who got it.
+
+"So there are two of them--I can't help thinking of it--both
+unmarried. The light-haired Armadale, who offers to the woman who
+can secure him, eight thousand a year while he lives; who leaves
+her twelve hundred a year when he dies; who must and shall marry
+me for those two golden reasons; and whom I hate and loathe as I
+never hated and loathed a man yet. And the dark-haired Armadale,
+who has a poor little income, which might perhaps pay his wife's
+milliner, if his wife was careful; who has just left me,
+persuaded that I mean to marry him; and whom--well, whom I
+_might_ have loved once, before I was the woman I am now.
+
+"And Allan the Fair doesn't know he has a namesake. And Allan
+the Dark has kept the secret from everybody but the Somersetshire
+clergyman (whose discretion he can depend on) and myself.
+
+"And there are two Allan Armadales--two Allan Armadales--two
+Allan Armadales. There! three is a lucky number. Haunt me again,
+after that, if you can!
+
+"What next? The murder in the timber ship? No; the murder is
+a good reason why the dark Armadale, whose father committed it,
+should keep his secret from the fair Armadale, whose father
+was killed; but it doesn't concern _me_. I remember there was
+a suspicion in Madeira at the time of something wrong. _Was_ it
+wrong? Was the man who had been tricked out of his wife to blame
+for shutting the cabin door, and leaving the man who had tricked
+him to drown in the wreck? Yes; the woman wasn't worth it.
+
+"What am I sure of that really concerns myself?
+
+"I am sure of one very important thing. I am sure that
+Midwinter--I must call him by his ugly false name, or I may
+confuse the two Armadales before I have done--I am sure that
+Midwinter is perfectly ignorant that I and the little imp of
+twelve years old who waited on Mrs. Armadale in Madeira, and
+copied the letters that were supposed to arrive from the West
+Indies, are one and the same. There are not many girls of twelve
+who could have imitated a man's handwriting, and held their
+tongues about it afterward, as I did; but that doesn't matter
+now. What does matter is that Midwinter's belief in the Dream
+is Midwinter's only reason for trying to connect me with Allan
+Armadale, by associating me with Allan Armadale's father and
+mother. I asked him if he actually thought me old enough to have
+known either of them. And he said No, poor fellow, in the most
+innocent, bewildered way. Would he say No if he saw me now? Shall
+I turn to the glass and see if I look my five-and-thirty years?
+or shall I go on writing? I will go on writing.
+
+"There is one thing more that haunts me almost as obstinately
+as the Names.
+
+"I wonder whether I am right in relying on Midwinter's
+superstition (as I do) to help me in keeping him at arms-length.
+After having let the excitement of the moment hurry me into
+saying more than I need have said, he is certain to press me;
+he is certain to come back, with a man's hateful selfishness
+and impatience in such things, to the question of marrying me.
+Will the Dream help me to check him? After alternately believing
+and disbelieving in it, he has got, by his own confession, to
+believing in it again. Can I say I believe in it, too? I have
+better reasons for doing so than he knows of. I am not only
+the person who helped Mrs. Armadale's marriage by helping her
+to impose on her own father: I am the woman who tried to drown
+herself; the woman who started the series of accidents which put
+young Armadale in possession of his fortune; the woman who has
+come Thorpe Ambrose to marry him for his fortune, now he has got
+it; and more extraordinary still, the woman who stood in the
+Shadow's place at the pool! These may be coincidences, but they
+are strange coincidences. I declare I begin to fancy that _I_
+believe in the Dream too!
+
+"Suppose I say to him, 'I think as you think. I say what you said
+in your letter to me, Let us part before the harm is done. Leave
+me before the Third Vision of the Dream comes true. Leave me, and
+put the mountains and the seas between you and the man who bears
+your name!'
+
+"Suppose, on the other side, that his love for me makes him
+reckless of everything else? Suppose he says those desperate
+words again, which I understand now: What _is_ to be, _will_ be.
+What have I to do with it, and what has she?' Suppose--suppose--
+
+"I won't write any more. I hate writing. It doesn't relieve
+me--it makes me worse. I'm further from being able to think of
+all that I _must_ think of than I was when I sat down. It is past
+midnight. To-morrow has come already; and here I am as helpless
+as the stupidest woman living! Bed is the only fit place for me.
+
+"Bed? If it was ten years since, instead of to-day; and if I had
+married Midwinter for love, I might be going to bed now with
+nothing heavier on my mind than a visit on tiptoe to the nursery,
+and a last look at night to see if my children were sleeping
+quietly in their cribs. I wonder whether I should have loved
+my children if I had ever had any? Perhaps, yes--perhaps, no.
+It doesn't matter.
+
+
+"Tuesday morning, ten o'clock.--Who was the man who invented
+laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart whoever he was.
+If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose
+comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises,
+what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of
+oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed; I have written
+a perfect little letter to Midwinter; I have drunk my nice cup
+of tea, with a real relish of it; I have dawdled over my morning
+toilet with an exquisite sense of relief--and all through the
+modest little bottle of Drops, which I see on my bedroom
+chimney-piece at this moment. 'Drops,' you are a darling! If
+I love nothing else, I love _you_.
+
+"My letter to Midwinter has been sent through the post; and
+I have told him to reply to me in the same manner.
+
+"I feel no anxiety about his answer--he can only answer in one
+way. I have asked for a little time to consider, because my
+family circumstances require some consideration, in his interests
+as well as in mine. I have engaged to tell him what those
+circumstances are (what shall I say, I wonder?) when we next
+meet; and I have requested him in the meantime to keep all that
+has passed between us a secret for the present. As to what he
+is to do himself in the interval while I am supposed to be
+considering, I have left it to his own discretion--merely
+reminding him that his attempting to see me again (while our
+positions toward each other cannot be openly avowed) might injure
+my reputation. I have offered to write to him if he wishes it;
+and I have ended by promising to make the interval of our
+necessary separation as short as I can.
+
+"This sort of plain, unaffected letter--which I might have
+written to him last night, if his story had not been running in
+my head as it did--has one defect, I know. It certainly keeps him
+out of the way, while I am casting my net, and catching my gold
+fish at the great house for the second time; but it also leaves
+an awkward day of reckoning to come with Midwinter if I succeed.
+How am I to manage him? What am I to do? I ought to face those
+two questions as boldly as usual; but somehow my courage seems to
+fail me, and I don't quite fancy meeting _that_ difficulty, till
+the time comes when it _must_ be met. Shall I confess to my diary
+that I am sorry for Midwinter, and that I shrink a little from
+thinking of the day when he hears that I am going to be mistress
+at the great house?
+
+"But I am not mistress yet; and I can't take a step in the
+direction of the great house till I have got the answer to
+my letter, and till I know that Midwinter is out of the way.
+Patience! patience! I must go and forget myself at my piano.
+There is the 'Moonlight Sonata' open, and tempting me, on the
+music-stand. Have I nerve enough to play it, I wonder? Or will
+it set me shuddering with the mystery and terror of it, as it did
+the other day?
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--I have got his answer. The slightest request
+I can make is a command to him. He has gone; and he sends me
+his address in London. 'There are two considerations' (he says)
+'which help to reconcile me to leaving you. The first is that
+_you_ wish it, and that it is only to be for a little while. The
+second is that I think I can make some arrangements in London for
+adding to my income by my own labor. I have never cared for money
+for myself; but you don't know how I am beginning already to
+prize the luxuries and refinements that money can provide, for my
+wife's sake.' Poor fellow! I almost wish I had not written to him
+as I did; I almost wish I had not sent him away from me.
+
+"Fancy if Mother Oldershaw saw this page in my diary! I have had
+a letter from her this morning--a letter to remind me of my
+obligations, and to tell me she suspects things are all going
+wrong. Let her suspect! I shan't trouble myself to answer; I
+can't be worried with that old wretch in the state I am in now.
+
+"It is a lovely afternoon--I want a walk--I mustn't think of
+Midwinter. Suppose I put on my bonnet, and try my experiment at
+once at the great house? Everything is in my favor. There is no
+spy to follow me, and no lawyer to keep me out, this time. Am I
+handsome enough, today? Well, yes; handsome enough to be a match
+for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be
+perched on a form at school, and strapped to a backboard to
+straighten her crooked shoulders.
+
+  "'The nursery lisps out in all they utter;
+    Besides, they always smell of bread-and-butter.'
+
+"How admirably Byron has described girls in their teens!
+
+
+"Eight o'clock.--I have just got back from Armadale's house. I
+have seen him, and spoken to him; and the end of it may be set
+down in three plain words. I have failed. There is no more chance
+of my being Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose than there is of my
+being Queen of England.
+
+"Shall I write and tell Oldershaw? Shall I go back to London? Not
+till I have had time to think a little. Not just yet.
+
+"Let me think; I have failed completely--failed, with all the
+circumstances in favor of success. I caught him alone on the
+drive in front of the house. He was excessively disconcerted,
+but at the same time quite willing to hear me. I tried him, first
+quietly--then with tears, and the rest of it. I introduced myself
+in the character of the poor innocent woman whom he had been the
+means of injuring. I confused, I interested, I convinced him.
+I went on to the purely Christian part of my errand, and spoke
+with such feeling of his separation from his friend, for which
+I was innocently responsible, that I turned his odious rosy face
+quite pale, and made him beg me at last not to distress him. But,
+whatever other feelings I roused in him, I never once roused his
+old feeling for _me_. I saw it in his eyes when he looked at me;
+I felt it in his fingers when we shook hands. We parted friends,
+and nothing more.
+
+"It is for this, is it, Miss Milroy, that I resisted temptation,
+morning after morning, when I knew you were out alone in the
+park? I have just left you time to slip in, and take my place in
+Armadale's good graces, have I? I never resisted temptation yet
+without suffering for it in some such way as this! If I had only
+followed my first thoughts, on the day when I took leave of you,
+my young lady--well, well, never mind that now. I have got the
+future before me; you are not Mrs. Armadale yet! And I can tell
+you one other thing--whoever else he marries, he will never marry
+_you_. If I am even with you in no other way, trust me, whatever
+comes of it, to be even with you there!
+
+"I am not, to my own surprise, in one of my furious passions.
+The last time I was in this perfectly cool state, under serious
+provocation, something came of it, which I daren't write down,
+even in my own private diary. I shouldn't be surprised if
+something comes of it now.
+
+"On my way back, I called at Mr. Bashwood's lodgings in the town.
+He was not at home, and I left a message telling him to come here
+tonight and speak to me. I mean to relieve him at once of the
+duty of looking after Armadale and Miss Milroy. I may not see my
+way yet to ruining her prospects at Thorpe Ambrose as completely
+as she has ruined mine. But when the time comes, and I do see it,
+I don't know to what lengths my sense of injury may take me; and
+there may be inconvenience, and possibly danger, in having such
+a chicken-hearted creature as Mr. Bashwood in my confidence.
+
+"I suspect I am more upset by all this than I supposed.
+Midwinter's story is beginning to haunt me again, without rhyme
+or reason.
+
+"A soft, quick, trembling knock at the street door! I know who
+it is. No hand but old Bashwood's could knock in that way.
+
+
+"Nine o'clock.--I have just got rid of him. He has surprised me
+by coming out in a new character.
+
+"It seems (though I didn't detect him) that he was at the great
+house while I was in company with Armadale. He saw us talking on
+the drive, and he afterward heard what the servants said, who saw
+us too. The wise opinion below stairs is that we have 'made it
+up,' and that the master is likely to marry me after all. 'He's
+sweet on her red hair,' was the elegant expression they used
+in the kitchen. 'Little missie can't match her there; and little
+missie will get the worst of it.' How I hate the coarse ways
+of the lower orders!
+
+"While old Bashwood was telling me this, I thought he looked
+even more confused and nervous than usual. But I failed to see
+what was really the matter until after I had told him that he was
+to leave all further observation of Mr. Armadale and Miss Milroy
+to me. Every drop of the little blood there is in the feeble old
+creature's body seemed to fly up into his face. He made quite an
+overpowering effort; he really looked as if he would drop down
+dead of fright at his own boldness; but be forced out the
+question for all that, stammering, and stuttering, and kneading
+desperately with both hands at the brim of his hideous great hat.
+'I beg your pardon, Miss Gwi-Gwi-Gwilt! You are not really
+go-go-going to marry Mr. Armadale, are you? Jealous--if ever I
+saw it in a man's face yet, I saw it in his--actually jealous of
+Armadale at his age! If I had been in the humor for it, I should
+have burst out laughing in his face. As it was, I was angry, and
+lost all patience with him. I told him he was an old fool, and
+ordered him to go on quietly with his usual business until I sent
+him word that he was wanted again. He submitted as usual; but
+there was an indescribable something in his watery old eyes, when
+he took leave of me, which I have never noticed in them before.
+Love has the credit of working all sorts of strange
+transformations. Can it be really possible that Love has made
+Mr. Bashwood man enough to be angry with me?
+
+"Wednesday.--My experience of Miss Milroy's habits suggested a
+suspicion to me last night which I thought it desirable to clear
+up this morning.
+
+"It was always her way, when I was at the cottage, to take a walk
+early in the morning before breakfast. Considering that I used
+often to choose that very time for _my_ private meetings with
+Armadale, it struck me as likely that my former pupil might be
+taking a leaf out of my book, and that I might make some
+desirable discoveries if I turned my steps in the direction
+of the major's garden at the right hour. I deprived myself
+of my Drops, to make sure of waking; passed a miserable night
+in consequence; and was ready enough to get up at six o'clock,
+and walk the distance from my lodgings to the cottage in the
+fresh morning air.
+
+"I had not been five minutes on the park side of the garden
+inclosure before I sat her come out.
+
+"She seemed to have had a bad night too; her eyes were heavy and
+red, and her lips and cheeks looked swollen as if she had been
+crying. There was something on her mind, evidently; something,
+as it soon appeared, to take her out of the garden into the park.
+She walked (if one can call it walking; with such legs as hers!)
+straight to the summer house, and opened the door, and crossed
+the bridge, and went on quicker and quicker toward the low ground
+in the park, where the trees are thickest. I followed her over
+the open space with perfect impunity in the preoccupied state she
+was in; and, when she began to slacken her pace among the trees,
+I was among the trees too, and was not afraid of her seeing me.
+
+"Before long, there was a crackling and trampling of heavy feet
+coming up toward us through the under-wood in a deep dip of the
+ground. I knew that step as well as she knew it. 'Here I am,'
+she said, in a faint little voice. I kept behind the trees a few
+yards off, in some doubt on which side Armadale would come out of
+the under-wood to join her. He came out up the side of the dell,
+opposite to the tree behind which I was standing. They sat down
+together on the bank. I sat down behind the tree, and looked at
+them through the under-wood, and heard without the slightest
+difficulty every word that they said.
+
+"The talk began by his noticing that she looked out of spirits,
+and asking if anything had gone wrong at the cottage. The artful
+little minx lost no time in making the necessary impression on
+him; she began to cry. He took her hand, of course, and tried,
+in his brutishly straightforward way, to comfort her. No; she
+was not to be comforted. A miserable prospect was before her; she
+had not slept the whole night for thinking of it. Her father had
+called her into his room the previous evening, had spoken about
+the state of her education, and had told her in so many words
+that she was to go to school. The place had been found, and the
+terms had been settled; and as soon as her clothes could he got
+ready, miss was to go.
+
+"'While that hateful Miss Gwilt was in the house,' says this
+model young person, 'I would have gone to school willingly--I
+wanted to go. But it's all different now; I don't think of it in
+the same way; I feel too old for school. I'm quite heart-broken,
+Mr. Armadale.' There she stopped as if she had meant to say more,
+and gave him a look which finished the sentence plainly: 'I'm
+quite heart-broken, Mr. Armadale, now we are friendly again, at
+going away from you!' For downright brazen impudence, which a
+grown woman would be ashamed of, give me the young girls whose
+'modesty' is so pertinaciously insisted on by the nauseous
+domestic sentimentalists of the present day!
+
+"Even Armadale, booby as he is, understood her. After bewildering
+himself in a labyrinth of words that led nowhere, he took
+her--one can hardly say round the waist, for she hasn't got
+one--he took her round the last hook-and-eye of her dress, and,
+by way of offering her a refuge from the indignity of being sent
+to school at her age, made her a proposal of marriage in so many
+words.
+
+"If I could have killed them both at that moment by lifting up
+my little finger, I have not the least doubt I should have lifted
+it. As things were, I only waited to see what Miss Milroy would
+do.
+
+"She appeared to think it necessary--feeling, I suppose, that she
+had met him without her father's knowledge, and not forgetting
+that I had had the start of her as the favored object of Mr.
+Armadale's good opinion--to assert herself by an explosion of
+virtuous indignation. She wondered how he could think of such
+a thing after his conduct with Miss Gwilt, and after her father
+had forbidden him the house! Did he want to make her feel how
+inexcusably she had forgotten what was due to herself? Was it
+worthy of a gentleman to propose what he knew as well as she did
+was impossible? and so on, and so on. Any man with brains in his
+head would have known what all this rodomontade really meant.
+Armadale took it so seriously that he actually attempted to
+justify himself.
+
+"He declared, in his headlong, blundering way, that he was quite
+in earnest; he and her father might make it up and be friends
+again; and, if the major persisted in treating him as a stranger,
+young ladies and gentlemen in their situation had made runaway
+marriages before now, and fathers and mothers who wouldn't
+forgive them before had forgiven them afterward. Such
+outrageously straightforward love-making as this left Miss
+Milroy, of course, but two alternatives--to confess that she had
+been saying No when she meant Yes, or to take refuge in another
+explosion. She was hypocrite enough to prefer another explosion.
+'How dare you, Mr. Armadale? Go away directly! It's
+inconsiderate, it's heartless, it's perfectly disgraceful to say
+such things to me!' and so on, and so on. It seems incredible,
+but it is not the less true, that he was positively fool enough
+to take her at her word. He begged her pardon, and went away like
+a child that is put in the corner--the most contemptible object
+in the form of man that eyes ever looked on!
+
+"She waited, after he had gone, to compose herself, and I waited
+behind the trees to see how she would succeed. Her eyes wandered
+round slyly to the path by which he had left her. She smiled
+(grinned would be the truer way of putting it, with such a mouth
+as hers); took a few steps on tiptoe to look after him; turned
+back again, and suddenly burst into a violent fit of crying. I am
+not quite so easily taken in as Armadale, and I saw what it all
+meant plainly enough.
+
+"'To-morrow,' I thought to myself, 'you will be in the park
+again, miss, by pure accident. The next day, you will lead him on
+into proposing to you for the second time. The day after, he will
+venture back to the subject of runaway marriages, and you will
+only be becomingly confused. And the day after that, if he has
+got a plan to propose, and if your clothes are ready to be packed
+for school, you will listen to him.' Yes, yes; Time is always on
+the man's side, where a woman is concerned, if the man is only
+patient enough to let Time help him.
+
+"I let her leave the place and go back to the cottage, quite
+unconscious that I had been looking at her. I waited among the
+trees, thinking. The truth is, I was impressed by what I had
+heard and seen, in a manner that it is not very easy to describe.
+It put the whole thing before me in a new light. It showed
+me--what I had never even suspected till this morning--that she
+is really fond of him.
+
+"Heavy as my debt of obligation is to her, there is no fear _now_
+of my failing to pay it to the last farthing. It would have been
+no small triumph for me to stand between Miss Milroy and her
+ambition to be one of the leading ladies of the county. But it
+is infinitely more, where her first love is concerned, to stand
+between Miss Milroy and her heart's desire. Shall I remember my
+own youth and spare her? No! She has deprived me of the one
+chance I had of breaking the chain that binds me to a past life
+too horrible to be thought of. I am thrown back into a position,
+compared to which the position of an outcast who walks the
+streets is endurable and enviable. No, Miss Milroy--no, Mr.
+Armadale; I will spare neither of you.
+
+"I have been back some hours. I have been thinking, and nothing
+has come of it. Ever since I got that strange letter of
+Midwinter's last Sunday, my usual readiness in emergencies has
+deserted me. When I am not thinking of him or of his story, my
+mind feels quite stupefied. I, who have always known what to do
+on other occasions, don't know what to do now. It would be easy
+enough, of course, to warn Major Milroy of his daughter's
+proceedings. But the major is fond of his daughter; Armadale
+is anxious to be reconciled with him; Armadale is rich and
+prosperous, and ready to submit to the elder man; and sooner or
+later they will be friends again, and the marriage will follow.
+Warning Major Milroy is only the way to embarrass them for the
+present; it is not the way to part them for good and all.
+
+"What _is_ the way? I can't see it. I could tear my own hair off
+my head! I could burn the house down! If there was a train of
+gunpowder under the whole world, I could light it, and blow the
+whole world to destruction--I am in such a rage, such a frenzy
+with myself for not seeing it!
+
+"Poor dear Midwinter! Yes, '_dear_.' I don't care. I'm lonely and
+helpless. I want somebody who is gentle and loving to make much
+of me; I wish I had his head on my bosom again; I have a good
+mind to go to London and marry him. Am I mad? Yes; all people who
+are as miserable as I am are mad. I must go to the window and get
+some air. Shall I jump out? No; it disfigures one so, and the
+coroner's inquest lets so many people see it.
+
+"The air has revived me. I begin to remember that I have Time
+on my side, at any rate. Nobody knows but me of their secret
+meetings in the park the first thing in the morning. If jealous
+old Bashwood, who is slinking and sly enough for anything, tries
+to look privately after Armadale, in his own interests, he will
+try at the usual time when he goes to the steward's office. He
+knows nothing of Miss Milroy's early habits; and he won't be on
+the spot till Armadale has got back to the house. For another
+week to come, I may wait and watch them, and choose my own time
+and way of interfering the moment I see a chance of his getting
+the better of her hesitation, and making her say Yes.
+
+"So here I wait, without knowing how things will end with
+Midwinter in London; with my purse getting emptier and emptier,
+and no appearance so far of any new pupils to fill it; with
+Mother Oldershaw certain to insist on having her money back the
+moment she knows I have failed; without prospects, friends, or
+hopes of any kind--a lost woman, if ever there was a lost woman
+yet. Well! I say it again and again and again--I don't care! Here
+I stop, if I sell the clothes off my back, if I hire myself at
+the public-house to play to the brutes in the tap-room; here I
+stop till the time comes, and I see the way to parting Armadale
+and Miss Milroy forever!
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--Any signs that the time is coming yet? I hardly
+know; there are signs of a change, at any rate, in my position
+in the neighborhood.
+
+"Two of the oldest and ugliest of the many old and ugly ladies
+who took up my case when I left Major Milroy's service have just
+called, announcing themselves, with the insufferable impudence of
+charitable Englishwomen, as a deputation from my patronesses. It
+seems that the news of my reconciliation with Armadale has spread
+from the servants' offices at the great house, and has reached
+the town, with this result.
+
+"It is the unanimous opinion of my 'patronesses' (and the opinion
+of Major Milroy also, who has been consulted) that I have acted
+with the most inexcusable imprudence in going to Armadale's
+house, and in there speaking on friendly terms with a man whose
+conduct toward myself has made his name a by-word in the
+neighborhood. My total want of self-respect in this matter has
+given rise to a report that I am trading as cleverly as ever on
+my good looks, and that I am as likely as not to end in making
+Armadale marry me, after all. My 'patronesses' are, of course,
+too charitable to believe this. They merely feel it necessary to
+remonstrate with me in a Christian spirit, and to warn me that
+any second and similar imprudence on my part would force all my
+best friends in the plate to withdraw the countenance and
+protection which I now enjoy.
+
+"Having addressed me, turn and turn about, in these terms
+(evidently all rehearsed beforehand), my two Gorgon visitors
+straightened themselves in their chairs, and looked at me as much
+as to say, 'You may often have heard of Virtue, Miss Gwilt, but
+we don't believe you ever really saw it in full bloom till we
+came and called on you.'
+
+"Seeing they were bent on provoking me, I kept my temper, and
+answered them in my smoothest, sweetest, and most lady-like
+manner. I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class
+of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at
+eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up
+again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes
+and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their
+Christianity on a week-day. On this hint, as the man says in the
+play, I spoke.
+
+"'What have I done that is wrong?' I asked, innocently.
+'Mr. Armadale has injured me; and I have been to his house
+and forgiven him the injury. Surely there must be some mistake,
+ladies? You can't have really come here to remonstrate with me
+in a Christian spirit for performing an act of Christianity?'
+
+"The two Gorgons got up. I firmly believe some women have cats'
+tails as well as cats' faces. I firmly believe the tails of those
+two particular cats wagged slowly under their petticoats, and
+swelled to four times their proper size.
+
+"'Temper we were prepared for, Miss Gwilt,' they said, 'but
+not Profanity. We wish you good-evening.'
+
+"So they left me, and so 'Miss Gwilt' sinks out of the
+patronizing notice of the neighborhood
+
+"I wonder what will come of this trumpery little quarrel? One
+thing will come of it which I can see already. The report will
+reach Miss Milroy's ears; she will insist on Armadale's
+justifying himself; and Armadale will end in satisfying her of
+his innocence by making another proposal. This will be quite
+likely to hasten matters between them; at least it would with me.
+If I was in her place, I should say to myself, 'I will make sure
+of him while I can.' Supposing it doesn't rain to-morrow morning,
+I think I will take another early walk in the direction of the
+park.
+
+
+"Midnight.--As I can't take my drops, with a morning walk before
+me, I may as well give up all hope of sleeping, and go on with my
+diary. Even with my drops, I doubt if my head would be very quiet
+on my pillow to-night. Since the little excitement of the scene
+with my 'lady-patronesses' has worn off, I have been troubled
+with misgivings which would leave me but a poor chance, under any
+circumstances, of getting much rest.
+
+"I can't imagine why, but the parting words spoken to Armadale by
+that old brute of a lawyer have come back to my mind! Here they
+are, as reported in Mr. Bashwood's letter: 'Some other person's
+curiosity may go on from the point where you (and I) have
+stopped, and some other person's hand may let the broad daylight
+in yet on Miss Gwilt.'
+
+"What does he mean by that? And what did he mean afterward when
+he overtook old Bashwood in the drive, by telling him to gratify
+his curiosity? Does this hateful Pedgift actually suppose there
+is any chance--? Ridiculous! Why, I have only to _look_ at the
+feeble old creature, and he daren't lift his little finger unless
+I tell him. _He_ try to pry into my past life, indeed! Why,
+people with ten times his brains, and a hundred times his
+courage, have tried--and have left off as wise as they began.
+
+"I don't know, though; it might have been better if I had kept my
+temper when Bashwood was here the other night. And it might be
+better still if I saw him to-morrow, and took him back into my
+good graces by giving him something to do for me. Suppose I tell
+him to look after the two Pedgifts, and to discover whether there
+is any chance of their attempting to renew their connection with
+Armadale? No such thing is at all likely; but if I gave old
+Bashwood this commission, it would flatter his sense of his own
+importance to me, and would at the same time serve the excellent
+purpose of keeping him out of my way.
+
+
+"Thursday morning, nine o'clock.--I have just got back from the
+park.
+
+"For once I have proved a true prophet. There they were together,
+at the same early hour, in the same secluded situation among the
+trees; and there was miss in full possession of the report of my
+visit to the great house, and taking her tone accordingly.
+
+"After saying one or two things about me, which I promise him not
+to forget, Armadale took the way to convince her of his constancy
+which I felt beforehand he would be driven to take. He repeated
+his proposal of marriage, with excellent effect this time. Tears
+and kisses and protestations followed; and my late pupil opened
+her heart at last, in the most innocent manner. Home, she
+confessed, was getting so miserable to her now that it was only
+less miserable than going to school. Her mother's temper was
+becoming more violent and unmanageable every day. The nurse, who
+was the only person with any influence over her, had gone away in
+disgust. Her father was becoming more and more immersed in his
+clock, and was made more and more resolute to send her away from
+home by the distressing scenes which now took place with her
+mother almost day by day. I waited through these domestic
+disclosures on the chance of hearing any plans they might have
+for the future discussed between them; and my patience, after no
+small exercise of it, was rewarded at last.
+
+"The first suggestion (as was only natural where such a fool as
+Armadale was concerned) came from the girl.
+
+"She started an idea which I own I had not anticipated. She
+proposed that Armadale should write to her father; and, cleverer
+still, she prevented all fear of his blundering by telling him
+what he was to say. He was to express himself as deeply
+distressed at his estrangement from the major, and to request
+permission to call at the cottage, and say a few words in his own
+justification. That was all. The letter was not to be sent that
+day, for the applicants for the vacant place of Mrs. Milroy's
+nurse were coming, and seeing them and questioning them would put
+her father, with his dislike of such things, in no humor to
+receive Armadale's application indulgently. The Friday would be
+the day to send the letter, and on the Saturday morning if the
+answer was unfortunately not favorable, they might meet again, 'I
+don't like deceiving my father; he has always been so kind to me.
+And there will be no need to deceive him, Allan, if we can only
+make you friends again.' Those were the last words the little
+hypocrite said, when I left them.
+
+"What will the major do? Saturday morning will show. I won't
+think of it till Saturday morning has come and gone. They are not
+man and wife yet; and again and again I say it, though my brains
+are still as helpless as ever, man and wife they shall never be.
+
+"On my way home again, I caught Bashwood at his breakfast, with
+his poor old black tea-pot, and his little penny loaf, and his
+one cheap morsel of oily butter, and his darned dirty tablecloth.
+It sickens me to think of it.
+
+"I coaxed and comforted the miserable old creature till the tears
+stood in his eyes, and he quite blushed with pleasure. He
+undertakes to look after the Pedgifts with the utmost alacrity.
+Pedgift the elder he described, when once roused, as the most
+obstinate man living; nothing will induce him to give way,
+unless Armadale gives way also on his side. Pedgift the younger
+is much the more likely of the two to make attempts at a
+reconciliation. Such, at least, is Bashwood's opinion. It is of
+very little consequence now what happens either way. The only
+important thing is to tie my elderly admirer safely again to my
+apron-string. And this is done.
+
+"The post is late this morning. It has only just come in, and has
+brought me a letter from Midwinter.
+
+
+"It is a charming letter; it flatters me and flutters me as if I
+was a young girl again. No reproaches for my never having written
+to him; no hateful hurrying of me, in plain words, to marry him.
+He only writes to tell me a piece of news. He has obtained,
+through his lawyers, a prospect of being employed as occasional
+correspondent to a newspaper which is about to be started in
+London. The employment will require him to leave England for
+the Continent, which would exactly meet his own wishes for the
+future, but he cannot consider the proposal seriously until he
+has first ascertained whether it would meet my wishes too. He
+knows no will but mine, and he leaves me to decide, after first
+mentioning the time allowed him before his answer must be sent
+in. It is the time, of course (if I agree to his going abroad),
+in which I must marry him. But there is not a word about this in
+his letter. He asks for nothing but a sight of my handwriting to
+help him through the interval while we are separated from each
+other.
+
+"That is the letter; not very long, but so prettily expressed.
+
+"I think I can penetrate the secret of his fancy for going
+abroad. That wild idea of putting the mountains and the seas
+between Armadale and himself is still in his mind. As if either
+he or I could escape doing what we are fated to do--supposing
+we really are fated--by putting a few hundred or a few thousand
+miles between Armadale and ourselves! What strange absurdity
+and inconsistency! And yet how I like him for being absurd and
+inconsistent; for don't I see plainly that I am at the bottom of
+it all? Who leads this clever man astray in spite of himself? Who
+makes him too blind to see the contradiction in his own conduct,
+which he would see plainly in the conduct of another person?
+How interested I do feel in him! How dangerously near I am to
+shutting my eyes on the past, and letting myself love him! Was
+Eve fonder of Adam than ever, I wonder, after she had coaxed him
+into eating the apple? I should have quite doted on him if I had
+been in her place. (Memorandum: To write Midwinter a charming
+little letter on my side, with a kiss in it; and as time is
+allowed him before he sends in his answer, to ask for time, too,
+before I tell him whether I will or will not go abroad.)
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--A tiresome visit from my landlady; eager for a
+little gossip, and full of news which she thinks will interest
+me.
+
+"She is acquainted, I find, with Mrs. Milroy's late nurse; and
+she has been seeing her friend off at the station this afternoon.
+They talked, of course, of affairs at the cottage, and my name
+found its way into the conversation. I am quite wrong, it seems,
+if the nurse's authority is to be trusted, in believing Miss
+Milroy to be responsible for sending Mr. Armadale to my reference
+in London. Miss Milroy really knew nothing about it, and it all
+originated in her mother's mad jealousy of me. The present
+wretched state of things at the cottage is due entirely to the
+same cause. Mrs. Milroy is firmly persuaded that my remaining
+at Thorpe Ambrose is referable to my having some private means
+of communicating with the major which it is impossible for her
+to discover. With this conviction in her mind, she has become
+so unmanageable that no person, with any chance of bettering
+herself, could possibly remain in attendance an her; and sooner
+or later, the major, object to it as he may, will be obliged to
+place her under proper medical care.
+
+"That is the sum and substance of what the wearisome landlady,
+had to tell me. Unnecessary to say that I was not in the least
+interested by it. Even if the nurse's s assertion is to be
+depended on--which I persist in doubting--it is of no importance
+now. I know that Miss Milroy, and nobody but Miss Milroy has
+utterly ruined my prospect of becoming Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose, and I care to know nothing more. If her mother was
+really alone in the attempt to expose my false reference, her
+mother seems to be suffering for it, at any rate. And so good-by
+to Mrs. Milroy; and Heaven defend me from any more last glimpses
+at the cottages seen through the medium of my landlady's
+spectacles!
+
+
+"Nine o'clock.--Bashwood has just left me, having come with news
+from the great house. Pedgift the younger has made his attempt
+at bringing about a reconciliation this very day, and has failed.
+I am the sole cause of the failure. Armadale is quite willing to
+be reconciled if Pedgift the elder will avoid all future occasion
+of disagreement between them by never recurring to the subject
+of Miss Gwilt. This, however, happens to be exactly the condition
+which Pedgift's father--with his opinion of me and my
+doings--should consider it his duty to Armadale _not_ to accept.
+So lawyer and client remain as far apart as ever, and the
+obstacle of the Pedgifts is cleared out of my way.
+
+"It might have been a very awkward obstacle, so far as Pedgift
+the elder is concerned, if one of his suggestions had been
+carried out; I mean, if an officer of the London police had been
+brought down here to look at me. It is a question, even now,
+whether I had better not take to the thick veil again, which I
+always wear in London and other large places. The only difficulty
+is that it would excite remark in this inquisitive little town
+to see me wearing a thick veil, for the first time, in the summer
+weather.
+
+"It is close on ten o'clock; I have been dawdling over my diary
+longer than I supposed.
+
+"No words can describe how weary and languid I feel. Why don't I
+take my sleeping drops and go to bed? There is no meeting between
+Armadale and Miss Milroy to force me into early rising to-morrow
+morning. Am I trying, for the hundredth time, to see my way
+clearly into the future--trying, in my present state of fatigue,
+to be the quick-witted woman I once was, before all these
+anxieties came together and overpowered me? or am I perversely
+afraid of my bed when I want it most? I don't know; I am tired
+and miserable; I am looking wretchedly haggard and old. With a
+little encouragement, I might be fool enough to burst out crying.
+Luckily, there is no one to encourage me. What sort of a night
+is it, I wonder?
+
+"A cloudy night, with the moon showing at intervals, and the wind
+rising. I can just hear it moaning among the ins and outs of the
+unfinished cottages at the end of the street. My nerves must be
+a little shaken, I think. I was startled just now by a shadow on
+the wall. It was only after a moment or two that I mustered sense
+enough to notice where the candle was, and to see that the shadow
+was my own.
+
+"Shadows remind me of Midwinter; or, if the shadows don't,
+something else does. I must have another look at his letter,
+and then I will positively go to bed.
+
+
+"I shall end in getting fond of him. If I remain much longer in
+this lonely uncertain state--so irresolute, so unlike my usual
+self--I shall end in getting fond of him. What madness! As if
+_I_ could ever be really fond of a man again!
+
+"Suppose I took one of my sudden resolutions, and married him.
+Poor as he is, he would give me a name and a position if I became
+his wife. Let me see how the name--his own name--would look, if
+I really did consent to it for mine.
+
+"'Mrs. Armadale!' Pretty.
+
+"'Mrs. Allan Armadale!' Prettier still.
+
+"My nerves _must_ be shaken. Here is my own handwriting startling
+me now! It is so strange; it is enough to startle anybody. The
+similarity in the two names never struck me in this light before.
+Marry which of the two I might, my name would, of course, be the
+same. I should have been Mrs. Armadale, if I had married the
+light-haired Allan at the great house. And I can be Mrs. Armadale
+still, if I marry the dark-haired Allan in London. It's almost
+maddening to write it down--to feel that something ought to come
+of it--and to find nothing come.
+
+"How _can_ anything come of it? If I did go to London, and marry
+him (as of course I must marry him) under his real name, would
+he let me be known by it afterward? With all his reasons for
+concealing his real name, he would insist--no, he is too fond of
+me to do that--he would entreat me to take the name which he has
+assumed. Mrs. Midwinter. Hideous! Ozias, too, when I wanted to
+address him familiarly, as his wife should. Worse than hideous!
+
+"And yet there would be some reason for humoring him in this
+if he asked me.
+
+"Suppose the brute at the great house happened to leave this
+neighborhood as a single man; and suppose, in his absence, any
+of the people who know him heard of a Mrs. Allan Armadale, they
+would set her down at once as his wife. Even if they actually saw
+me--if I actually came among them with that name, and if he was
+not present to contradict it--his own servants would be the first
+to say, 'We knew she would marry him, after all!' And my
+lady-patronesses, who will be ready to believe anything of me
+now we have quarreled, would join the chorus _sotto voce:_ 'Only
+think, my dear, the report that so shocked us actually turns out
+to be true!' No. If I marry Midwinter, I must either be
+perpetually putting my husband and myself in a false position--or
+I must leave his real name, his pretty, romantic name, behind me
+at the church door.
+
+"My husband! As if I was really going to marry him! I am _not_
+going to marry him, and there's an end of it.
+
+
+"Half-past ten.--Oh, dear! oh, dear! how my temples throb, and
+how hot my weary eyes feel! There is the moon looking at me
+through the window. How fast the little scattered clouds are
+flying before the wind! Now they let the moon in; and now they
+shut the moon out. What strange shapes the patches of yellow
+light take, and lose again, all in a moment! No peace and quiet
+for me, look where I may. The candle keeps flickering, and the
+very sky itself is restless to-night.
+
+"'To bed! to bed!' as Lady Macbeth says. I wonder, by-the-by,
+what Lady Macbeth would have done in my position? She would have
+killed somebody when her difficulties first began. Probably
+Armadale.
+
+
+"Friday morning.--A night's rest, thanks again to my Drops.
+I went to breakfast in better spirits, and received a morning
+welcome in the shape of a letter from Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+"My silence has produced its effect on Mother Jezebel. She
+attributes it to the right cause, and she shows her claws at
+last. If I am not in a position to pay my note of hand for thirty
+pounds, which is due on Tuesday next, her lawyer is instructed to
+'take the usual course.' _If_ I am not in a position to pay it!
+Why, when I have settled to-day with my landlord, I shall have
+barely five pounds left! There is not the shadow of a prospect
+between now and Tuesday of my earning any money; and I don't
+possess a friend in this place who would trust me with sixpence.
+The difficulties that are swarming round me wanted but one more
+to complete them, and that one has come.
+
+"Midwinter would assist me, of course, if I could bring myself
+to ask him for assistance. But _that_ means marrying him. Am I
+really desperate enough and helpless enough to end it in that
+way? No; not yet.
+
+"My head feels heavy; I must get out into the fresh air, and
+think about it.
+
+
+"Two o'clock.--I believe I have caught the infection of
+Midwinter's superstition. I begin to think that events are
+forcing me nearer and nearer to some end which I don't see yet,
+but which I am firmly persuaded is now not far off.
+
+"I have been insulted--deliberately insulted before witnesses--by
+Miss Milroy.
+
+"After walking, as usual, in the most unfrequented place I could
+pick out, and after trying, not very successfully, to think to
+some good purpose of what I am to do next, I remembered that I
+needed some note-paper and pens, and went back to the town to the
+stationer's shop. It might have been wiser to have sent for what
+I wanted. But I was weary of myself, and weary of my lonely
+rooms; and I did my own errand, for no better reason than that
+it was something to do.
+
+"I had just got into the shop, and was asking for what I wanted,
+when another customer came in. We both looked up, and recognized
+each other at the same moment: Miss Milroy.
+
+"A woman and a lad were behind the counter, besides the man who
+was serving me. The woman civilly addressed the new customer.
+'What can we have the pleasure of doing for you, miss?' After
+pointing it first by looking me straight in the face, she
+answered, 'Nothing, thank you, at present. I'll come back when
+the shop is empty.'
+
+"She went out. The three people in the shop looked at me in
+silence. In silence, on my side, I paid for my purchases, and
+left the place. I don't know how I might have felt if I had been
+in my usual spirits. In the anxious, unsettled state I am in now,
+I can't deny it, the girl stung me.
+
+"In the weakness of the moment (for it was nothing else), I was
+on the point of matching her petty spitefulness by spitefulness
+quite as petty on my side. I had actually got as far as the whole
+length of the street on my way to the major's cottage, bent on
+telling him the secret of his daughter's morning walks, before
+my better sense came back to me. When I did cool down, I turned
+round at once, and took the way home. No, no, Miss Milroy; mere
+temporary mischief-making at the cottage, which would only end
+in your father forgiving you, and in Armadale profiting by his
+indulgence, will nothing like pay the debt I owe you. I don't
+forget that your heart is set on Armadale; and that the major,
+however he may talk, has always ended hitherto in giving you your
+own way. My head may be getting duller and duller, but it has not
+quite failed me yet.
+
+"In the meantime, there is Mother Oldershaw's letter waiting
+obstinately to be answered; and here am I, not knowing what to do
+about it yet. Shall I answer it or not? It doesn't matter for the
+present; there are some hours still to spare before the post goes
+out.
+
+"Suppose I asked Armadale to lend me the money? I should enjoy
+getting _something_ out of him; and I believe, in his present
+situation with Miss Milroy, he would do anything to be rid of me.
+Mean enough this, on my part. Pooh! When you hate and despise a
+man, as I hate and despise Armadale, who cares for looking mean
+in _his_ eyes?
+
+"And yet my pride--or my something else, I don't know
+what--shrinks from it.
+
+"Half-past two--only half-past two. Oh, the dreadful weariness
+of these long summer days! I can't keep thinking and thinking any
+longer; I must do something to relieve my mind. Can I go to my
+piano? No; I'm not fit for it. Work? No; I shall get thinking
+again if I take to my needle. A man, in my place, would find
+refuge in drink. I'm not a man, and I can't drink. I'll dawdle
+over my dresses, and put my things tidy.
+
+* * * * * *
+
+"Has an hour passed? More than an hour. It seems like a minute.
+
+"I can't look back through these leaves, but I know I wrote
+somewhere that I felt myself getting nearer and nearer to some
+end that was still hidden from me. The end is hidden no longer.
+The cloud is off my mind, the blindness has gone from my eyes.
+I see it! I see it!
+
+"It came to me--I never sought it. If I was lying on my
+death-bed, I could swear, with a safe conscience, I never sought
+it.
+
+"I was only looking over my things; I was as idly and as
+frivolously employed as the most idle and most frivolous woman
+living. I went through my dresses, and my linen. What could be
+more innocent? Children go through their dresses and their linen.
+
+"It was, such a long summer day, and I was so tired of myself.
+I went to my boxes next. I looked over the large box first, which
+I usually leave open; and then I tried the small box, which
+I always keep locked.
+
+"From one thing to the other, I came at last to the bundle of
+letters at the bottom--the letters of the man for whom I once
+sacrificed and suffered everything; the man who has made me what
+I am.
+
+"A hundred times I had determined to burn his letters; but I have
+never burned them. This, time, all I said was, 'I won't read his
+letters!' And I did read them.
+
+"The villain--the false, cowardly, heartless villain--what have
+I to do with his letters now? Oh, the misery of being a woman!
+Oh, the meanness that our memory of a man can tempt us to, when
+our love for him is dead and gone! I read the letters--I was so
+lonely and so miserable, I read the letters.
+
+"I came to the last--the letter he wrote to encourage me, when I
+hesitated as the terrible time came nearer and nearer; the letter
+that revived me when my resolution failed at the eleventh hour.
+I read on, line after line, till I came to these words:
+
+
+"'...I really have no patience with such absurdities as you
+have written to me. You say I am driving you on to do what
+is beyond a woman's courage. Am I? I might refer you to any
+collection of Trials, English or foreign. to show that you were
+utterly wrong. But such collections may be beyond your reach;
+and I will only refer you to a case in yesterday's newspaper.
+The circumstances are totally different from our circumstances;
+but the example of resolution in a woman is an example worth
+your notice.
+
+"'You will find, among the law reports, a married woman charged
+with fraudulently representing herself to be the missing widow of
+an officer in the merchant service, who was supposed to have been
+drowned. The name of the prisoner's husband (living) and the name
+of the officer (a very common one, both as to Christian and
+surname) happened to be identically the same. There was money to
+be got by it (sorely wanted by the prisoner's husband, to whom
+she was devotedly attached), if the fraud had succeeded. The
+woman took it all on herself. Her husband was helpless and ill,
+and the bailiffs were after him. The circumstances, as you may
+read for yourself, were all in her favor, and were so well
+managed by her that the lawyers themselves acknowledged she might
+have succeeded, if the supposed drowned man had not turned up
+alive and well in the nick of time to confront her. The scene
+took place at the lawyer's office, and came out in the evidence
+at the police court. The woman was handsome, and the sailor was
+a good-natured man. He wanted, at first, if the lawyers would
+have allowed him, to let her off. He said to her, among other
+things: "You didn't count on the drowned man coming back, alive
+and hearty, did you, ma'am?" "It's lucky for you," she said,
+"I didn't count on it. You have escaped the sea, but you wouldn't
+have escaped _me_." "Why, what would you have done, if you
+_had_ known I was coming back?" says the sailor. She looked him
+steadily in the face, and answered: "I would have killed you."
+There! Do you think such a woman as that would have written to
+tell me I was pressing her further than she had courage to go?
+A handsome woman, too, like yourself. You would drive some men
+in my position to wish they had her now in your place.'
+
+
+"I read no further. When I had got on, line by line, to those
+words, it burst on me like a flash of lightning. In an instant I
+saw it as plainly as I see it now. It is horrible, it is unheard
+of, it outdares all daring; but, if I can only nerve myself to
+face one terrible necessity, it is to be done. _I may personate
+the richly provided widow of Allan Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose,
+if I can count on Allan Armadale's death in a given time_.
+
+"There, in plain words, is the frightful temptation under which
+I now feel myself sinking. It is frightful in more ways than one;
+for it has come straight out of that other temptation to which
+I yielded in the by-gone time.
+
+"Yes; there the letter has been waiting for me in my box, to
+serve a purpose never thought of by the villain who wrote it.
+There is the Case, as he called it--only quoted to taunt me;
+utterly unlike my own case at the time--there it has been,
+waiting and lurking for me through all the changes in my life,
+till it has come to be like _my_ case at last.
+
+"It might startle any woman to see this, and even this is not
+the worst. The whole thing has been in my Diary, for days past,
+without my knowing it! Every idle fancy that escaped me has been
+tending secretly that one way! And I never saw, never suspected
+it, till the reading of the letter put my own thoughts before me
+in a new light--till I saw the shadow of my own circumstances
+suddenly reflected in one special circumstance of that other
+woman's case!
+
+"It is to be done, if I can but look the necessity in the face.
+It is to be done, _if I can count on Allan Armadale's death in
+a given time_.
+
+"All but his death is easy. The whole series of events under
+which I have been blindly chafing and fretting for more than a
+week past have been, one and all--though I was too stupid to see
+it--events in my favor; events paving the way smoothly and more
+smoothly straight to the end.
+
+"In three bold steps--only three!--that end might be reached.
+Let Midwinter marry me privately, under his real name--step the
+first! Let Armadale leave Thorpe Ambrose a single man, and die
+in some distant place among strangers--step the second!
+
+"Why am I hesitating? Why not go on to step the third, and last?
+
+"I _will_ go on. Step the third, and last, is my appearance,
+after the announcement of Armadale's death has reached this
+neighborhood, in the character of Armadale's widow, with my
+marriage certificate in my hand to prove my claim. It is as clear
+as the sun at noonday. Thanks to the exact similarity between the
+two names, and thanks to the careful manner in which the secret
+of that similarity has been kept, I may be the wife of the dark
+Allan Armadale, known as such to nobody but my husband and
+myself; and I may, out of that very position, claim the character
+of widow of the light Allan Armadale, with proof to support me
+(in the shape of my marriage certificate) which would be proof
+in the estimation of the most incredulous person living.
+
+"To think of my having put all this in my Diary! To think of my
+having actually contemplated this very situation, and having seen
+nothing more in it, at the time, than a reason (if I married
+Midwinter) for consenting to appear in the world under my
+husband's assumed name!
+
+"What is it daunts me? The dread of obstacles? The fear of
+discovery?
+
+"Where are the obstacles? Where is the fear of discovery?
+
+"I am actually suspected all over the neighborhood of intriguing
+to be mistress of Thorpe Ambrose. I am the only person who knows
+the real turn that Armadale's inclinations have taken. Not a
+creature but myself is as yet aware of his early morning meetings
+with Miss Milroy. If it is necessary to part them, I can do it at
+any moment by an anonymous line to the major. If it is necessary
+to remove Armadale from Thorpe Ambrose, I can get him away at
+three days' notice. His own lips informed me, when I last spoke
+to him, that he would go to the ends of the earth to be friends
+again with Midwinter, if Midwinter would let him. I have only to
+tell Midwinter to write from London, and ask to be reconciled;
+and Midwinter would obey me--and to London Armadale would go.
+Every difficulty, at starting, is smoothed over ready to my hand.
+Every after-difficulty I could manage for myself. In the whole
+venture--desperate as it looks to pass myself off for the widow
+of one man, while I am all the while the wife of the other--there
+is absolutely no necessity that wants twice considering, but the
+one terrible necessity of Armadale's death.
+
+"His death! It might be a terrible necessity to any other woman;
+but is it, ought it to be terrible to Me?
+
+"I hate him for his mother's sake. I hate him for his own sake. I
+hate him for going to London behind my back, and making inquiries
+about me. I hate him for forcing me out of my situation before I
+wanted to go. I hate him for destroying all my hopes of marrying
+him, and throwing me back helpless on my own miserable life. But,
+oh, after what I have done already in the past time, how can I?
+how can I?
+
+"The girl, too--the girl who has come between us; who has taken
+him away from me; who has openly insulted me this very day--how
+the girl whose heart is set on him would feel it if he died! What
+a vengeance on _her_, if I did it! And when I was received as
+Armadale's widow what a triumph for _me_. Triumph! It is more
+than triumph--it is the salvation of me. A name that can't be
+assailed, a station that can't be assailed, to hide myself in
+from my past life! Comfort, luxury, wealth! An income of twelve
+hundred a year secured to me secured by a will which has been
+looked at by a lawyer: secured independently of anything Armadale
+can say or do himself! I never had twelve hundred a year. At my
+luckiest time, I never had half as much, really my own. What have
+I got now? Just five pounds left in the world--and the prospect
+next week of a debtor's prison.
+
+"But, oh, after what I have done already in the past time, how
+can I? how can I?
+
+"Some women--in my place, and with my recollections to look back
+on--would feel it differently. Some women would say, 'It's easier
+the second time than the first.' Why can't I? why can't I?
+
+"Oh, you Devil tempting me, is there no Angel near to raise some
+timely obstacle between this and to-morrow which might help me to
+give it up?
+
+"I shall sink under it--I shall sink, if I write or think of it
+any more! I'll shut up these leaves and go out again. I'll get
+some common person to come with me, and we will talk of common
+things. I'll take out the woman of the house, and her children.
+We will go and see something. There is a show of some kind in the
+town--I'll treat them to it. I'm not such an ill-natured woman
+when I try; and the landlady has really been kind to me. Surely
+I might occupy my mind a little in seeing her and her children
+enjoying themselves.
+
+
+"A minute since, I shut up these leaves as I said I would; and
+now I have opened them again, I don't know why. I think my brain
+is turned. I feel as if something was lost out of my mind; I feel
+as if I ought to find it here
+
+"I have found it! _Midwinter!!!_
+
+"Is it possible that I can have been thinking of the reasons For
+and Against, for an hour past--writing Midwinter's name over
+and over again--speculating seriously on marrying him--and all
+the time not once remembering that, even with every other
+impediment removed, _he_ alone, when the time came, would be an
+insurmountable obstacle in my way? Has the effort to face the
+consideration of Armadale's death absorbed me to _that_ degree?
+I suppose it has. I can't account for such extraordinary
+forgetfulness on my part in any other way.
+
+"Shall I stop and think it out, as I have thought out all the
+rest? Shall I ask myself if the obstacle of Midwinter would,
+after all, when the time came, be the unmanageable obstacle that
+it looks at present? No! What need is there to think of it? I
+have made up my mind to get the better of the temptation. I have
+made up my mind to give my landlady and her children a treat; I
+have made up my mind to close my Diary. And closed it shall be.
+
+
+"Six o'clock.--The landlady's gossip is unendurable; the
+landlady's children distract me. I have left them to run back
+here before post time and write a line to Mrs. Oldershaw.
+
+"The dread that I shall sink under the temptation has grown
+stronger and stronger on me. I have determined to put it beyond
+my power to have my own way and follow my own will. Mother
+Oldershaw shall be the salvation of me for the first time since I
+have known her. If I can't pay my note of hand, she threatens me
+with an arrest. Well, she _shall_ arrest me. In the state my mind
+is in now, the best thing that can happen to me is to be taken
+away from Thorpe Ambrose, whether I like it or not. I will write
+and say that I am to be found here I will write and tell her, in
+so many words, that the best service she can render me is to lock
+me up.
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--The letter has gone to the post. I had begun
+to feel a little easier, when the children came in to thank me
+for taking them to the show. One of them is a girl, and the girl
+upset me. She is a forward child, and her hair is nearly the
+color of mine. She said, 'I shall be like you when I have grown
+bigger, shan't I?' Her idiot of a mother said, 'Please to excuse
+her, miss,' and took her out of the room, laughing. Like me!
+I don't pretend to be fond of the child; but think of her being
+like me!
+
+
+"Saturday morning.--I have done well for once in acting on
+impulse, and writing as I did to Mrs. Oldershaw. The only new
+circumstance that has happened is another circumstance in my
+favor!
+
+"Major Milroy has answered Armadale's letter, entreating
+permission to call at the cottage and justify himself. His
+daughter read it in silence, when Armadale handed it to her at
+their meeting this morning, in the park. But they talked about
+it afterward, loud enough for me to hear them. The major persists
+in the course he has taken. He says his opinion of Armadale's
+conduct has been formed, not on common report, but on Armadale's
+own letters, and he sees no reason to alter the conclusion at
+which he arrived when the correspondence between them was closed.
+
+"This little matter had, I confess, slipped out of my memory.
+It might have ended awkwardly for _me_. If Major Milroy had been
+less obstinately wedded to his own opinion, Armadale might have
+justified himself; the marriage engagement might have been
+acknowledged; and all _my_ power of influencing the matter might
+have been at an end. As it is, they must continue to keep the
+engagement strictly secret; and Miss Milroy, who has never
+ventured herself near the great house since the thunder-storm
+forced her into it for shelter, will be less likely than ever
+to venture there now. I can part them when I please; with an
+anonymous line to the major, I can part them when I please!
+
+"After having discussed the letter, the talk between them turned
+on what they were to do next. Major Milroy's severity, as it soon
+appeared, produced the usual results. Armadale returned to the
+subject of the elopement; and this time she listened to him.
+There is everything to drive her to it. Her outfit of clothes
+is nearly ready; and the summer holidays, at the school which
+has been chosen for her, end at the end of next week. When I left
+them, they had decided to meet again and settle something on
+Monday.
+
+"The last words I heard him address to her, before I went away,
+shook me a little. He said: 'There is one difficulty, Neelie,
+that needn't trouble us, at any rate. I have got plenty of
+money.' And then he kissed her. The way to his life began to look
+an easier way to me when he talked of his money, and kissed her.
+
+"Some hours have passed, and the more I think of it, the more I
+fear the blank interval between this time and the time when Mrs.
+Oldershaw calls in the law, and protects me against myself. It
+might have been better if I had stopped at home this morning. But
+how could I? After the insult she offered me yesterday, I tingled
+all over to go and look at her.
+
+"To-day; Sunday; Monday; Tuesday. They can't arrest me for the
+money before Wednesday. And my miserable five pounds are
+dwindling to four! And he told her he had plenty of money! And
+she blushed and trembled when he kissed her. It might have been
+better for him, better for her, and better for me, if my debt had
+fallen due yesterday, and if the bailiffs had their hands on me
+at this moment.
+
+"Suppose I had the means of leaving Thorpe Ambrose by the next
+train, and going somewhere abroad, and absorbing myself in some
+new interest, among new people. Could I do it, rather than look
+again at that easy way to his life which would smooth the way
+to everything else?
+
+"Perhaps I might. But where is the money to come from? Surely
+some way of getting it struck me a day or two since? Yes; that
+mean idea of asking Armadale to help me! Well; I _will_ be mean
+for once. I'll give him the chance of making a generous use of
+that well-filled purse which it is such a comfort to him to
+reflect on in his present circumstances. It would soften my heart
+toward any man if he lent me money in my present extremity; and,
+if Armadale lends me money, it might soften my heart toward him.
+When shall I go? At once! I won't give myself time to feel the
+degradation of it, and to change my mind.
+
+
+"Three 'clock.--I mark the hour. He has sealed his own doom.
+He has insulted me.
+
+"Yes! I have suffered it once from Miss Milroy. And I have now
+suffered it a second time from Armadale himself. An insult--a
+marked, merciless, deliberate insult in the open day!
+
+"I had got through the town, and had advanced a few hundred
+yards along the road that leads to the great house, when I saw
+Armadale at a little distance, coming toward me. He was walking
+fast--evidently with some errand of his own to take him to the
+town. The instant he caught sight of me he stopped, colored up,
+took off his hat, hesitated, and turned aside down a lane behind
+him, which I happen to know would take him exactly in the
+contrary direction to the direction in which he was walking when
+he first saw me. His conduct said in so many words, 'Miss Milroy
+may hear of it; I daren't run the risk of being seen speaking to
+you.' Men have used me heartlessly; men have done and said hard
+things to me; but no man living ever yet treated me as if I was
+plague-struck, and as if the very air about me was infected by
+my presence!
+
+"I say no more. When he walked away from me down that lane, he
+walked to his death. I have written to Midwinter to expect me
+in London nest week, and to be ready for our marriage soon
+afterward.
+
+
+"Four o'clock.--Half an hour since, I put on my bonnet to go out
+and post the letter to Midwinter myself. And here I am, still in
+my room, with my mind torn by doubts, and my letter on the table.
+
+"Armadale counts for nothing in the perplexities that are now
+torturing me. It is Midwinter who makes me hesitate. Can I take
+the first of those three steps that lead me to the end, without
+the common caution of looking at consequences? Can I marry
+Midwinter, without knowing beforehand how to meet the obstacle
+of my husband, when the time comes which transforms me from the
+living Armadale's wife to the dead Armadale's widow?
+
+"Why can't I think of it, when I know I _must_ think of it? Why
+can't I look at it as steadily as I have looked at all the rest?
+I feel his kisses on my lips; I feel his tears on my bosom; I
+feel his arms round me again. He is far away in London; and yet,
+he is here and won't let me think of it!
+
+"Why can't I wait a little? Why can't I let Time help me? Time?
+It's Saturday! What need is there to think of it, unless I like?
+There is no post to London to-day. I _must_ wait. If I posted the
+letter, it wouldn't go. Besides, to- morrow I may hear from Mrs.
+Oldershaw. I ought to wait to hear from Mrs. Oldershaw. I can't
+consider myself a free woman till I know what Mrs. Oldershaw
+means to do. There is a necessity for waiting till to-morrow.
+I shall take my bonnet off, and lock the letter up in my desk.
+
+
+"Sunday morning.--There is no resisting it! One after another
+the circumstances crowd on me. They come thicker and thicker,
+and they all force me one way.
+
+"I have got Mother Oldershaw's answer. The wretch fawns on me,
+and cringes to me. I can see, as plainly as if she had
+acknowledged it, that she suspects me of seeing my own way to
+success at Thorpe Ambrose without her assistance. Having found
+threatening me useless, she tries coaxing me now. I am her
+darling Lydia again! She is quite shocked that I could imagine
+she ever really intended to arrest her bosom friend; and she has
+only to entreat me, as a favor to herself, to renew the bill!
+
+"I say once more, no mortal creature could resist it! Time after
+time I have tried to escape the temptation; and time after time
+the circumstances drive me back again. I can struggle no longer.
+The post that takes the letters to-night shall take my letter to
+Midwinter among the rest.
+
+"To-night! If I give myself till to-night, something else may
+happen. If I give myself till to-night, I may hesitate again. I'm
+weary of the torture of hesitating. I must and will have relief
+in the present, cost what it may in the future. My letter to
+Midwinter will drive me mad if I see it staring and staring at me
+in my desk any longer. I can post it in ten minutes' time--and I
+will!
+
+"It is done. The first of the three steps that lead me to the end
+is a step taken. My mind is quieter--the letter is in the post.
+
+"By to-morrow Midwinter will receive it. Before the end of the
+week Armadale must be publicly seen to leave Thorpe Ambrose; and
+I must be publicly seen to leave with him.
+
+"Have I looked at the consequences of my marriage to Midwinter?
+No! Do I know how to meet the obstacle of my husband, when the
+time comes which transforms me from the living Armadale's wife
+to the dead Armadale's widow?
+
+"No! When the time comes, I must meet the obstacle as I best may.
+I am going blindfold, then--so far as Midwinter is concerned--
+into this frightful risk? Yes; blindfold. Am I out of my senses?
+Very likely. Or am I a little too fond of him to look the thing
+in the face? I dare say. Who cares?
+
+"I won't, I won't, I won't think of it! Haven't I a will of my
+own? And can't I think, if I like, of something else?
+
+"Here is Mother Jezebel's cringing letter. _That_ is something
+else to think of. I'll answer it. I am in a fine humor for
+writing to Mother Jezebel.
+
+* * * * * * *
+
+_Conclusion of Miss Gwilt's Letter to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
+
+"...I told you, when I broke off, that I would wait before I
+finished this, and ask my Diary if I could safely tell you what
+I have now got it in my mind to do. Well, I have asked; and my
+Diary says, 'Don't tell her!' Under these circumstances I close
+my letter--with my best excuses for leaving you in the dark.
+
+"I shall probably be in London before long--and I may tell you
+by word of mouth what I don't think it safe to write here. Mind,
+I make no promise! It all depends on how I feel toward you at
+the time. I don't doubt your discretion; but (under certain
+circumstances) I am not so sure of your courage. L. G."
+
+"P. S.--My best thanks for your permission to renew the bill. I
+decline profiting by the proposal. The money will be ready when
+the money is due. I have a friend now in London who will pay it
+if I ask him. Do you wonder who the friend is? You will wonder at
+one or two other things, Mrs. Oldershaw, before many weeks more
+are over your head and mine."
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+LOVE AND LAW.
+
+On the morning of Monday, the 28th of July, Miss Gwilt--once more
+on the watch for Allan and Neelie--reached her customary post of
+observation in the park, by the usual roundabout way.
+
+She was a little surprised to find Neelie alone at the place of
+meeting. She was more seriously astonished, when the tardy Allan
+made his appearance ten minutes later, to see him mounting the
+side of the dell, with a large volume under his arm, and to hear
+him say, as an apology for being late, that "he had muddled away
+his time in hunting for the Books; and that he had only found
+one, after all, which seemed in the least likely to repay either
+Neelie or himself for the trouble of looking into it."
+
+If Miss Gwilt had waited long enough in the park, on the previous
+Saturday, to hear the lovers' parting words on that occasion, she
+would have been at no loss to explain the mystery of the volume
+under Allan's arm, and she would have understood the apology
+which he now offered for being late as readily as Neelie herself.
+
+There is a certain exceptional occasion in life--the occasion
+of marriage--on which even girls in their teens sometimes become
+capable (more or less hysterically) of looking at consequences.
+At the farewell moment of the interview on Saturday, Neelie's
+mind had suddenly precipitated itself into the future; and
+she had utterly confounded Allan by inquiring whether the
+contemplated elopement was an offense punishable by the Law?
+Her memory satisfied her that she had certainly read somewhere,
+at some former period, in some book or other (possibly a novel),
+of an elopement with a dreadful end--of a bride dragged home in
+hysterics--and of a bridegroom sentenced to languish in prison,
+with all his beautiful hair cut off, by Act of Parliament, close
+to his head. Supposing she could bring herself to consent to the
+elopement at all--which she positively declined to promise--she
+must first insist on discovering whether there was any fear of
+the police being concerned in her marriage as well as the parson
+and the clerk. Allan, being a man, ought to know; and to Allan
+she looked for information--with this preliminary assurance to
+assist him in laying down the law, that she would die of a broken
+heart a thousand times over, rather than be the innocent means of
+sending him to languish in prison, and of cutting his hair off,
+by Act of Parliament, close to his head. "It's no laughing
+matter," said Neelie, resolutely, in conclusion; "I decline even
+to think of our marriage till my mind is made easy first on the
+subject of the Law."
+
+"But I don't know anything about the law, not even as much as
+you do," said Allan. "Hang the law! I don't mind my head being
+cropped. Let's risk it."
+
+"Risk it?" repeated Neelie, indignantly. "Have you no
+consideration for me? I won't risk it! Where there's a will,
+there's a way. We must find out the law for ourselves."
+
+"With all my heart," said Allan. "How?"
+
+"Out of books, to be sure! There must be quantities of
+information in that enormous library of yours at the great house.
+If you really love me, you won't mind going over the backs of a
+few thousand books, for my sake!"
+
+"I'll go over the backs of ten thousand!" cried Allan, warmly.
+"Would you mind telling me what I'm to look for?"
+
+"For 'Law,' to be sure! When it says 'Law' on the back, open it,
+and look inside for Marriage--read every word of it--and then
+come here and explain it to me. What! you don't think your head
+is to be trusted to do such a simple thing as that?"
+
+"I'm certain it isn't," said Allan. "Can't you help me?"
+
+"Of course I can, if you can't manage without me! Law may be
+hard, but it can't be harder than music; and I must, and will,
+satisfy my mind. Bring me all the books you can find, on Monday
+morning--in a wheelbarrow, if there are a good many of them,
+and if you can't manage it in any other way."
+
+The result of this conversation was Allan's appearance in the
+park, with a volume of Blackstone's Commentaries under his arm,
+on the fatal Monday morning, when Miss Gwilt's written engagement
+of marriage was placed in Midwinter's hands. Here again, in this,
+as in all other human instances, the widely discordant elements
+of the grotesque and the terrible were forced together by that
+subtle law of contrast which is one of the laws of mortal life.
+Amid all the thickening complications now impending over their
+heads--with the shadow of meditated murder stealing toward one of
+them already from the lurking-place that hid Miss Gwilt--the two
+sat down, unconscious of the future, with the book between them;
+and applied themselves to the study of the law of marriage, with
+a grave resolution to understand it, which, in two such students,
+was nothing less than a burlesque in itself!
+
+
+"Find the place," said Neelie, as soon as they were comfortably
+established. "We must manage this by what they call a division
+of labor. You shall read, and I'll take notes."
+
+She produced forthwith a smart little pocket-book and pencil,
+and opened the book in the middle, where there was a blank page
+on the right hand and the left. At the top of the right-hand page
+she wrote the word _Good_. At the top of the left-hand page she
+wrote the word _Bad_. "'Good' means where the law is on our
+side," she explained; "and 'Bad' means where the law is against
+us. We will have 'Good' and 'Bad' opposite each other, all down
+the two pages; and when we get to the bottom, we'll add them up,
+and act accordingly. They say girls have no heads for business.
+Haven't they! Don't look at me--look at Blackstone, and begin."
+
+"Would you mind giving one a kiss first?" asked Allan.
+
+"I should mind it very much. In our serious situation, when we
+have both got to exert our intellects, I wonder you can ask for
+such a thing!"
+
+"That's why I asked for it," said the unblushing Allan. "I feel
+as if it would clear my head."
+
+"Oh, if it would clear your head, that's quite another thing!
+I must clear your head, of course, at any sacrifice. Only one,
+mind," she whispered, coquettishly; "and pray be careful of
+Blackstone, or you'll lose the place."
+
+There was a pause in the conversation. Blackstone and the
+pocket-book both rolled on the ground together.
+
+"If this happens again," said Neelie, picking up the pocket-book,
+with her eyes and her complexion at their brightest and best, "I
+shall sit with my back to you for the rest of the morning. _Will_
+you go on?"
+
+Allan found his place for the second time, and fell headlong into
+the bottomless abyss of the English Law.
+
+"Page 280," he began. "Law of husband and wife. Here's a bit I
+don't understand, to begin with: 'It may be observed generally
+that the law considers marriage in the light of a Contract.' What
+does that mean? I thought a contract was the sort of a thing a
+builder signs when he promises to have the workmen out of the
+house in a given time, and when the time comes (as my poor mother
+used to say) the workmen never go."
+
+"Is there nothing about Love?" asked Neelie. "Look a little lower
+down."
+
+"Not a word. He sticks to his confounded 'Contract' all the way
+through."
+
+"Then he's a brute! Go on to something else that's more in our
+way."
+
+"Here's a bit that's more in our way: 'Incapacities. If
+any persons under legal incapacities come together, it is
+a meretricious, and not a matrimonial union.' (Blackstone's
+a good one at long words, isn't he? I wonder what he means by
+meretricious?) 'The first of these legal disabilities is a prior
+marriage, and having another husband or wife living--'"
+
+"Stop!" said Neelie; "I must make a note of that." She gravely
+made her first entry on the page headed "Good," as follows: "I
+have no husband, and Allan has no wife. We are both entirely
+unmarried at the present time."
+
+"All right, so far," remarked Allan, looking over her shoulder.
+
+"Go on," said Neelie. "What next?"
+
+"'The next disability,'" proceeded Allan, "'is want of age. The
+age for consent to matrimony is, fourteen in males, and twelve
+in females.' Come!" cried Allan, cheerfully, "Blackstone begins
+early enough, at any rate!"
+
+Neelie was too business-like to make any other remark, on her
+side, than the necessary remark in the pocket-book. She made
+another entry under the head of "Good": "I am old enough to
+consent, and so is Allan too. Go on," resumed Neelie, looking
+over the reader's shoulder. "Never mind all that prosing of
+Blackstone's, about the husband being of years of discretion,
+and the wife under twelve. Abominable wretch! the wife under
+twelve! Skip to the third incapacity, if there is one."
+
+"'The third incapacity,'" Allan went on, "'is want of reason.'"
+
+Neelie immediately made a third entry on the side of "Good":
+"Allan and I are both perfectly reasonable. Skip to the next
+page."
+
+Allan skipped. "'A fourth incapacity is in respect of proximity
+of relationship.'"
+
+A fourth entry followed instantly on the cheering side of the
+pocket-book: "He loves me, and I love him--without our being
+in the slightest degree related to each other. Any more?" asked
+Neelie, tapping her chin impatiently with the end of the pencil.
+
+"Plenty more," rejoined Allan; "all in hieroglyphics. Look here:
+'Marriage Acts, 4 Geo. IV., c. 76, and 6 and 7 Will. IV., c. 85
+(_q_).' Blackstone's intellect seems to be wandering here. Shall
+we take another skip, and see if he picks himself up again on the
+next page?"
+
+"Wait a little," said Neelie; "what's that I see in the middle?"
+She read for a minute in silence, over Allan's shoulder, and
+suddenly clasped her hands in despair. "I knew I was right!" she
+exclaimed. "Oh, heavens, here it is!"
+
+"Where?" asked Allan. "I see nothing about languishing in prison,
+and cropping a fellow's hair close to his head, unless it's in
+the hieroglyphics. Is '4 Geo. IV.' short for 'Lock him up'? and
+does 'c. 85 (_q_)' mean, 'Send for the hair-cutter'?"
+
+"Pray be serious," remonstrated Neelie. "We are both sitting on
+a volcano. There," she said pointing to the place. "Read it! If
+anything can bring you to a proper sense of our situation, _that_
+will."
+
+Allan cleared his throat, and Neelie held the point of her pencil
+ready on the depressing side of the account--otherwise the "Bad"
+page of the pocket-book.
+
+"'And as it is the policy of our law,'" Allan began, "'to prevent
+the marriage of persons under the age of twenty-one, without the
+consent of parents and guardians'"--(Neelie made her first entry
+on the side of "Bad!" "I'm only seventeen next birthday, and
+circumstances forbid me to confide my attachment to papa")--"'it
+is provided that in the case of the publication of banns of a
+person under twenty-one, not being a widower or widow, who are
+deemed emancipated'"--(Neelie made another entry on the
+depressing side: "Allan is not a widower, and I am not a widow;
+consequently, we are neither of us emancipated")--"'if the
+parent or guardian openly signifies his dissent at the time the
+banns are published'"--("which papa would be certain to do")--
+"'such publication would be void.' I'll take breath here if
+you'll allow me," said Allan. "Blackstone might put it in shorter
+sentences, I think, if he can't put it in fewer words. Cheer up,
+Neelie! there must be other ways of marrying, besides this
+roundabout way, that ends in a Publication and a Void. Infernal
+gibberish! I could write better English myself."
+
+"We are not at the end of it yet," said Neelie. "The Void is
+nothing to what is to come."
+
+"Whatever it is," rejoined Allan, "we'll treat it like a dose
+of physic--we'll take it at once, and be done with it." He went
+on reading: "'And no license to marry without banns shall be
+granted, unless oath shall be first made by one of the parties
+that he or she believes that there is no impediment of kindred
+or alliance'--well, I can take my oath of that with a safe
+conscience! What next? 'And one of the said parties must, for the
+space of fifteen days immediately preceding such license, have
+had his or her usual place of abode within the parish or chapelry
+within which such marriage is to be solemnized!' Chapelry! I'd
+live fifteen days in a dog-kennel with the greatest pleasure.
+I say, Neelie, all this seems like plain sailing enough. What
+are you shaking your head about? Go on, and I shall see? Oh,
+all right; I'll go on. Here we are: 'And where one of the said
+parties, not being a widower or widow, shall be under the age of
+twenty-one years, oath must first be made that the consent of the
+person or persons whose consent is required has been obtained,
+or that there is no person having authority to give such consent.
+The consent required by this act is that of the father--'" At
+those last formidable words Allan came to a full stop. "The
+consent of the father," he repeated, with all needful seriousness
+of look and manner. "I couldn't exactly swear to that, could I?"
+
+Neelie answered in expressive silence. She handed him the
+pocket-book, with the final entry completed, on the side of
+"Bad," in these terms: "Our marriage is impossible, unless Allan
+commits perjury."
+
+The lovers looked at each other, across the insuperable obstacle
+of Blackstone, in speechless dismay.
+
+"Shut up the book," said Neelie, resignedly. "I have no doubt we
+should find the police, and the prison, and the hair-cutting--all
+punishments for perjury, exactly as I told you!--if we looked at
+the next page. But we needn't trouble ourselves to look; we have
+found out quite enough already. It's all over with us. I must go
+to school on Saturday, and you must manage to forget me as soon
+as you can. Perhaps we may meet in after-life, and you may be a
+widower and I may be a widow, and the cruel law may consider us
+emancipated, when it's too late to be of the slightest use.
+By that time, no doubt, I shall be old and ugly, and you will
+naturally have ceased to care about me, and it will all end in
+the grave, and the sooner the better. Good-by," concluded Neelie,
+rising mournfully, with the tears in her eyes. "It's only
+prolonging our misery to stop here, unless--unless you have
+anything to propose?"
+
+"I've got something to propose," cried the headlong Allan. "It's
+an entirely new idea. Would you mind trying the blacksmith at
+Gretna Green?"
+
+"No earthly consideration," answered Neelie, indignantly, "would
+induce me to be married by a blacksmith!"
+
+"Don't be offended," pleaded Allan; "I meant it for the best.
+Lots of people in our situation have tried the blacksmith, and
+found him quite as good as a clergyman, and a most amiable man,
+I believe, into the bargain. Never mind! We must try another
+string to our bow."
+
+"We haven't got another to try," said Neelie.
+
+"Take my word for it," persisted Allan, stoutly, "there must be
+ways and means of circumventing Blackstone (without perjury), if
+we only knew of them. It's a matter of law, and we must consult
+somebody in the profession. I dare say it's a risk. But nothing
+venture, nothing have. What do you say to young Pedgift? He's a
+thorough good fellow. I'm sure we could trust young Pedgift to
+keep our secret."
+
+"Not for worlds!" exclaimed Neelie. "You may be willing to trust
+your secrets to the vulgar little wretch; I won't have him
+trusted with mine. I hate him. No!" she concluded, with a
+mounting color and a peremptory stamp of her foot on the grass.
+"I positively forbid you to take any of the Thorpe Ambrose people
+into your confidence. They would instantly suspect me, and it
+would be all over the place in a moment. My attachment may be an
+unhappy one," remarked Neelie, with her handkerchief to her eyes,
+"and papa may nip it in the bud, but I won't have it profaned by
+the town gossip!"
+
+"Hush! hush!" said Allan. "I won't say a word at Thorpe Ambrose,
+I won't indeed!" He paused, and considered for a moment. "There's
+another way!" he burst out, brightening up on the instant. "We've
+got the whole week before us. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll go
+to London!"
+
+There was a sudden rustling--heard neither by one nor the
+other--among the trees behind them that screened Miss Gwilt. One
+more of the difficulties in her way (the difficulty of getting
+Allan to London) now promised to be removed by an act of Allan's
+own will.
+
+"To London?" repeated Neelie, looking up in astonishment.
+
+"To London!" reiterated Allan. "That's far enough away from
+Thorpe Ambrose, surely? Wait a minute, and don't forget that this
+is a question of law. Very well, I know some lawyers in London
+who managed all my business for me when I first came in for this
+property; they are just the men to consult. And if they decline
+to be mixed up in it, there's their head clerk, who is one of
+the best fellows I ever met with in my life. I asked him to go
+yachting with me, I remember; and, though he couldn't go, he said
+he felt the obligation all the same. That's the man to help us.
+Blackstone's a mere infant to him. Don't say it's absurd; don't
+say it's exactly like _me_. Do pray hear me out. I won't breathe
+your name or your father's. I'll describe you as 'a young lady
+to whom I am devotedly attached.' And if my friend the clerk
+asks where you live, I'll say the north of Scotland, or the west
+of Ireland, or the Channel Islands, or anywhere else you like.
+My friend the clerk is a total stranger to Thorpe Ambrose and
+everybody in it (which is one recommendation); and in five
+minutes' time he'd put me up to what to do (which is another). If
+you only knew him! He's one of those extraordinary men who appear
+once or twice in a century--the sort of man who won't allow you
+to make a mistake if you try. All I have got to say to him
+(putting it short) is, 'My dear fellow, I want to be privately
+married without perjury.' All he has got to say to me (putting it
+short) is, 'You must do so-and-so and so-and-so, and you must be
+careful to avoid this, that, and the other.' I have nothing
+in the world to do but to follow his directions; and you have
+nothing in the world to do but what the bride always does
+when the bridegroom is ready and willing!" His arm stole round
+Neelie's waist, and his lips pointed the moral of the last
+sentence with that inarticulate eloquence which is so uniformly
+successful in persuading a woman against her will.
+
+All Neelie's meditated objections dwindled, in spite of her, to
+one feeble little question. "Suppose I allow you to go, Allan?"
+she whispered, toying nervously with the stud in the bosom of
+his shirt. "Shall you be very long away?"
+
+"I'll be off to-day," said Allan, "by the eleven o'clock train.
+And I'll be back to-morrow, if I and my friend the clerk can
+settle it all in time. If not, by Wednesday at latest."
+
+"You'll write to me every day?" pleaded Neelie, clinging a little
+closer to him. "I shall sink under the suspense, if you don't
+promise to write to me every day."
+
+Allan promised to write twice a day, if she liked--letter-
+writing, which was such an effort to other men, was no effort
+to _him_!
+
+"And mind, whatever those people may say to you in London,"
+proceeded Neelie, "I insist on your coming back for me. I
+positively decline to run away, unless you promise to fetch me."
+
+Allan promised for the second time, on his sacred word of honor,
+and at the full compass of his voice. But Neelie was not
+satisfied even yet. She reverted to first principles, and
+insisted on knowing whether Allan was quite sure he loved her.
+Allan called Heaven to witness how sure he was; and got another
+question directly for his pains. Could he solemnly declare that
+he would never regret taking Neelie away from home? Allan called
+Heaven to witness again, louder than ever. All to no purpose! The
+ravenous female appetite for tender protestations still hungered
+for more. "I know what will happen one of these days," persisted
+Neelie. "You will see some other girl who is prettier than I am;
+and you will wish you had married her instead of me!"
+
+As Allan opened his lips for a final outburst of asseveration,
+the stable clock at the great house was faintly audible in the
+distance striking the hour. Neelie started guiltily. It was
+breakfast-time at the cottage--in other words, time to take
+leave. At the last moment her heart went back to her father;
+and her head sank on Allan's bosom as she tried to say, Good-by.
+"Papa has always been so kind to me, Allan," she whispered,
+holding him back tremulously when he turned to leave her. "It
+seems so guilty and so heartless to go away from him and be
+married in secret. Oh, do, do think before you really go to
+London; is there no way of making him a little kinder and juster
+to _you_?" The question was useless; the major's resolutely
+unfavorable reception of Allan's letter rose in Neelie's memory,
+and answered her as the words passed her lips. With a girl's
+impulsiveness she pushed Allan away before he could speak, and
+signed to him impatiently to go. The conflict of contending
+emotions, which she had mastered thus far, burst its way outward
+in spite of her after he had waved his hand for the last time,
+and had disappeared in the depths of the dell. When she turned
+from the place, on her side, her long-restrained tears fell
+freely at last, and made the lonely way back to the cottage the
+dimmest prospect that Neelie had seen for many a long day past.
+
+As she hurried homeward, the leaves parted behind her, and Miss
+Gwilt stepped softly into the open space. She stood there in
+triumph, tall, beautiful, and resolute. Her lovely color
+brightened while she watched Neelie's retreating figure hastening
+lightly away from her over the grass.
+
+"Cry, you little fool!" she said, with her quiet, clear tones,
+and her steady smile of contempt. "Cry as you have never cried
+yet! You have seen the last of your sweetheart."
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A SCANDAL AT THE STATION.
+
+An hour later, the landlady at Miss Gwilt's lodgings was lost in
+astonishment, and the clamorous tongues of the children were in
+a state of ungovernable revolt. "Unforeseen circumstances" had
+suddenly obliged the tenant of the first floor to terminate the
+occupation of her apartments, and to go to London that day by the
+eleven o'clock train.
+
+"Please to have a fly at the door at half-past ten," said Miss
+Gwilt, as the amazed landlady followed her upstairs. "And excuse
+me, you good creature, if I beg and pray not to be disturbed till
+the fly comes. "Once inside the room, she locked the door, and
+then opened her writing-desk. "Now for my letter to the major!"
+she said. "How shall I word it?"
+
+A moment's consideration apparently decided her. Searching
+through her collection of pens, she carefully selected the worst
+that could be found, and began the letter by writing the date
+of the day on a soiled sheet of note-paper, in crooked, clumsy
+characters, which ended in a blot made purposely with the feather
+of the pen. Pausing, sometimes to think a little, sometimes to
+make another blot, she completed the letter in these words:
+
+
+"HON'D SIR--It is on my conscience to tell you something, which
+I think you ought to know. You ought to know of the goings-on of
+Miss, your daughter, with young Mister Armadale. I wish you to
+make sure, and, what is more, I advise you to be quick about it,
+if she is going the way you want her to go, when she takes her
+morning walk before breakfast. I scorn to make mischief, where
+there is true love on both sides. But I don't think the young man
+means truly by Miss. What I mean is, I think Miss only has his
+fancy. Another person, who shall be nameless betwixt us, has his
+true heart. Please to pardon my not putting my name; I am only a
+humble person, and it might get me into trouble. This is all at
+present, dear sir, from yours,
+
+"A WELL-WISHER."
+
+
+"There!" said Miss Gwilt, as she folded the letter up. "If I had
+been a professed novelist, I could hardly have written more
+naturally in the character of a servant than that!" She wrote the
+necessary address to Major Milroy; looked admiringly for the last
+time at the coarse and clumsy writing which her own delicate hand
+had produced; and rose to post the letter herself, before she
+entered next on the serious business of packing up. "Curious!"
+she thought, when the letter had been posted, and she was back
+again making her traveling preparations in her own room; "here
+I am, running headlong into a frightful risk--and I never was in
+better spirits in my life!"
+
+The boxes were ready when the fly was at the door, and Miss Gwilt
+was equipped (as becomingly as usual) in her neat traveling
+costume. The thick veil, which she was accustomed to wear in
+London, appeared on her country straw bonnet for the first time."
+One meets such rude men occasionally in the railway," she said
+to the landlady. "And though I dress quietly, my hair is so very
+remarkable." She was a little paler than usual; but she had never
+been so sweet-tempered and engaging, so gracefully cordial and
+friendly, as now, when the moment of departure had come. The
+simple people of the house were quite moved at taking leave of
+her. She insisted on shaking hands with the landlord--on speaking
+to him in her prettiest way, and sunning him in her brightest
+smiles. "Come!" she said to the landlady, "you have been so kind,
+you have been so like a mother to me, you must give me a kiss at
+parting." She embraced the children all together in a lump, with
+a mixture of humor and tenderness delightful to see, and left a
+shilling among them to buy a cake. "If I was only rich enough to
+make it a sovereign," she whispered to the mother, "how glad I
+should be!" The awkward lad who ran on errands stood waiting at
+the fly door. He was clumsy, he was frowsy, he had a gaping mouth
+and a turn-up nose; but the ineradicable female delight in being
+charming accepted him, for all that, in the character of a last
+chance. "You dear, dingy John!" she said, kindly, at the carriage
+door. "I am so poor I have only sixpence to give you--with my
+very best wishes. Take my advice, John--grow to be a fine man,
+and find yourself a nice sweetheart! Thank you a thousand times!"
+She gave him a friendly little pat on the cheek with two of her
+gloved fingers, and smiled, and nodded, and got into the fly.
+
+"Armadale next!" she said to herself as the carriage drove off.
+
+Allan's anxiety not to miss the train had brought him to the
+station in better time than usual. After taking his ticket and
+putting his portmanteau under the porter's charge, he was pacing
+the platform and thinking of Neelie, when he heard the rustling
+of a lady's dress behind him, and, turning round to look, found
+himself face to face with Miss Gwilt.
+
+There was no escaping her this time. The station wall was on his
+right hand, and the line was on his left; a tunnel was behind
+him, and Miss Gwilt was in front, inquiring in her sweetest tones
+whether Mr. Armadale was going to London.
+
+Allan colored scarlet with vexation and surprise. There he was
+obviously waiting for the train; and there was his portmanteau
+close by, with his name on it, already labeled for London! What
+answer but the true one could he make after that? Could he let
+the train go without him, and lose the precious hours so vitally
+important to Neelie and himself? Impossible! Allan helplessly
+confirmed the printed statement on his portmanteau, and heartily
+wished himself at the other end of the world as he said the
+words.
+
+"How very fortunate!" rejoined Miss Gwilt. "I am going to London
+too. Might I ask you Mr. Armadale (as you seem to be quite
+alone), to be my escort on the journey?"
+
+Allan looked at the little assembly of travelers, and travelers'
+friends, collected on the platform, near the booking-office door.
+They were all Thorpe Ambrose people. He was probably known by
+sight, and Miss Gwilt was probably known by sight, to every one
+of them. In sheer desperation, hesitating more awkwardly than
+ever, he produced his cigar case. "I should be delighted," he
+said, with an embarrassment which was almost an insult under the
+circumstances. "But I--I'm what the people who get sick over a
+cigar call a slave to smoking."
+
+"I delight in smoking!" said Miss Gwilt, with undiminished
+vivacity and good humor. "It's one of the privileges of the men
+which I have always envied. I'm afraid, Mr. Armadale, you must
+think I am forcing myself on you. It certainly looks like it.
+The real truth is, I want particularly to say a word to you in
+private about Mr. Midwinter."
+
+The train came up at the same moment. Setting Midwinter out of
+the question, the common decencies of politeness left Allan no
+alternative but to submit. After having been the cause of her
+leaving her situation at Major Milroy's, after having pointedly
+avoided her only a few days since on the high-road, to have
+declined going to London in the same carriage with Miss Gwilt
+would have been an act of downright brutality which it was
+simply impossible to commit. "Damn her!" said Allan, internally,
+as he handed his traveling companion into an empty carriage,
+officiously placed at his disposal, before all the people at the
+station, by the guard. "You shan't be disturbed, sir," the man
+whispered, confidentially, with a smile and a touch of his hat.
+Allan could have knocked him down with the utmost pleasure.
+"Stop!" he said, from the window. "I don't want the carriage--"
+It was useless; the guard was out of hearing; the whistle blew,
+and the train started for London.
+
+The select assembly of travelers' friends, left behind on
+the platform, congregated in a circle on the spot, with the
+station-master in the center.
+
+The station-master--otherwise Mr. Mack--was a popular character
+in the neighborhood. He possessed two social qualifications
+which invariably impress the average English mind--he was an
+old soldier, and he was a man of few words. The conclave on the
+platform insisted on taking his opinion, before it committed
+itself positively to an opinion of its own. A brisk fire of
+remarks exploded, as a matter of course, on all sides; but
+everybody's view of the subject ended interrogatively, in a
+question aimed pointblank at the station-master's ears.
+
+"She's got him, hasn't she?" "She'll come back 'Mrs. Armadale,'
+won't she?" "He'd better have stuck to Miss Milroy, hadn't he?"
+"Miss Milroy stuck to _him_. She paid him a visit at the great
+house, didn't she?" "Nothing of the sort; it's a shame to take
+the girl's character away. She was caught in a thunder-storm
+close by; he was obliged to give her shelter; and she's never
+been near the place since. Miss Gwilt's been there, if you like,
+with no thunderstorm to force _her_ in; and Miss Gwilt's off with
+him to London in a carriage all to themselves, eh, Mr. Mack?"
+"Ah, he's a soft one, that Armadale! with all his money, to take
+up with a red-haired woman, a good eight or nine years older than
+he is! She's thirty if she's a day. That's what I say, Mr. Mack.
+What do you say?" "Older or younger, she'll rule the roast at
+Thorpe Ambrose; and I say, for the sake of the place, and for the
+sake of trade, let's make the best of it; and Mr. Mack, as a man
+of the world, sees it in the same light as I do, don't you, sir?"
+
+"Gentlemen," said the station-master, with his abrupt military
+accent, and his impenetrable military manner, "she's a devilish
+fine woman. And when I was Mr. Armadale's age, it's my opinion,
+if her fancy had laid that way, she might have married Me."
+
+With that expression of opinion the station-master wheeled to
+the right, and intrenched himself impregnably in the stronghold
+of his own office.
+
+The citizens of Thorpe Ambrose looked at the closed door, and
+gravely shook their heads. Mr. Mack had disappointed them. No
+opinion which openly recognizes the frailty of human nature is
+ever a popular opinion with mankind. "It's as good as saying
+that any of _us_ might have married her if _we_ had been Mr.
+Armadale's age!" Such was the general impression on the minds
+of the conclave, when the meeting had been adjourned, and the
+members were leaving the station.
+
+The last of the party to go was a slow old gentleman, with a
+habit of deliberately looking about him. Pausing at the door,
+this observant person stared up the platform and down the
+platform, and discovered in the latter direction, standing behind
+an angle of the wall, an elderly man in black, who had escaped
+the notice of everybody up to that time. "Why, bless my soul!"
+said the old gentleman, advancing inquisitively by a step at a
+time, "it can't be Mr. Bashwood!"
+
+It _was_ Mr. Bashwood--Mr. Bashwood, whose constitutional
+curiosity had taken him privately to the station, bent on solving
+the mystery of Allan's sudden journey to London--Mr. Bashwood,
+who had seen and heard, behind his angle in the wall, what
+everybody else had seen and heard, and who appeared to have been
+impressed by it in no ordinary way. He stood stiffly against the
+wall, like a man petrified, with one hand pressed on his bare
+head, and the other holding his hat--he stood, with a dull flush
+on his face, and a dull stare in his eyes, looking straight into
+the black depths of the tunnel outside the station, as if the
+train to London had disappeared in it but the moment before.
+
+"Is your head bad?" asked the old gentleman. "Take my advice.
+Go home and lie down."
+
+Mr. Bashwood listened mechanically, with his usual attention,
+and answered mechanically, with his usual politeness.
+
+"Yes, sir," he said, in a low, lost tone, like a man between
+dreaming and waking; "I'll go home and lie down."
+
+"That's right," rejoined the old gentleman, making for the door.
+"And take a pill, Mr. Bashwood--take a pill."
+
+Five minutes later, the porter charged with the business of
+locking up the station found Mr. Bashwood, still standing
+bare-headed against the wall, and still looking straight into
+the black depths of the tunnel, as if the train to London had
+disappeared in it but a moment since.
+
+"Come, sir!" said the porter; "I must lock up. Are you out
+of sorts? Anything wrong with your inside? Try a drop of
+gin-and-bitters."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Bashwood, answering the porter, exactly as he had
+answered the old gentleman; "I'll try a drop of gin-and-bitters."
+
+The porter took him by the arm, and led him out. "You'll get it
+there," said the man, pointing confidentially to a public-house;
+"and you'll get it good."
+
+"I shall get it there," echoed Mr. Bashwood, still mechanically
+repeating what was said to him; "and I shall get it good."
+
+His will seemed to be paralyzed; his actions depended absolutely
+on what other people told him to do. He took a few steps in the
+direction of the public-house, hesitated, staggered, and caught
+at the pillar of one of the station lamps near him.
+
+The porter followed, and took him by the arm once more.
+
+"Why, you've been drinking already!" exclaimed the man, with a
+suddenly quickened interest in Mr. Bashwood's case. "What was it?
+Beer?"
+
+Mr. Bashwood, in his low, lost tones, echoed the last word.
+
+It was close on the porter's dinner-time. But, when the lower
+orders of the English people believe they have discovered an
+intoxicated man, their sympathy with him is boundless. The
+porter let his dinner take its chance, and carefully assisted
+Mr. Bashwood to reach the public-house. "Gin-and-bitters will put
+you on your legs again," whispered this Samaritan setter-right
+of the alcoholic disasters of mankind.
+
+If Mr. Bashwood had really been intoxicated, the effect of the
+porter's remedy would have been marvelous indeed. Almost as
+soon as the glass was emptied, the stimulant did its work. The
+long-weakened nervous system of the deputy-steward, prostrated
+for the moment by the shock that had fallen on it, rallied again
+like a weary horse under the spur. The dull flush on his cheeks,
+the dull stare in his eyes, disappeared simultaneously. After a
+momentary effort, he recovered memory enough of what had passed
+to thank the porter, and to ask whether he would take something
+himself. The worthy creature instantly accepted a dose of his own
+remedy--in the capacity of a preventive--and went home to dinner
+as only those men can go home who are physically warmed by
+gin-and-bitters and morally elevated by the performance of
+a good action.
+
+Still strangely abstracted (but conscious now of the way by which
+he went), Mr. Bashwood left the public-house a few minutes later,
+in his turn. He walked on mechanically, in his dreary black
+garments, moving like a blot on the white surface of the
+sun-brightened road, as Midwinter had seen him move in the early
+days at Thorpe Ambrose, when they had first met. Arrived at
+the point where he had to choose between the way that led into
+the town and the way that led to the great house, he stopped,
+incapable of deciding, and careless, apparently, even of making
+the attempt. "I'll be revenged on her!" he whispered to himself,
+still absorbed in his jealous frenzy of rage against the woman
+who had deceived him. "I'll be revenged on her," he repeated,
+in louder tones, "if I spend every half-penny I've got!"
+
+Some women of the disorderly sort, passing on their way to the
+town, heard him. "Ah, you old brute," they called out, with the
+measureless license of their class, "whatever she did, she served
+you right!"
+
+The coarseness of the voices startled him, whether he
+comprehended the words or not. He shrank away from more
+interruption and more insult, into the quieter road that led
+to the great house.
+
+At a solitary place by the wayside he stopped and sat down.
+He took off his hat and lifted his youthful wig a little from
+his bald old head, and tried desperately to get beyond the one
+immovable conviction which lay on his mind like lead--the
+conviction that Miss Gwilt had been purposely deceiving him from
+the first. It was useless. No effort would free him from that one
+dominant impression, and from the one answering idea that it had
+evoked--the idea of revenge. He got up again, and put on his hat
+and walked rapidly forward a little way--then turned without
+knowing why, and slowly walked back again "If I had only dressed
+a little smarter!" said the poor wretch, helplessly. "If I had
+only been a little bolder with her, she might have overlooked
+my being an old man!" The angry fit returned on him. He clinched
+his clammy, trembling hands, and shook them fiercely in the empty
+air. "I'll be revenged on her," he reiterated. "I'll be revenged
+on her, if I spend every half-penny I've got!" It was terribly
+suggestive of the hold she had taken on him, that his vindictive
+sense of injury could not get far enough away from her to reach
+the man whom he believed to be his rival, even yet. In his rage,
+as in his love, he was absorbed, body and soul, by Miss Gwilt.
+
+In a moment more, the noise of running wheels approaching from
+behind startled him. He turned and looked round. There was Mr.
+Pedgift the elder, rapidly overtaking him in the gig, just as Mr.
+Pedgift had overtaken him once already, on that former occasion
+when he had listened under the window at the great house, and
+when the lawyer had bluntly charged him with feeling a curiosity
+about Miss Gwilt!
+
+In an instant the inevitable association of ideas burst on his
+mind. The opinion of Miss Gwilt, which he had heard the lawyer
+express to Allan at parting, flashed back into his memory, side
+by side with Mr. Pedgift's sarcastic approval of anything in
+the way of inquiry which his own curiosity might attempt. "I
+may be even with her yet," he thought, "if Mr. Pedgift will help
+me!--Stop, sir!" he called out, desperately, as the gig came up
+with him. "If you please, sir, I want to speak to you."
+
+Pedgift Senior slackened the pace of his fast-trotting mare,
+without pulling up. "Come to the office in half an hour," he
+said; "I'm busy now." Without waiting for an answer, without
+noticing Mr. Bashwood's bow, he gave the mare the rein again,
+and was out of sight in another minute.
+
+Mr. Bashwood sat down once more in a shady place by the roadside.
+He appeared to be incapable of feeling any slight but the one
+unpardonable slight put upon him by Miss Gwilt. He not only
+declined to resent, he even made the best of Mr. Pedgift's
+unceremonious treatment of him. "Half an hour," he said,
+resignedly. "Time enough to compose myself; and I want time.
+Very kind of Mr. Pedgift, though he mightn't have meant it."
+
+The sense of oppression in his head forced him once again
+to remove his hat. He sat with it on his lap, deep in thought;
+his face bent low, and the wavering fingers of one hand drumming
+absently on the crown of the hat. If Mr. Pedgift the elder,
+seeing him as he sat now, could only have looked a little way
+into the future, the monotonously drumming hand of the
+deputy-steward might have been strong enough, feeble as it was,
+to stop the lawyer by the roadside. It was the worn, weary,
+miserable old hand of a worn, weary, miserable old man; but
+it was, for all that (to use the language of Mr. Pedgift's own
+parting prediction to Allan), the hand that was now destined
+to "let the light in on Miss Gwilt."
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+AN OLD MAN'S HEART.
+
+Punctual to the moment, when the half hour's interval had
+expired, Mr. Bashwood was announced at the office as waiting
+to see Mr. Pedgift by special appointment.
+
+The lawyer looked up from his papers with an air of annoyance:
+he had totally forgotten the meeting by the roadside. "See what
+he wants," said Pedgift Senior to Pedgift Junior, working in the
+same room with him. "And if it's nothing of importance, put it
+off to some other time."
+
+Pedgift Junior swiftly disappeared and swiftly returned.
+
+"Well?" asked the father.
+
+"Well," answered the son, "he is rather more shaky and
+unintelligible than usual. I can make nothing out of him, except
+that he persists in wanting to see you. My own idea," pursued
+Pedgift Junior, with his usual, sardonic gravity, "is that he
+is going to have a fit, and that he wishes to acknowledge your
+uniform kindness to him by obliging you with a private view
+of the whole proceeding."
+
+Pedgift Senior habitually matched everybody--his son included--
+with their own weapons. "Be good enough to remember, Augustus,"
+he rejoined, "that my Room is not a Court of Law. A bad joke
+is not invariably followed by 'roars of laughter' _here_. Let
+Mr. Bashwood come in."
+
+Mr. Bashwood was introduced, and Pedgift Junior withdrew. "You
+mustn't bleed him, sir," whispered the incorrigible joker, as
+he passed the back of his father's chair. "Hot-water bottles
+to the soles of his feet, and a mustard plaster on the pit of
+his stomach--that's the modern treatment."
+
+"Sit down, Bashwood," said Pedgift Senior when they were alone.
+"And don't forget that time's money. Out with it, whatever it is,
+at the quickest possible rate, and in the fewest possible words."
+
+These preliminary directions, bluntly but not at all unkindly
+spoken, rather increased than diminished the painful agitation
+under which Mr. Bashwood was suffering. He stammered more
+helplessly, he trembled more continuously than usual, as he made
+his little speech of thanks, and added his apologies at the end
+for intruding on his patron in business hours.
+
+"Everybody in the place, Mr. Pedgift, sir, knows your time is
+valuable. Oh, dear, yes! oh, dear, yes! most valuable, most
+valuable! Excuse me, sir, I'm coming out with it. Your goodness
+--or rather your business--no, your goodness gave me half an hour
+to wait--and I have thought of what I had to say, and prepared
+it, and put it short." Having got as far as that, he stopped
+with a pained, bewildered look. He had put it away in his memory,
+and now, when the time came, he was too confused to find it.
+And there was Mr. Pedgift mutely waiting; his face and manner
+expressive alike of that silent sense of the value of his own
+time which every patient who has visited a great doctor, every
+client who has consulted a lawyer in large practice, knows so
+well. "Have you heard the news, sir?" stammered Mr. Bashwood,
+shifting his ground in despair, and letting the uppermost idea
+in his mind escape him, simply because it was the one idea in him
+that was ready to come out.
+
+"Does it concern _me_?" asked Pedgift Senior, mercilessly brief,
+and mercilessly straight in coming to the point.
+
+"It concerns a lady, sir--no, not a lady--a young man, I ought
+to say, in whom you used to feel some interest. Oh, Mr. Pedgift,
+sir, what do you think! Mr. Armadale and Miss Gwilt have gone
+up to London together to-day--alone, sir--alone in a carriage
+reserved for their two selves. Do you think he's going to marry
+her? Do you really think, like the rest of them, he's going to
+marry her?"
+
+He put the question with a sudden flush in his face and a sudden
+energy in his manner. His sense of the value of the lawyer's
+time, his conviction of the greatness of the lawyer's
+condescension, his constitutional shyness and timidity--all
+yielded together to his one overwhelming interest in hearing Mr.
+Pedgift's answer. He was loud for the first time in his life in
+putting the question.
+
+"After my experience of Mr. Armadale," said the lawyer, instantly
+hardening in look and manner, "I believe him to be infatuated
+enough to marry Miss Gwilt a dozen times over, if Miss Gwilt
+chose to ask him. Your news doesn't surprise me in the least,
+Bashwood. I'm sorry for him. I can honestly say that, though he
+_has_ set my advice at defiance. And I'm more sorry still," he
+continued, softening again as his mind reverted to his interview
+with Neelie under the trees of the park--"I'm more sorry still
+for another person who shall be nameless. But what have I to do
+with all this? And what on earth is the matter with you?" he
+resumed, noticing for the first time the abject misery in Mr.
+Bashwood's manner, the blank despair in Mr. Bashwood's face,
+which his answer had produced. "Are you ill? Is there something
+behind the curtain that you're afraid to bring out? I don't
+understand it. Have you come here--here in my private room, in
+business hours--with nothing to tell me but that young Armadale
+has been fool enough to ruin his prospects for life? Why, I
+foresaw it all weeks since, and what is more, I as good as told
+him so at the last conversation I had with him in the great
+house."
+
+At those last words, Mr. Bashwood suddenly rallied. The lawyer's
+passing reference to the great house had led him back in a moment
+to the purpose that he had in view.
+
+"That's it, sir!" he said, eagerly; "that's what I wanted to
+speak to you about; that's what I've been preparing in my mind.
+Mr. Pedgift, sir, the last time you were at the great house, when
+you came away in your gig, you--you overtook me on the drive."
+
+"I dare say I did," remarked Pedgift, resignedly. "My mare
+happens to be a trifle quicker on her legs than you are on yours,
+Bashwood. Go on, go on. We shall come in time, I suppose, to what
+you are driving at."
+
+"You stopped, and spoke to me, sir," proceeded Mr. Bashwood,
+advancing more and more eagerly to his end. "You said you
+suspected me of feeling some curiosity about Miss Gwilt, and you
+told me (I remember the exact words, sir)--you told me to gratify
+my curiosity by all means, for you didn't object to it."
+
+Pedgift Senior began for the first time to look interested
+in hearing more.
+
+"I remember something of the sort," he replied; "and I also
+remember thinking it rather remarkable that you should
+_happen_--we won't put it in any more offensive way--to be
+exactly under Mr. Armadale's open window while I was talking
+to him. It might have been accident, of course; but it looked
+rather more like curiosity. I could only judge by appearances,"
+concluded Pedgift, pointing his sarcasm with a pinch of snuff;
+"and appearances, Bashwood, were decidedly against you."
+
+"I don't deny it, sir. I only mentioned the circumstance because
+I wished to acknowledge that I _was_ curious, and _am_ curious
+about Miss Gwilt."
+
+"Why?" asked Pedgift Senior, seeing something under the surface
+in Mr. Bashwood's face and manner, but utterly in the dark thus
+far as to what that something might be.
+
+There was silence for a moment. The moment passed, Mr. Bashwood
+took the refuge usually taken by nervous, unready men, placed
+in his circumstances, when they are at a loss for an answer.
+He simply reiterated the assertion that he had just made.
+"I feel some curiosity sir," he said, with a strange mixture
+of doggedness and timidity, "about Miss Gwilt."
+
+There was another moment of silence. In spite of his practiced
+acuteness and knowledge of the world, the lawyer was more puzzled
+than ever. The case of Mr. Bashwood presented the one human
+riddle of all others which he was least qualified to solve.
+Though year after year witnesses in thousands and thousands
+of cases, the remorseless disinheriting of nearest and dearest
+relations, the unnatural breaking-up of sacred family ties, the
+deplorable severance of old and firm friendships, due entirely
+to the intense self-absorption which the sexual passion can
+produce when it enters the heart of an old man, the association
+of love with infirmity and gray hairs arouses, nevertheless,
+all the world over, no other idea than the idea of extravagant
+improbability or extravagant absurdity in the general mind. If
+the interview now taking place in Mr. Pedgift's consulting-room
+had taken place at his dinner-table instead, when wine had opened
+his mind to humorous influences, it is possible that he might, by
+this time, have suspected the truth. But, in his business hours,
+Pedgift Senior was in the habit of investigating men's motives
+seriously from the business point of view; and he was on that
+very account simply incapable of conceiving any improbability
+so startling, any absurdity so enormous, as the absurdity and
+improbability of Mr. Bashwood's being in love.
+
+Some men in the lawyer's position would have tried to force their
+way to enlightenment by obstinately repeating the unanswered
+question. Pedgift Senior wisely postponed the question until he
+had moved the conversation on another step. "Well," he resumed,
+"let us say you feel a curiosity about Miss Gwilt. What next?"
+
+The palms of Mr. Bashwood's hands began to moisten under the
+influence of his agitation, as they had moistened in the past
+days when he had told the story of his domestic sorrows
+to Midwinter at the great house. Once more he rolled his
+handkerchief into a ball, and dabbed it softly to and fro
+from one hand to the other.
+
+"May I ask if I am right, sir," he began, "in believing that you
+have a very unfavorable opinion of Miss Gwilt? You are quite
+convinced, I think--"
+
+"My good fellow," interrupted Pedgift Senior, "why need you be
+in any doubt about it? You were under Mr. Armadale's open window
+all the while I was talking to him; and your ears, I presume,
+were not absolutely shut."
+
+Mr. Bashwood showed no sense of the interruption. The little
+sting of the lawyer's sarcasm was lost in the nobler pain that
+wrung him from the wound inflicted by Miss Gwilt.
+
+"You are quite convinced, I think, sir," he resumed, "that there
+are circumstances in this lady's past life which would be highly
+discreditable to her if they were discovered at the present
+time?"
+
+"The window was open at the great house, Bashwood; and your ears,
+I presume, were not absolutely shut."
+
+Still impenetrable to the sting, Mr. Bashwood persisted more
+obstinately than ever.
+
+"Unless I am greatly mistaken," he said, "your long experience
+in such things has even suggested to you, sir, that Miss Gwilt
+might turn out to be known to the police?"
+
+Pedgift Senior's patience gave way. "You have been over ten
+minutes in this room," he broke out. "Can you, or can you not,
+tell me in plain English what you want?"
+
+In plain English--with the passion that had transformed him, the
+passion which (in Miss Gwilt's own words) had made a man of him,
+burning in his haggard cheeks--Mr. Bashwood met the challenge,
+and faced the lawyer (as, the worried sheep faces the dog) on
+his own ground.
+
+"I wish to say, sir," he answered, "that your opinion in this
+matter is my opinion too. I believe there is something wrong in
+Miss Gwilt's past life which she keeps concealed from everybody,
+and I want to be the man who knows it."
+
+Pedgift Senior saw his chance, and instantly reverted to the
+question that he had postponed. "Why?" he asked for the second
+time.
+
+For the second time Mr. Bashwood hesitated.
+
+Could he acknowledge that he had been mad enough to love her, and
+mean enough to be a spy for her? Could he say, She has deceived
+me from the first, and she has deserted me, now her object is
+served. After robbing me of my happiness, robbing me of my honor,
+robbing me of my last hope left in life, she has gone from me
+forever, and left me nothing but my old man's longing, slow and
+sly, and strong and changeless, for revenge. Revenge that I may
+have, if I can poison her success by dragging her frailties into
+the public view. Revenge that I will buy (for what is gold or
+what is life to me?) with the last farthing of my hoarded money
+and the last drop of my stagnant blood. Could he say that to the
+man who sat waiting for his answer? No; he could only crush it
+down and be silent.
+
+The lawyer's expression began to harden once more.
+
+"One of us must speak out," he said; "and as you evidently
+won't, I will. I can only account for this extraordinary anxiety
+of yours to make yourself acquainted with Miss Gwilt's secrets,
+in one of two ways. Your motive is either an excessively mean
+one (no offense, Bashwood, I am only putting the case), or an
+excessively generous one. After my experience of your honest
+character and your creditable conduct, it is only your due that I
+should absolve you at once of the mean motive. I believe you are
+as incapable as I am--I can say no more--of turning to mercenary
+account any discoveries you might make to Miss Gwilt's prejudice
+in Miss Gwilt's past life. Shall I go on any further? or would
+you prefer, on second thoughts, opening your mind frankly to me
+of your own accord?"
+
+"I should prefer not interrupting you, sir," said Mr. Bashwood.
+
+"As you please," pursued Pedgift Senior. "Having absolved you
+of the mean motive, I come to the generous motive next. It is
+possible that you are an unusually grateful man; and it is
+certain that Mr. Armadale has been remarkably kind to you.
+After employing you under Mr. Midwinter, in the steward's office,
+he has had confidence enough in your honesty and your capacity,
+now his friend has left him, to put his business entirely and
+unreservedly in your hands. It's not in my experience of human
+nature--but it may be possible, nevertheless---that you are
+so gratefully sensible of that confidence, and so gratefully
+interested in your employer's welfare, that you can't see him,
+in his friendless position, going straight to his own disgrace
+and ruin, without making an effort to save him. To put it in two
+words. Is it your idea that Mr. Armadale might be prevented from
+marrying Miss Gwilt, if he could be informed in time of her real
+character? And do you wish to be the man who opens his eyes to
+the truth? If that is the case--"
+
+He stopped in astonishment. Acting under some uncontrollable
+impulse, Mr. Bashwood had started to his feet. He stood, with
+his withered face lit up by a sudden irradiation from within,
+which made him look younger than his age by a good twenty
+years--he stood, gasping for breath enough to speak, and
+gesticulated entreatingly at the lawyer with both hands.
+
+"Say it again, sir!" he burst out, eagerly, recovering his breath
+before Pedgift Senior had recovered his surprise. "The question
+about Mr. Armadale, sir!--only once more!--only once more, Mr.
+Pedgift, please!"
+
+With his practiced observation closely and distrustfully at work
+on Mr. Bashwood' s face, Pedgift Senior motioned to him to sit
+down again, and put the question for the second time.
+
+"Do I think," said Mr. Bashwood, repeating the sense, but not
+the words of the question, "that Mr. Armadale might be parted
+from Miss Gwilt, if she could be shown to him as she really is?
+Yes, sir! And do I wish to be the man who does it? Yes, sir!
+yes, sir!! yes, sir!!!"
+
+"It's rather strange," remarked the lawyer, looking at him
+more and more distrustfully, "that you should be so violently
+agitated, simply because my question happens to have hit the
+mark."
+
+The question happened to have hit a mark which Pedgift little
+dreamed of. It had released Mr. Bashwood's mind in an instant
+from the dead pressure of his one dominant idea of revenge, and
+had shown him a purpose to be achieved by the discovery of Miss
+Gwilt's secrets which had never occurred to him till that moment.
+The marriage which he had blindly regarded as inevitable was
+a marriage that might be stopped--not in Allan's interests, but
+in his own--and the woman whom he believed that he had lost might
+yet, in spite of circumstances, be a woman won! His brain whirled
+as he thought of it. His own roused resolution almost daunted
+him, by its terrible incongruity with all the familiar habits
+of his mind, and all the customary proceedings of his life.
+
+Finding his last remark unanswered, Pedgift Senior considered
+a little before he said anything more.
+
+"One thing is clear," reasoned the lawyer with himself. "His true
+motive in this matter is a motive which he is afraid to avow.
+My question evidently offered him a chance of misleading me, and
+he has accepted it on the spot. That's enough for _me_. If I was
+Mr. Armadale's lawyer, the mystery might be worth investigating.
+As things are, it's no interest of mine to hunt Mr. Bashwood
+from one lie to another till I run him to earth at last. I have
+nothing whatever to do with it; and I shall leave him free
+to follow his own roundabout courses, in his own roundabout way."
+Having arrived at that conclusion, Pedgift Senior pushed back
+his chair, and rose briskly to terminate the interview.
+
+"Don't be alarmed, Bashwood," he began. "The subject of our
+conversation is a subject exhausted, so far as I am concerned.
+I have only a few last words to say, and it's a habit of mine,
+as you know, to say my last words on my legs. Whatever else I may
+be in the dark about, I have made one discovery, at any rate.
+I have found out what you really want with me--at last! You want
+me to help you."
+
+"If you would be so very, very kind, sir!" stammered Mr.
+Bashwood. "If you would only give me the great advantage of
+your opinion and advice."
+
+"Wait a bit, Bashwood We will separate those two things, if you
+please. A lawyer may offer an opinion like any other man; but
+when a lawyer gives his advice--by the Lord Harry, sir, it's
+Professional! You're welcome to my opinion in this matter; I have
+disguised it from nobody. I believe there have been events in
+Miss Gwilt's career which (if they could be discovered) would
+even make Mr. Armadale, infatuated as he is, afraid to marry
+her--supposing, of course, that he really _is_ going to marry
+her; for, though the appearances are in favor of it so far,
+it is only an assumption, after all. As to the mode of proceeding
+by which the blots on this woman's character might or might not
+be brought to light in time--she may be married by license in
+a fortnight if she likes--_that_ is a branch of the question on
+which I positively decline to enter. It implies speaking in my
+character as a lawyer, and giving you, what I decline positively
+to give you, my professional advice."
+
+"Oh, sir, don't say that!" pleaded Mr. Bashwood. "Don't deny
+me the great favor, the inestimable advantage of your advice!
+I have such a poor head, Mr. Pedgift! I am so old and so slow,
+sir, and I get so sadly startled and worried when I'm thrown out
+of my ordinary ways. It's quite natural you should be a little
+impatient with me for taking up your time--I know that time is
+money, to a clever man like you. Would you excuse me--would you
+please excuse me, if I venture to say that I have saved a little
+something, a few pounds, sir; and being quite lonely, with nobody
+dependent on me, I'm sure I may spend my savings as I please?"
+Blind to every consideration but the one consideration of
+propitiating Mr. Pedgift, he took out a dingy, ragged old
+pocket-book, and tried, with trembling fingers, to open it on
+the lawyer's table.
+
+"Put your pocket-book back directly," said Pedgift Senior.
+"Richer men than you have tried that argument with me, and have
+found that there is such a thing (off the stage) as a lawyer
+who is not to be bribed. I will have nothing to do with the case,
+under existing circumstances. If you want to know why, I beg
+to inform you that Miss Gwilt ceased to be professionally
+interesting to me on the day when I ceased to be Mr. Armadale's
+lawyer. I may have other reasons besides, which I don't think
+it necessary to mention. The reason already given is explicit
+enough. Go your own way, and take your responsibility on your own
+shoulders. You _may_ venture within reach of Miss Gwilt's claws
+and come out again without being scratched. Time will show. In
+the meanwhile, I wish you good-morning--and I own, to my shame,
+that I never knew till today what a hero you were."
+
+This time, Mr. Bashwood felt the sting. Without another word
+of expostulation or entreaty, without even saying "Good-morning"
+on his side, he walked to the door, opened it, softly, and left
+the room.
+
+The parting look in his face, and the sudden silence that had
+fallen on him, were not lost on Pedgift Senior. "Bashwood will
+end badly," said the lawyer, shuffling his papers, and returning
+impenetrably to his interrupted work.
+
+The change in Mr. Bashwood's face and manner to something dogged
+and self-contained was so startlingly uncharacteristic of him,
+that it even forced itself on the notice of Pedgift Junior and
+the clerks as he passed through the outer office. Accustomed to
+make the old man their butt, they took a boisterously comic view
+of the marked alteration in him. Deaf to the merciless raillery
+with which he was assailed on all sides, he stopped opposite
+young Pedgift, and, looking him attentively in the face, said,
+in a quiet, absent manner, like a man thinking aloud, "I wonder
+whether _you_ would help me?"
+
+"Open an account instantly," said Pedgift Junior to the clerks,
+"in the name of Mr. Bashwood. Place a chair for Mr. Bashwood,
+with a footstool close by, in case he wants it. Supply me with
+a quire of extra double-wove satin paper, and a gross of picked
+quills, to take notes of Mr. Bashwood's case; and inform my
+father instantly that I am going to leave him and set up in
+business for myself, on the strength of Mr. Bashwood's patronage.
+Take a seat, sir, pray take a seat, and express your feelings
+freely."
+
+Still impenetrably deaf to the raillery of which he was the
+object, Mr. Bashwood waited until Pedgift Junior had exhausted
+himself, and then turned quietly away.
+
+"I ought to have known better," he said, in the same absent
+manner as before. "He is his father's son all over--he would
+make game of me on my death-bed." He paused a moment at the door,
+mechanically brushing his hat with his hand, and went out into
+the street.
+
+The bright sunshine dazzled his eyes, the passing vehicles and
+foot-passengers startled and bewildered him. He shrank into a
+by-street, and put his hand over his eyes. "I'd better go home,"
+he thought, "and shut myself up, and think about it in my own
+room."
+
+His lodging was in a small house, in the poor quarter of the
+town. He let himself in with his key, and stole softly upstairs.
+The one little room he possessed met him cruelly, look round it
+where he might, with silent memorials of Miss Gwilt. On the
+chimney-piece were the flowers she had given him at various
+times, all withered long since, and all preserved on a little
+china pedestal, protected by a glass shade. On the wall hung
+a wretched colored print of a woman, which he had caused to be
+nicely framed and glazed, because there was a look in it that
+reminded him of her face. In his clumsy old mahogany writing-desk
+were the few letters, brief and peremptory, which she had written
+to him at the time when he was watching and listening meanly at
+Thorpe Ambrose to please _her_. And when, turning his back on
+these, he sat down wearily on his sofa-bedstead--there, hanging
+over one end of it, was the gaudy cravat of blue satin, which he
+had bought because she had told him she liked bright colors, and
+which he had never yet had the courage to wear, though he had
+taken it out morning after morning with the resolution to put it
+on! Habitually quiet in his actions, habitually restrained in his
+language, he now seized the cravat as if it was a living thing
+that could feel, and flung it to the other end of the room with
+an oath.
+
+The time passed; and still, though his resolution to stand
+between Miss Gwilt and her marriage remained unbroken, he was
+as far as ever from discovering the means which might lead him
+to his end. The more he thought and thought of it, the darker
+and the darker his course in the future looked to him.
+
+He rose again, as wearily as he had sat down, and went to his
+cupboard. "I'm feverish and thirsty," he said; "a cup of tea
+may help me." He opened his canister, and measured out his small
+allowance of tea, less carefully than usual. "Even my own hands
+won't serve me to-day!" he thought, as he scraped together the
+few grains of tea that he had spilled, and put them carefully
+back in the canister.
+
+In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the
+kitchen fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his
+teapot in his hand.
+
+Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the
+many English matrons whose path through this world is a path of
+thorns; and who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity
+is afforded them, in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet
+of other people in a like condition with themselves. Her one vice
+was of the lighter sort--the vice of curiosity; and among the
+many counterbalancing virtues she possessed was the virtue of
+greatly respecting Mr. Bashwood, as a lodger whose rent was
+regularly paid, and whose ways were always quiet and civil from
+one year's end to another.
+
+"What did you please to want, sir?" asked the landlady. "Boiling
+water, is it? Did you ever know the water boil, Mr. Bashwood,
+when you wanted it? Did you ever see a sulkier fire than that?
+I'll put a stick or two in, if you'll wait a little, and give me
+the chance. Dear, dear me, you'll excuse my mentioning it, sir,
+but how poorly you do look to-day!"
+
+The strain on Mr. Bashwood's mind was beginning to tell.
+Something of the helplessness which he had shown at the station
+appeared again in his face and manner as he put his teapot on
+the kitchen table and sat down.
+
+"I'm in trouble, ma'am," he said, quietly; "and I find trouble
+gets harder to bear than it used to be."
+
+"Ah, you may well say that!" groaned the landlady. "_I'm_ ready
+for the undertaker, Mr. Bashwood, when _my_ time comes, whatever
+you may be. You're too lonely, sir. When you're in trouble, it's
+some help--though not much--to shift a share of it off on another
+person's shoulders. If your good lady had only been alive now,
+sir, what a comfort you would have found her, wouldn't you?"
+
+A momentary spasm of pain passed across Mr. Bashwood's face.
+The landlady had ignorantly recalled him to the misfortunes
+of his married life. He had been long since forced to quiet her
+curiosity about his family affairs by telling her that he was
+a widower, and that his domestic circumstances had not been happy
+ones; but he had taken her no further into his confidence than
+this. The sad story which he had related to Midwinter, of his
+drunken wife who had ended her miserable life in a lunatic
+asylum, was a story which he had shrunk from confiding to the
+talkative woman, who would have confided it in her turn to every
+one else in the house.
+
+"What I always say to my husband when he's low, sir," pursued the
+landlady, intent on the kettle, "is, 'What would you do _now_,
+Sam, without me?' When his temper don't get the better of him
+(it will boil directly, Mr. Bashwood), he says, 'Elizabeth,
+I could do nothing.' When his temper does get the better of him,
+he says, 'I should try the public-house, missus; and I'll try it
+now.' Ah, I've got _my_ troubles! A man with grown-up sons and
+daughters tippling in a public-house! I don't call to mind, Mr.
+Bashwood, whether _you_ ever had any sons and daughters? And
+yet, now I think of it, I seem to fancy you said yes, you had.
+Daughters, sir, weren't they? and, ah, dear! dear! to be sure!
+all dead."
+
+"I had one daughter, ma'am," said Mr. Bashwood, patiently--"only
+one, who died before she was a year old."
+
+"Only one!" repeated the sympathizing landlady. "It's as near
+boiling as it ever will be, sir; give me the tea-pot. Only one!
+Ah, it comes heavier (don't it?) when it's an only child? You
+said it was an only child, I think, didn't you, sir?"
+
+For a moment, Mr. Bashwood looked at the woman with vacant eyes,
+and without attempting to answer her. After ignorantly recalling
+the memory of the wife who had disgraced him, she was now, as
+ignorantly, forcing him back on the miserable remembrance of the
+son who had ruined and deserted him. For the first time, since he
+had told his story to Midwinter, at their introductory interview
+in the great house, his mind reverted once more to the bitter
+disappointment and disaster of the past. Again he thought of the
+bygone days, when he had become security for his son, and when
+that son's dishonesty had forced him to sell everything he
+possessed to pay the forfeit that was exacted when the forfeit
+was due. "I have a son, ma'am," he said, becoming conscious that
+the landlady was looking at him in mute and melancholy surprise.
+"I did my best to help him forward in the world, and he has
+behaved very badly to me."
+
+"Did he, now?" rejoined the landlady, with an appearance of
+the greatest interest. "Behaved badly to you--almost broke your
+heart, didn't he? Ah, it will come home to him, sooner or later.
+Don't you fear! 'Honor your father and mother,' wasn't put on
+Moses's tables of stone for nothing, Mr. Bashwood. Where may
+he be, and what is he doing now, sir?"
+
+The question was in effect almost the same as the question which
+Midwinter had put when the circumstances had been described to
+him. As Mr. Bashwood had answered it on the former occasion,
+so (in nearly the same words) he answered it now.
+
+"My son is in London, ma'am, for all I know to the contrary.
+He was employed, when I last heard of him, in no very creditable
+way, at the Private Inquiry Office--"
+
+At those words he suddenly checked himself. His face flushed,
+his eyes brightened; he pushed away the cup which had just been
+filled for him, and rose from his seat. The landlady started back
+a step. There was something in her lodger's face that she had
+never seen in it before.
+
+"I hope I've not offended you, sir," said the woman, recovering
+her self-possession, and looking a little too ready to take
+offense on her side, at a moment's notice.
+
+"Far from it, ma'am, far from it!" he rejoined, in a strangely
+eager, hurried way. "I have just remembered something--something
+very important. I must go upstairs--it's a letter, a letter, a
+letter. I'll come back to my tea, ma'am. I beg your pardon, I'm
+much obliged to you, you've been very kind--I'll say good-by, if
+you'll allow me, for the present." To the landlady's amazement,
+he cordially shook hands with her, and made for the door, leaving
+tea and tea-pot to take care of themselves.
+
+The moment he reached his own room, he locked himself in. For
+a little while he stood holding by the chimney-piece, waiting
+to recover his breath. The moment he could move again, he opened
+his writing-desk on the table. "That for you, Mr. Pedgift and
+Son!" he said, with a snap of his fingers as he sat down. "I've
+got a son too!"
+
+There was a knock at the door--a knock, soft, considerate, and
+confidential. The anxious landlady wished to know whether Mr.
+Bashwood was ill, and begged to intimate for the second time
+that she earnestly trusted she had given him no offense.
+
+"No! no!" he called through the door. "I'm quite well--I'm
+writing, ma'am, I'm writing--please to excuse me. She's a good
+woman; she's an excellent woman," he thought, when the landlady
+had retired. "I'll make her a little present. My mind's so
+unsettled, I might never have thought of it but for her. Oh, if
+my boy is at the office still! Oh, if I can only write a letter
+that will make him pity me!"
+
+He took up his pen, and sat thinking anxiously, thinking long,
+before he touched the paper. Slowly, with many patient pauses to
+think and think again, and with more than ordinary care to make
+his writing legible, he traced these lines:
+
+
+"MY DEAR JAMES--You will be surprised, I am afraid, to see my
+handwriting. Pray don't suppose I am going to ask you for money,
+or to reproach you for having sold me out of house and home when
+you forfeited your security, and I had to pay. I am willing and
+anxious to let by-gones be by-gones, and to forget the past.
+
+"It is in your power (if you are still at the Private Inquiry
+Office) to do me a great service. I am in sore anxiety and
+trouble on the subject of a person in whom I am interested. The
+person is a lady. Please don't make game of me for confessing
+this, if you can help it. If you knew what I am now suffering,
+I think you would be more inclined to pity than to make game
+of me.
+
+"I would enter into particulars, only I know your quick temper,
+and I fear exhausting your patience. Perhaps it may be enough
+to say that I have reason to believe the lady's past life has
+not been a very creditable one, and that I am interested--more
+interested than words can tell--in finding out what her life has
+really been, and in making the discovery within a fortnight from
+the present time.
+
+"Though I know very little about the ways of business in an
+office like yours, I can understand that, without first having
+the lady's present address, nothing can be done to help me.
+Unfortunately, I am not yet acquainted with her present address.
+I only know that she went to town to-day, accompanied by a
+gentleman, in whose employment I now am, and who (as I believe)
+will be likely to write to me for money before many days more
+are over his head.
+
+"Is this circumstance of a nature to help us? I venture to say
+'us,' because I count already, my dear boy, on your kind
+assistance and advice. Don't let money stand between us; I have
+saved a little something, and it is all freely at your disposal.
+Pray, pray write to me by return of post! If you will only try
+your best to end the dreadful suspense under which I am now
+suffering, you will atone for all the grief and disappointment
+you caused me in times that are past, and you will confer an
+obligation that he will never forget on
+
+"Your affectionate father,
+
+"FELIX BASHWOOD."
+
+
+After waiting a little, to dry his eyes, Mr. Bashwood added the
+date and address, and directed the letter to his son, at "The
+Private Inquiry Office, Shadyside Place, London." That done, he
+went out at once, and posted his letter with his own hands. It
+was then Monday; and, if the answer was sent by return of post,
+the answer would be received on Wednesday morning.
+
+The interval day, the Tuesday, was passed by Mr. Bashwood in
+the steward's office at the great house. He had a double motive
+for absorbing himself as deeply as might be in the various
+occupations connected with the management of the estate. In
+the first place, employment helped him to control the devouring
+impatience with which he looked for the coming of the next day.
+In the second place, the more forward he was with the business of
+the office, the more free he would be to join his son in London,
+without attracting suspicion to himself by openly neglecting the
+interests placed under his charge.
+
+Toward the Tuesday afternoon, vague rumors of something wrong
+at the cottage found their way (through Major Milroy's servants)
+to the servants at the great house, and attempted ineffectually
+through this latter channel to engage the attention of Mr.
+Bashwood, impenetrably fixed on other things. The major and Miss
+Neelie had been shut up together in mysterious conference; and
+Miss Neelie's appearance after the close of the interview plainly
+showed that she had been crying. This had happened on the Monday
+afternoon; and on the next day (that present Tuesday) the major
+had startled the household by announcing briefly that his
+daughter wanted a change to the air of the seaside, and that
+he proposed taking her himself, by the next train, to Lowestoft.
+The two had gone away together, both very serious and silent,
+but both, apparently, very good friends, for all that. Opinions
+at the great house attributed this domestic revolution to the
+reports current on the subject of Allan and Miss Gwilt. Opinions
+at the cottage rejected that solution of the difficulty, on
+practical grounds. Miss Neelie had remained inaccessibly shut up
+in her own room, from the Monday afternoon to the Tuesday morning
+when her father took her away. The major, during the same
+interval, had not been outside the door, and had spoken to nobody
+And Mrs. Milroy, at the first attempt of her new attendant to
+inform her of the prevailing scandal in the town, had sealed
+the servant's lips by flying into one of her terrible passions
+the instant Miss Gwilt's name was mentioned. Something must have
+happened, of course, to take Major Milroy and his daughter so
+suddenly from home; but that something was certainly not Mr.
+Armadale's scandalous elopement, in broad daylight, with Miss
+Gwilt.
+
+The afternoon passed, and the evening passed, and no other event
+happened but the purely private and personal event which had
+taken place at the cottage. Nothing occurred (for nothing in the
+nature of things _could_ occur) to dissipate the delusion on
+which Miss Gwilt had counted--the delusion which all Thorpe
+Ambrose now shared with Mr. Bashwood, that she had gone privately
+to London with Allan in the character of Allan's future wife.
+
+On the Wednesday morning, the postman, entering the street
+in which Mr. Bashwood lived, was encountered by Mr. Bashwood
+himself, so eager to know if there was a letter for him that he
+had come out without his hat. There _was_ a letter for him--the
+letter that he longed for from his vagabond son.
+
+These were the terms in which Bashwood the younger answered his
+father's supplication for help--after having previously ruined
+his father's prospects for life:
+
+
+"Shadyside Place. Tuesday, July 29th.
+
+"MY DEAR DAD--We have some little practice in dealing with
+mysteries at this office; but the mystery of your letter beats
+me altogether. Are you speculating on the interesting hidden
+frailties of some charming woman? Or, after _your_ experience of
+matrimony, are you actually going to give me a stepmother at this
+time of day? Whichever it is, upon my life your letter interests
+me.
+
+"I am not joking, mind--though the temptation is not an easy one
+to resist. On the contrary, I have given you a quarter of an hour
+of my valuable time already. The place you date from sounded
+somehow familiar to me. I referred back to the memorandum book,
+and found that I was sent down to Thorpe Ambrose to make private
+inquiries not very long since. My employer was a lively old lady,
+who was too sly to give us her right name and address. As a
+matter of course, we set to work at once, and found out who she
+was. Her name is Mrs. Oldershaw; and, if you think of _her_ for
+my stepmother, I strongly recommend you to think again before
+you make her Mrs. Bashwood.
+
+"If it is not Mrs. Oldershaw, then all I can do, so far, is to
+tell you how you may find out the unknown lady's address. Come
+to town yourself as soon as you get the letter you expect from
+the gentleman who has gone away with her (I hope he is not
+a handsome young man, for your sake) and call here. I will send
+somebody to help you in watching his hotel or lodgings; and if
+he communicates with the lady, or the lady with him, you may
+consider her address discovered from that moment. Once let me
+identify her, and know where she is, and you shall see all her
+charming little secrets as plainly as you see the paper on which
+your affectionate son is now writing to you.
+
+"A word more about the terms. I am as willing as you are to be
+friends again; but, though I own you were out of pocket by me
+once, I can't afford to be out of pocket by you. It must be
+understood that you are answerable for all the expenses of
+the inquiry. We may have to employ some of the women attached
+to this office, if your lady is too wideawake or too nice-looking
+to be dealt with by a man. There will be cab hire, and
+postage-stamps--admissions to public amusements, if she is
+inclined that way--shillings for pew-openers, if she is serious,
+and takes our people into churches to hear popular preachers, and
+so on. My own professional services you shall have gratis; but I
+can't lose by you as well. Only remember that, and you shall have
+your way. By-gones shall be by-gones, and we will forget the
+past.
+
+"Your affectionate son,
+
+"JAMES BASHWOOD."
+
+
+In the ecstasy of seeing help placed at last within his reach,
+the father put his son's atrocious letter to his lips. "My good
+boy!" he murmured, tenderly--"my dear, good boy!"
+
+He put the letter down, and fell into a new train of thought.
+The next question to face was the serious question of time. Mr.
+Pedgift had told him Miss Gwilt might be married in a fortnight.
+One day of the fourteen had passed already, and another was
+passing. He beat his hand impatiently on the table at his side,
+wondering how soon the want of money would force Allan to write
+to him from London. "To-morrow?" he asked himself. "Or next day?"
+
+The morrow passed, and nothing happened. The next day came, and
+the letter arrived! It was on business, as he had anticipated;
+it asked for money, as he had anticipated; and there, at the end
+of it, in a postscript, was the address added, concluding with
+the words, "You may count on my staying here till further
+notice."
+
+He gave one deep gasp of relief, and instantly busied himself
+--though there were nearly two hours to spare before the train
+started for London--in packing his bag. The last thing he put in
+was his blue satin cravat. "She likes bright colors," he said,
+"and she may see me in it yet!"
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
+
+"All Saints' Terrace, New Road, London, July 28th, Monday
+night.--I can hardly hold my head up, I am so tired. But in my
+situation, I dare not trust anything to memory. Before I go to
+bed, I must write my customary record of the events of the day.
+
+"So far, the turn of luck in my favor (it was long enough before
+it took the turn!) seems likely to continue. I succeeded in
+forcing Armadale--the brute required nothing short of forcing!--
+to leave Thorpe Ambrose for London, alone in the same carriage
+with me, before all the people in the station. There was a full
+attendance of dealers in small scandal, all staring hard at us,
+and all evidently drawing their own conclusions. Either I knew
+nothing of Thorpe Ambrose--or the town gossip is busy enough
+by this time with Mr. Armadale and Miss Gwilt.
+
+"I had some difficulty with him for the first half-hour after we
+left the station. The guard (delightful man! I felt so grateful
+to him!) had shut us up together, in expectation of half a crown
+at the end of the journey. Armadale was suspicious of me, and he
+showed it plainly. Little by little I tamed my wild beast--partly
+by taking care to display no curiosity about his journey to town,
+and partly by interesting him on the subject of his friend
+Midwinter; dwelling especially on the opportunity that now
+offered itself for a reconciliation between them. I kept harping
+on this string till I set his tongue going, and made him amuse me
+as a gentleman is bound to do when he has the honor of escorting
+a lady on a long railway journey.
+
+"What little mind he has was full, of course, of his own affairs
+and Miss Milroy's. No words can express the clumsiness he showed
+in trying to talk about himself, without taking me into his
+confidence or mentioning Miss Milroy's name.
+
+"He was going to London, he gravely informed me, on a matter of
+indescribable interest to him. It was a secret for the present,
+but he hoped to tell it me soon; it had made a great difference
+already in the way in which he looked at the slanders spoken
+of him in Thorpe Ambrose; he was too happy to care what the
+scandal-mongers said of him now, and he should soon stop their
+mouths by appearing in a new character that would surprise them
+all. So he blundered on, with the firm persuasion that he was
+keeping me quite in the dark. It was hard not to laugh, when
+I thought of my anonymous letter on its way to the major; but
+I managed to control myself--though, I must own, with some
+difficulty. As the time wore on, I began to feel a terrible
+excitement; the position was, I think, a little too much for me.
+There I was, alone with him, talking in the most innocent, easy,
+familiar manner, and having it in my mind all the time to brush
+his life out of my way, when the moment comes, as I might brush
+a stain off my gown. It made my blood leap, and my cheeks flush.
+I caught myself laughing once or twice much louder than I ought;
+and long before we got to London I thought it desirable to put
+my face in hiding by pulling down my veil.
+
+"There was no difficulty, on reaching the terminus, in getting
+him to come in the cab with me to the hotel where Midwinter
+is staying. He was all eagerness to be reconciled with his dear
+friend--principally, I have no doubt, because he wants the dear
+friend to lend a helping hand to the elopement. The real
+difficulty lay, of course, with Midwinter. My sudden journey
+to London had allowed me no opportunity of writing to combat his
+superstitious conviction that he and his former friend are better
+apart. I thought it wise to leave Armadale in the cab at the
+door, and to go into the hotel by myself to pave the way for him.
+
+"Fortunately, Midwinter had not gone out. His delight at seeing
+me some days sooner than he had hoped had something infectious in
+it, I suppose. Pooh! I may own the truth to my own diary! There
+was a moment when _I_ forgot everything in the world but our two
+selves as completely as he did. I felt as if I was back in my
+teens--until I remembered the lout in the cab at the door. And
+then I was five-and-thirty again in an instant.
+
+"His face altered when he heard who was below, and what it was
+I wanted of him; he looked not angry, but distressed. He yielded,
+however, before long, not to my reasons, for I gave him none, but
+to my entreaties. His old fondness for his friend might possibly
+have had some share in persuading him against his will; but my
+own opinion is that he acted entirely under the influence of his
+fondness for Me.
+
+"I waited in the sitting-room while he went down to the door; so
+I knew nothing of what passed between them when they first saw
+each other again. But oh, the difference between the two men when
+the interval had passed, and they came upstairs together and
+joined me.
+
+"They were both agitated, but in such different ways! The hateful
+Armadale, so loud and red and clumsy; the dear, lovable
+Midwinter, so pale and quiet, with such a gentleness in his voice
+when he spoke, and such tenderness in his eyes every time they
+turned my way. Armadale overlooked me as completely as if I had
+not been in the room. _He_ referred to me over and over again
+in the conversation; _he_ constantly looked at me to see what
+I thought, while I sat in my corner silently watching them; _he_
+wanted to go with me and see me safe to my lodgings, and spare me
+all trouble with the cabman and the luggage. When I thanked him
+and declined, Armadale looked unaffectedly relieved at the
+prospect of seeing my back turned, and of having his friend all
+to himself. I left him, with his awkward elbows half over the
+table, scrawling a letter (no doubt to Miss Milroy), and shouting
+to the waiter that he wanted a bed at the hotel. I had calculated
+on his staying, as a matter of course, where he found his friend
+staying. It was pleasant to find my anticipations realized, and
+to know that I have as good as got him now under my own eye.
+
+"After promising to let Midwinter know where he could see me
+to-morrow, I went away in the cab to hunt for lodgings by myself.
+
+"With some difficulty I have succeeded in getting an endurable
+sitting-room and bedroom in this house, where the people are
+perfect strangers to me. Having paid a week's rent in advance
+(for I naturally preferred dispensing with a reference), I find
+myself with exactly three shillings and ninepence left in my
+purse. It is impossible to ask Midwinter for money, after he
+has already paid Mrs. Oldershaw's note of hand. I must borrow
+something to-morrow on my watch and chain at the pawnbroker's.
+Enough to keep me going for a fortnight is all, and more than
+all, that I want. In that time, or in less than that time,
+Midwinter will have married me.
+
+
+"July 29th.--Two o'clock.--Early in the morning I sent a line
+to Midwinter, telling him that he would find me here at three
+this afternoon. That done, I devoted the morning to two errands
+of my own. One is hardly worth mentioning--it was only to raise
+money on my watch and chain. I got more than I expected; and more
+(even supposing I buy myself one or two little things in the way
+of cheap summer dress) than I am at all likely to spend before
+the wedding-day.
+
+"The other errand was of a far more serious kind. It led me
+into an attorney's office.
+
+"I was well aware last night (though I was too weary to put it
+down in my diary), that I could not possibly see Midwinter this
+morning--in the position he now occupies toward me--without at
+least _appearing_ to take him into my confidence on the subject
+of myself and my circumstances. Excepting one necessary
+consideration which I must be careful not to overlook. there
+is not the least difficulty in my drawing on my invention, and
+telling him any story I please--for thus far I have told no story
+to anybody. Midwinter went away to London before it was possible
+to approach the subject. As to the Milroys (having provided them
+with the customary reference), I could fortunately keep them
+at arms-length on all questions relating purely to myself. And
+lastly, when I affected my reconciliation with Armadale on
+the drive in front of the house, he was fool enough to be too
+generous to let me defend my character. When I had expressed my
+regret for having lost my temper and threatened Miss Milroy, and
+when I had accepted his assurance that my pupil had never done or
+meant to do me any injury, he was too magnanimous to hear a word
+on the subject of my private affairs. Thus I am quite unfettered
+by any former assertions of my own; and I may tell any story I
+please--with the one drawback hinted at already in the shape of
+a restraint. Whatever I may invent in the way of pure fiction,
+I must preserve the character in which I have appeared at Thorpe
+Ambrose; for, with the notoriety that is attached to _my other
+name_, I have no other choice but to marry Midwinter in my maiden
+name as 'Miss Gwilt.'
+
+"This was the consideration that took me into the lawyer's
+office. I felt that I must inform myself, before I saw Midwinter
+later in the day, of any awkward consequences that may follow
+the marriage of a widow if she conceals her widow's name.
+
+"Knowing of no other professional person whom I could trust,
+I went boldly to the lawyer who had my interests in his charge,
+at that terrible past time in my life, which I have more reason
+than ever to shrink from thinking of now. He was astonished,
+and, as I could plainly detect, by no means pleased to see me.
+I had hardly opened my lips before he said he hoped I was not
+consulting him _again_ (with a strong emphasis on the word) on
+my own account. I took the hint, and put the question I had come
+to ask, in the interests of that accommodating personage on such
+occasions--an absent friend. The lawyer evidently saw through it
+at once; but he was sharp enough to turn my 'friend' to good
+account on his side. He said he would answer the question as
+a matter of courtesy toward a lady represented by myself; but
+he must make it a condition that this consultation of him
+by deputy should go no further.
+
+"I accepted his terms; for I really respected the clever manner
+in which he contrived to keep me at arms-length without violating
+the laws of good-breeding. In two minutes I heard what he had to
+say, mastered it in my own mind, and went out.
+
+"Short as it was, the consultation told me everything I wanted
+to know. I risk nothing by marrying Midwinter in my maiden
+instead of my widow's name. The marriage is a good marriage in
+this way: that it can only be set aside if my husband finds out
+the imposture, and takes proceedings to invalidate our marriage
+in my lifetime. That is the lawyer's answer in the lawyer's own
+words. It relieves me at once--in this direction, at any rate--of
+all apprehension about the future. The only imposture my husband
+will ever discover--and then only if he happens to be on the
+spot--is the imposture that puts me in the place, and gives me
+the income, of Armadale's widow; and by that time I shall have
+invalidated my own marriage forever.
+
+"Half-past two! Midwinter will be here in half an hour. I must go
+and ask my glass how I look. I must rouse my invention, and make
+up my little domestic romance. Am I feeling nervous about it?
+Something flutters in the place where my heart used to be. At
+five-and-thirty, too! and after such a life as mine!
+
+
+Six o'clock.--He has just gone. The day for our marriage is a day
+determined on already.
+
+"I have tried to rest and recover myself. I can't rest. I have
+come back to these leaves. There is much to be written in them
+since Midwinter has been here, that concerns me nearly.
+
+"Let me begin with what I hate most to remember, and so be
+the sooner done with it--let me begin with the paltry string
+of falsehoods which I told him about my family troubles.
+
+"What _can_ be the secret of this man's hold on me? How is it
+that he alters me so that I hardly know myself again? I was like
+myself in the railway carriage yesterday with Armadale. It was
+surely frightful to be talking to the living man, through the
+whole of that long journey, with the knowledge in me all the
+while that I meant to be his widow--and yet I was only excited
+and fevered. Hour after hour I never shrunk once from speaking
+to Armadale; but the first trumpery falsehood I told Midwinter
+turned me cold when I saw that he believed it! I felt a dreadful
+hysterical choking in the throat when he entreated me not to
+reveal my troubles. And once--I am horrified when I think of
+it--once, when he said, 'If I _could_ love you more dearly,
+I should love you more dearly now,' I was within a hair-breadth
+of turning traitor to myself. I was on the very point of crying
+out to him, 'Lies! all lies! I'm a fiend in human shape! Marry
+the wretchedest creature that prowls the streets, and you will
+marry a better woman than me!' Yes! the seeing his eyes moisten,
+the hearing his voice tremble, while I was deceiving him, shook
+me in that way. I have seen handsomer men by hundreds, cleverer
+men by dozens. What can this man have roused in me? Is it Love?
+I thought I _had_ loved, never to love again. Does a woman not
+love when the man's hardness to her drives her to drown herself?
+A man drove _me_ to that last despair in days gone by. Did all
+my misery at that time come from something which was not Love?
+Have I lived to be five-and-thirty, and am I only feeling now
+what Love really is?--now, when it is too late? Ridiculous!
+Besides, what is the use of asking? What do I know about it?
+What does any woman ever know? The more we think of it, the more
+we deceive ourselves. I wish I had been born an animal. My beauty
+might have been of some use to me then--it might have got me
+a good master.
+
+"Here is a whole page of my diary filled; and nothing written yet
+that is of the slightest use to me! My miserable made-up story
+must be told over again here, while the incidents are fresh
+in my memory--or how am I to refer to it consistently on
+after-occasions when I may be obliged to speak of it again?
+
+"There was nothing new in what I told him; it was the commonplace
+rubbish of the circulating libraries. A dead father; a lost
+fortune; vagabond brothers, whom I dread ever seeing again;
+a bedridden mother dependent on my exertions--No! I can't write
+it down! I hate myself, I despise myself, when I remember that
+_he_ believed it because I said it--that _he_ was distressed
+by it because it was my story! I will face the chances of
+contradicting myself--I will risk discovery and ruin--anything
+rather than dwell on that contemptible deception of him a moment
+longer.
+
+"My lies came to an end at last. And then he talked to me of
+himself and of his prospects. Oh, what a relief it was to turn
+to that at the time! What a relief it is to come to it now!
+
+"He has accepted the offer about which he wrote to me at Thorpe
+Ambrose; and he is now engaged as occasional foreign
+correspondent to the new newspaper. His first destination is
+Naples. I wish it had been some other place, for I have certain
+past associations with Naples which I am not at all anxious to
+renew. It has been arranged that he is to leave England not later
+than the eleventh of next month. By that time, therefore, I, who
+am to go with him, must go with him as his wife.
+
+"There is not the slightest difficulty about the marriage. All
+this part of it is so easy that I begin to dread an accident.
+
+"The proposal to keep the thing strictly private--which it might
+have embarrassed me to make--comes from Midwinter. Marrying me
+in his own name--the name that he has kept concealed from every
+living creature but myself and Mr. Brock--it is his interest
+that not a soul who knows him should be present at the ceremony;
+his friend Armadale least of all. He has been a week in London
+already. When another week has passed, he proposes to get the
+License, and to be married in the church belonging to the parish
+in which the hotel is situated. These are the only necessary
+formalities. I had but to say 'Yes' (he told me), and to feel
+no further anxiety about the future. I said 'Yes' with such
+a devouring anxiety about the future that I was afraid he would
+see it. What minutes the next few minutes were, when he whispered
+delicious words to me, while I hid my face on his breast!
+
+"I recovered myself first, and led him back to the subject of
+Armadale, having my own reasons for wanting to know what they
+said to each other after I had left them yesterday.
+
+"The manner in which Midwinter replied showed me that he was
+speaking under the restraint of respecting a confidence placed
+in him by his friend. Long before he had done, I detected what
+the confidence was. Armadale had been consulting him (exactly
+as I anticipated) on the subject of the elopement. Although he
+appears to have remonstrated against taking the girl secretly
+away from her home, Midwinter seems to have felt some delicacy
+about speaking strongly, remembering (widely different as the
+circumstances are) that he was contemplating a private marriage
+himself. I gathered, at any rate, that he had produced very
+little effect by what he had said; and that Armadale had already
+carried out his absurd intention of consulting the head-clerk
+in the office of his London lawyers.
+
+"Having got as far as this, Midwinter put the question which
+I felt must come sooner or later. He asked if I objected to our
+engagement being mentioned, in the strictest secrecy, to his
+friend.
+
+"'I will answer,' he said, 'for Allan's respecting any confidence
+that I place in him. And I will undertake, when the time comes,
+so to use my influence over him as to prevent his being present
+at the marriage, and discovering (what he must never know) that
+my name is the same as his own. It would help me,' he went on,
+'to speak more strongly about the object that has brought him
+to London, if I can requite the frankness with which he has
+spoken of his private affairs to me by the same frankness on
+my side.'
+
+"I had no choice but to give the necessary permission, and I gave
+it. It is of the utmost importance to me to know what course
+Major Milroy takes with his daughter and Armadale after receiving
+my anonymous letter; and, unless I invite Armadale's confidence
+in some way, I am nearly certain to be kept in the dark. Let him
+once be trusted with the knowledge that I am to be Midwinter's
+wife, and what he tells his friend about his love affair he will
+tell me.
+
+"When it had been understood between us that Armadale was to
+be taken into our confidence, we began to talk about ourselves
+again. How the time flew! What a sweet enchantment it was to
+forget everything in his arms! How he loves me!--ah, poor fellow,
+how he loves me!
+
+"I have promised to meet him to-morrow morning in the Regent's
+Park. The less he is seen here the better. The people in this
+house are strangers to me, certainly; but it may be wise to
+consult appearances, as if I was still at Thorpe Ambrose, and not
+to produce the impression, even on their minds, that Midwinter
+is engaged to me. If any after-inquiries are made, when I have
+run my grand risk, the testimony of my London landlady might be
+testimony worth having.
+
+"That wretched old Bashwood! Writing of Thorpe Ambrose reminds
+me of him. What will he say when the town gossip tells him that
+Armadale has taken me to London, in a carriage reserved for
+ourselves? It really is too absurd in a man of Bashwood's age
+and appearance to presume to be in love!....
+
+
+"July 30th.---News at last! Armadale has heard from Miss Milroy.
+My anonymous letter has produced its effect. The girl is removed
+from Thorpe Ambrose already; and the whole project of the
+elopement is blown to the winds at once and forever. This was
+the substance of what Midwinter had to tell me when I met him in
+the Park. I affected to be excessively astonished, and to feel
+the necessary feminine longing to know all the particulars. 'Not
+that I expect to have my curiosity satisfied,' I added, 'for Mr.
+Armadale and I are little better than mere acquaintances, after
+all.'
+
+"'You are far more than a mere acquaintance in Allan's eyes,'
+said Midwinter. 'Having your permission to trust him, I have
+already told him how near and dear you are to me.'
+
+"Hearing this, I thought it desirable, before I put any questions
+about Miss Milroy, to attend to my own interests first, and
+to find out what effect the announcement of my coming marriage
+had produced on Armadale. It was possible that he might be still
+suspicious of me, and that the inquiries he made in London, at
+Mrs. Milroy's instigation, might be still hanging on his mind.
+
+"'Did Mr. Armadale seem surprised,' I asked, 'when you told him
+of our engagement, and when you said it was to be kept a secret
+from everybody?'
+
+"'He seemed greatly surprised,' said Midwinter, 'to hear that we
+were going to be married. All he said when I told him it must
+be kept a secret was that he supposed there were reasons on your
+side for making the marriage a private one.'
+
+"'What did you say,' I inquired, 'when he made that remark?'
+
+"'I said the reasons were on my side,' answered Midwinter. 'And
+I thought it right to add--considering that Allan had allowed
+himself to be misled by the ignorant distrust of you at Thorpe
+Ambrose--that you had confided to me the whole of your sad family
+story, and that you had amply justified your unwillingness; under
+any ordinary circumstances, to speak of your private affairs.'
+
+("I breathed freely again. He had said just what was wanted,
+just in the right way.)
+
+"'Thank you,' I said, 'for putting me right in your friend's
+estimation. Does he wish to see me?' I added, by way of getting
+back to the other subject of Miss Milroy and the elopement.
+
+"'He is longing to see you,' returned Midwinter. 'He is in great
+distress, poor fellow--distress which I have done my best to
+soothe, but which, I believe, would yield far more readily to
+a woman's sympathy than to mine.'
+
+"'Where is he now?' I asked.
+
+"He was at the hotel; and to the hotel I instantly proposed
+that we should go. It is a busy, crowded place; and (with
+my veil down) I have less fear of compromising myself there
+than at my quiet lodgings. Besides, it is vitally important
+to me to know what Armadale does next, under this total change
+of circumstances--for I must so control his proceedings as to
+get him away from England if I can. We took a cab: such was
+my eagerness to sympathize with the heart-broken lover, that
+we took a cab!
+
+"Anything so ridiculous as Armadale's behavior under the double
+shock of discovering that his young lady has been taken away
+from him, and that I am to be married to Midwinter, I never
+before witnessed in all my experience. To say that he was like
+a child is a libel on all children who are not born idiots. He
+congratulated me on my coming marriage, and execrated the unknown
+wretch who had written the anonymous letter, little thinking that
+he was speaking of one and the same person in one and the same
+breath. Now he submissively acknowledged that Major Milroy had
+his rights as a father, and now he reviled the major as having
+no feeling for anything but his mechanics and his clock. At one
+moment he started up, with the tears in his eyes, and declared
+that his 'darling Neelie' was an angel on earth. At another he
+sat down sulkily, and thought that a girl of her spirit might
+have run away on the spot and joined him in London. After a good
+half-hour of this absurd exhibition, I succeeded in quieting him;
+and then a few words of tender inquiry produced what I had
+expressly come to the hotel to see--Miss Milroy's letter.
+
+"It was outrageously long, and rambling, and confused; in short,
+the letter of a fool. I had to wade through plenty of vulgar
+sentiment and lamentation, and to lose time and patience over
+maudlin outbursts of affection, and nauseous kisses inclosed in
+circles of ink. However, I contrived to extract the information
+I wanted at last; and here it is:
+
+
+"The major, on receipt of my anonymous warning, appears to have
+sent at once for his daughter, and to have shown her the letter.
+'You know what a hard life I lead with your mother; don't make
+it harder still, Neelie, by deceiving me.' That was all the poor
+old gentleman said. I always did like the major; and, though he
+was afraid to show it, I know he always liked me. His appeal to
+his daughter (if _her_ account of it is to be believed) cut her
+to the heart. She burst out crying (let her alone for crying at
+the right moment!) and confessed everything.
+
+"After giving her time to recover herself (if he had given her
+a good box on the ears it would have been more to the purpose!),
+the major seems to have put certain questions, and to have become
+convinced (as I was convinced myself) that his daughter's heart,
+or fancy, or whatever she calls it, was really and truly set on
+Armadale. The discovery evidently distressed as well as surprised
+him. He appears to have hesitated, and to have maintained his own
+unfavorable opinion of Miss Neelie's lover for some little time.
+But his daughter's tears and entreaties (so like the weakness
+of the dear old gentleman!) shook him at last. Though he firmly
+refused to allow of any marriage engagement at present, he
+consented to overlook the clandestine meetings in the park, and
+to put Armadale's fitness to become his son-in-law to the test,
+on certain conditions.
+
+"These conditions are, that for the next six months to come
+all communication is to be broken off, both personally and by
+writing, between Armadale and Miss Milroy. That space of time is
+to be occupied by the young gentleman as he himself thinks best,
+and by the young lady in completing her education at school. If,
+when the six months have passed, they are both still of the same
+mind, and if Armadale's conduct in the interval has been such
+as to improve the major's opinion of him, he will be allowed
+to present himself in the character of Miss Milroy's suitor, and,
+in six months more, if all goes well, the marriage may take
+place.
+
+"I declare I could kiss the dear old major, if I was only within
+reach of him! If I had been at his elbow, and had dictated the
+conditions myself, I could have asked for nothing better than
+this. Six months of total separation between Armadale and Miss
+Milroy! In half that time--with all communication cut off between
+the two--it must go hard with me, indeed, if I don't find myself
+dressed in the necessary mourning, and publicly recognized as
+Armadale's widow.
+
+"But I am forgetting the girl's letter. She gives her father's
+reasons for making his conditions, in her father's own words.
+The major seems to have spoken so sensibly and so feelingly
+that he left his daughter no decent alternative--and he leaves
+Armadale no decent alternative--but to submit. As well as I can
+remember, he seems to have expressed himself to Miss Neelie
+in these, or nearly in these terms:
+
+"'Don't think I am behaving cruelly to you, my dear: I am merely
+asking you to put Mr. Armadale to the proof. It is not only
+right, it is absolutely necessary, that you should hold no
+communication with him for some time to come; and I will show you
+why. In the first place, if you go to school, the necessary rules
+in such places--necessary for the sake of the other girls--would
+not permit you to see Mr. Armadale or to receive letters from
+him; and, if you are to become mistress of Thorpe Ambrose, to
+school you must go, for you would be ashamed, and I should be
+ashamed, if you occupied the position of a lady of station
+without having the accomplishments which all ladies of station
+are expected to possess. In the second place, I want to see
+whether Mr. Armadale will continue to think of you as he thinks
+now, without being encouraged in his attachment by seeing you, or
+reminded of it by hearing from you. If I am wrong in thinking him
+flighty and unreliable, and if your opinion of him is the right
+one, this is not putting the young man to an unfair test--true
+love survives much longer separations than a separation of six
+months. And when that time is over, and well over; and when I
+have had him under my own eye for another six months, and have
+learned to think as highly of him as you do--even then, my dear,
+after all that terrible delay, you will still be a married woman
+before you are eighteen. Think of this, Neelie, and show that you
+love me and trust me, by accepting my proposal. I will hold no
+communication with Mr. Armadale myself. I will leave it to you
+to write and tell him what has been decided on. He may write back
+one letter, and one only, to acquaint you with his decision.
+After that, for the sake of your reputation, nothing more is to
+be said, and nothing more is to be done, and the matter is to be
+kept strictly private until the six months' interval is at an
+end.'
+
+"To this effect the major spoke. His behavior to that little slut
+of a girl has produced a stronger impression on me than anything
+else in the letter. It has set me thinking (me, of all the people
+in the world!) of what they call 'a moral difficulty.' We are
+perpetually told that there can be no possible connection between
+virtue and vice. Can there not? Here is Major Milroy doing
+exactly what an excellent father, at once kind and prudent,
+affectionate and firm, would do under the circumstances; and by
+that very course of conduct he has now smoothed the way for _me_,
+as completely as if he had been the chosen accomplice of that
+abominable creature, Miss Gwilt. Only think of my reasoning in
+this way! But I am in such good spirits, I can do anything
+to-day. I have not looked so bright and so young as I look now
+for months past!
+
+"To return to the letter, for the last time--it is so excessively
+dull and stupid that I really can't help wandering away from it
+into reflections of my own, as a mere relief.
+
+"After solemnly announcing that she meant to sacrifice herself to
+her beloved father's wishes (the brazen assurance of her setting
+up for a martyr after what has happened exceeds anything I ever
+heard or read of!), Miss Neelie next mentioned that the major
+proposed taking her to the seaside for change of air, during
+the few days that were still to elapse before she went to school.
+Armadale was to send his answer by return of post, and to address
+her, under cover to her father, at Lowestoft. With this, and with
+a last outburst of tender protestation, crammed crookedly into
+a corner of the page, the letter ended. (N.B.--The major's object
+in taking her to the seaside is plain enough. He still privately
+distrusts Armadale, and he is wisely determined to prevent any
+more clandestine meetings in the park before the girl is safely
+disposed of at school.)
+
+
+"When I had done with the letter--I had requested permission
+to read parts of it which I particularly admired, for the second
+and third time!--we all consulted together in a friendly way
+about what Armadale was to do.
+
+"He was fool enough, at the outset, to protest against submitting
+to Major Milroy's conditions. He declared, with his odious red
+face looking the picture of brute health, that he should never
+survive a six months' separation from his beloved Neelie.
+Midwinter (as may easily be imagined) seemed a little ashamed of
+him, and joined me in bringing him to his senses. We showed him,
+what would have been plain enough to anybody but a booby, that
+there was no honorable or even decent alternative left but to
+follow the example of submission set by the young lady. 'Wait,
+and you will have her for your wife,' was what I said. 'Wait,
+and you will force the major to alter his unjust opinion of you,'
+was what Midwinter added. With two clever people hammering common
+sense into his head at that rate, it is needless to say that
+his head gave way, and he submitted.
+
+"Having decided him to accept the major's conditions (I was
+careful to warn him, before he wrote to Miss Milroy, that my
+engagement to Midwinter was to be kept as strictly secret from
+her as from everybody else), the next question we had to settle
+related to his future proceedings. I was ready with the necessary
+arguments to stop him, if he had proposed returning to Thorpe
+Ambrose. But he proposed nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he
+declared, of his own accord, that nothing would induce him to go
+back. The place and the people were associated with everything
+that was hateful to him. There would be no Miss Milroy now to
+meet him in the park, and no Midwinter to keep him company in
+the solitary house. 'I'd rather break stones on the road,' was
+the sensible and cheerful way in which he put it, 'than go back
+to Thorpe Ambrose.'
+
+"The first suggestion after this came from Midwinter. The sly old
+clergyman who gave Mrs. Oldershaw and me so much trouble has, it
+seems, been ill, but has been latterly reported better. 'Why not
+go to Somersetshire,' said Midwinter, 'and see your good friend,
+and my good friend, Mr. Brock?'
+
+"Armadale caught at the proposal readily enough. He longed, in
+the first place, to see 'dear old Brock,' and he longed, in
+the second place, to see his yacht. After staying a few days more
+in London with Midwinter, he would gladly go to Somersetshire.
+But what after that?
+
+"Seeing my opportunity, _I_ came to the rescue this time.
+'You have got a yacht, Mr. Armadale,' I said; 'and you know that
+Midwinter is going to Italy. When you are tired of Somersetshire,
+why not make a voyage to the Mediterranean, and meet your friend,
+and your friend's wife, at Naples?'
+
+"I made the allusion to 'his friend's wife' with the most
+becoming modesty and confusion. Armadale was enchanted. I had hit
+on the best of all ways of occupying the weary time. He started
+up, and wrung my hand in quite an ecstasy of gratitude. How I do
+hate people who can only express their feelings by hurting other
+people's hands!
+
+"Midwinter was as pleased with my proposal as Armadale; but he
+saw difficulties in the way of carrying it out. He considered
+the yacht too small for a cruise to the Mediterranean, and he
+thought it desirable to hire a larger vessel. His friend thought
+otherwise. I left them arguing the question. It was quite enough
+for me to have made sure, in the first place, that Armadale will
+not return to Thorpe Ambrose; and to have decided him, in the
+second place, on going abroad. He may go how he likes. I should
+prefer the small yacht myself; for there seems to be a chance
+that the small yacht might do me the inestimable service of
+drowning him....
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--The excitement of feeling that I had got
+Armadale's future movements completely under my own control
+made me so restless, when I returned to my lodgings, that I was
+obliged to go out again, and do something. A new interest to
+occupy me being what I wanted, I went to Pimlico to have it out
+with Mother Oldershaw.
+
+"I walked; and made up my mind, on the way, that I would begin
+by quarreling with her.
+
+"One of my notes of hand being paid already, and Midwinter being
+willing to pay the other two when they fall due, my present
+position with the old wretch is as independent a one as I could
+desire. I always get the better of her when it comes to a
+downright battle between us, and find her wonderfully civil
+and obliging the moment I have made her feel that mine is the
+strongest will of the two. In my present situation, she might be
+of use to me in various ways, if I could secure her assistance,
+without trusting her with secrets which I am now more than ever
+determined to keep to myself. That was my idea as I walked to
+Pimlico. Upsetting Mother Oldershaw's nerves, in the first place,
+and then twisting her round my little finger, in the second,
+promised me, as I thought, an interesting occupation for the rest
+of the afternoon.
+
+"When I got to Pimlico, a surprise was in store for we. The house
+was shut up--not only on Mrs. Oldershaw's side, but on Doctor
+Downward's as well. A padlock was on the shop door; and a man
+was hanging about on the watch, who might have been an ordinary
+idler certainly, but who looked, to my mind, like a policeman
+in disguise.
+
+"Knowing the risks the doctor runs in his particular form
+of practice, I suspected at once that something serious had
+happened, and that even cunning Mrs. Oldershaw was compromised
+this time. Without stopping, or making any inquiry, therefore,
+I called the first cab that passed me, and drove to the post-
+office to which I had desired my letters to be forwarded if any
+came for me after I left my Thorpe Ambrose lodging.
+
+"On inquiry a letter was produced for 'Miss Gwilt.' It was in
+Mother Oldershaw's handwriting, and it told me (as I had
+supposed) that the doctor had got into a serious difficulty--that
+she was herself most unfortunately mixed up in the matter, and
+that they were both in hiding for the present. The letter ended
+with some sufficiently venomous sentences about my conduct at
+Thorpe Ambrose, and with a warning that I have not heard the last
+of Mrs. Oldershaw yet. It relieved me to find her writing in this
+way--for she would have been civil and cringing if she had had
+any suspicion of what I have really got in view. I burned the
+letter as soon as the candles came up. And there, for the
+present, is an end of the connection between Mother Jezebel and
+me. I must do all my own dirty work now; and I shall be all the
+safer, perhaps, for trusting nobody's hands to do it but my own.
+
+
+"July 31st.--More useful information for me. I met Midwinter
+again in the Park (on the pretext that my reputation might suffer
+if he called too often at my lodgings), and heard the last news
+of Armadale since I left the hotel yesterday.
+
+"After he had written to Miss Milroy, Midwinter took the
+opportunity of speaking to him about the necessary business
+arrangements during his absence from the great house. It was
+decided that the servants should be put on board wages, and that
+Mr. Bashwood should be left in charge. (Somehow, I don't like
+this re-appearance of Mr. Bashwood in connection with my present
+interests, but there is no help for it.) The next question--the
+question of money--was settled at once by Mr. Armadale himself.
+All his available ready-money (a large sum) is to be lodged by
+Mr. Bashwood in Coutts's Bank, and to be there deposited in
+Armadale's name. This, he said, would save him the worry of any
+further letter-writing to his steward, and would enable him to
+get what he wanted, when he went abroad, at a moment's notice.
+The plan thus proposed, being certainly the simplest and the
+safest, was adopted with Midwinter's full concurrence; and here
+the business discussion would have ended, if the everlasting
+Mr. Bashwood had not turned up again in the conversation, and
+prolonged it in an entirely new direction.
+
+"On reflection, it seems to have struck Midwinter that the whole
+responsibility at Thorpe Ambrose ought not to rest on Mr.
+Bashwood's shoulders. Without in the least distrusting him,
+Midwinter felt, nevertheless, that he ought to have somebody set
+over him, to apply to in case of emergency. Armadale made no
+objection to this; he only asked, in his helpless way, who the
+person was to be?
+
+"The answer was not an easy one to arrive at.
+
+"Either of the two solicitors at Thorpe Ambrose might have been
+employed, but Armadale was on bad terms with both of them. Any
+reconciliation with such a bitter enemy as the elder lawyer, Mr.
+Darch, was out of the question; and reinstating Mr. Pedgift in
+his former position implied a tacit sanction on Armadale's part
+of the lawyer's abominable conduct toward _me_, which was
+scarcely consistent with the respect and regard that he felt for
+a lady who was soon to be his friend's wife. After some further
+discussion, Midwinter hit on a new suggestion which appeared to
+meet the difficulty. He proposed that Armadale should write to a
+respectable solicitor at Norwich, stating his position in general
+terms, and requesting that gentleman to act as Mr. Bashwood's
+adviser and superintendent when occasion required. Norwich being
+within an easy railway ride of Thorpe Ambrose, Armadale saw no
+objection to the proposal, and promised to write to the Norwich
+lawyer. Fearing that he might make some mistake if he wrote
+without assistance, Midwinter had drawn him out a draft of the
+necessary letter, and Armadale was now engaged in copying the
+draft, and also in writing to Mr. Bashwood to lodge the money
+immediately in Coutts's Bank.
+
+"These details are so dry and uninteresting in themselves that
+I hesitated at first about putting them down in my diary. But
+a little reflection has convinced me that they are too important
+to be passed over. Looked at from my point of view, they mean
+this--that Armadale's own act is now cutting him off from all
+communication with Thorpe Ambrose, even by letter. _He is as good
+as dead already to everybody he leaves behind him_. The causes
+which have led to such a result as that are causes which
+certainly claim the best place I can give them in these pages.
+
+
+"August 1st.--Nothing to record, but that I have had a long,
+quiet, happy day with Midwinter. He hired a carriage, and we
+drove to Richmond, and dined there. After to-day's experience,
+it is impossible to deceive myself any longer. Come what may
+of it, I love him.
+
+"I have fallen into low spirits since he left me. A persuasion
+has taken possession of my mind that the smooth and prosperous
+course of my affairs since I have been in London is too smooth
+and prosperous to last. There is something oppressing me
+to-night, which is more than the oppression of the heavy London
+air.
+
+
+"August 2d.--Three o'clock.--My presentiments, like other
+people's, have deceived me often enough; but I am almost afraid
+that my presentiment of last night was really prophetic, for once
+in a way.
+
+"I went after breakfast to a milliner's in this neighborhood to
+order a few cheap summer things, and thence to Midwinter's hotel
+to arrange with him for another day in the country. I drove to
+the milliner's and to the hotel, and part of the way back. Then,
+feeling disgusted with the horrid close smell of the cab
+(somebody had been smoking in it, I suppose), I got out to walk
+the rest of the way. Before I had been two minutes on my feet,
+I discovered that I was being followed by a strange man.
+
+"This may mean nothing but that an idle fellow has been struck by
+my figure, and my appearance generally. My face could have made
+no impression on him, for it was hidden as usual by my veil.
+Whether he followed me (in a cab, of course) from the milliner's,
+or from the hotel, I cannot say. Nor am I quite certain whether
+he did or did not track me to this door. I only know that I lost
+sight of him before I got back. There is no help for it but to
+wait till events enlighten me. If there is anything serious in
+what has happened, I shall soon discover it.
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--It _is_ serious. Ten minutes since, I was in
+my bedroom, which communicates with the sitting-room. I was
+just coming out, when I heard a strange voice on the landing
+outside--a woman's voice. The next instant the sitting-room
+door was suddenly opened; the woman's voice said, 'Are these
+the apartments you have got to let?' and though the landlady,
+behind her, answered, 'No! higher up, ma'am,' the woman came on
+straight to my bedroom, as if she had not heard. I had just time
+to slam the door in her face before she saw me. The necessary
+explanations and apologies followed between the landlady and
+the stranger in the sitting-room, and then I was left alone
+again.
+
+"I have no time to write more. It is plain that somebody has
+an interest in trying to identify me, and that, but for my own
+quickness, the strange woman would have accomplished this object
+by taking me by surprise. She and the man who followed me in the
+street are, I suspect, in league together; and there is probably
+somebody in the background whose interests they are serving. Is
+Mother Oldershaw attacking me in the dark? or who else can it be?
+No matter who it is; my present situation is too critical to be
+trifled with. I must get away from this house to-night, and leave
+no trace behind me by which I can be followed to another place.
+
+
+"August 3d.--Gary Street, Tottenham Court Road.--I got away last
+night (after writing an excuse to Midwinter, in which 'my invalid
+mother' figured as the all-sufficient cause of my disappearance);
+and I have found refuge here. It has cost me some money; but my
+object is attained! Nobody can possibly have traced me from All
+Saints' Terrace to this address.
+
+"After paying my landlady the necessary forfeit for leaving her
+without notice, I arranged with her son that he should take my
+boxes in a cab to the cloak-room at the nearest railway station,
+and send me the ticket in a letter, to wait my application for it
+at the post-office. While he went his way in one cab, I went
+mine in another, with a few things for the night in my little
+hand-bag.
+
+"I drove straight to the milliner's shop, which I had observed,
+when I was there yesterday, had a back entrance into a mews,
+for the apprentices to go in and out by. I went in at once,
+leaving the cab waiting for me at the door. 'A man is following
+me,' I said, 'and I want to get rid of him. Here is my cab fare;
+wait ten minutes before you give it to the driver, and let me out
+at once by the back way!' In a moment I was out in the mews;
+in another, I was in the next street; in a third, I hailed
+a passing omnibus, and was a free woman again.
+
+"Having now cut off all communication between me and my last
+lodgings, the next precaution (in case Midwinter or Armadale
+are watched) is to cut off all communication, for some days
+to come at least, between me and the hotel. I have written
+to Midwinter--making my supposititious mother once more the
+excuse--to say that I am tied to my nursing duties, and that
+we must communicate by writing only for the present. Doubtful
+as I still am of who my hidden enemy really is, I can do no more
+to defend myself than I have done now.
+
+
+"August 4th.--The two friends at the hotel had both written
+to me. Midwinter expresses his regret at our separation, in
+the tenderest terms. Armadale writes an entreaty for help under
+very awkward circumstances. A letter from Major Milroy has been
+forwarded to him from the great house, and he incloses it in
+his letter to me.
+
+"Having left the seaside, and placed his daughter safely at the
+school originally chosen for her (in the neighborhood of Ely),
+the major appears to have returned to Thorpe Ambrose at the close
+of last week; to have heard then, for the first time, the reports
+about Armadale and me; and to have written instantly to Armadale
+to tell him so.
+
+"The letter is stern and short. Major Milroy dismisses the report
+as unworthy of credit, because it is impossible for him to
+believe in such an act of 'cold-blooded treachery,' as the
+scandal would imply, if the scandal were true. He simply writes
+to warn Armadale that, if he is not more careful in his actions
+for the future, he must resign all pretensions to Miss Milroy's
+hand. 'I neither expect, nor wish for, an answer to this' (the
+letter ends), 'for I desire to receive no mere protestations in
+words. By your conduct, and by your conduct alone, I shall judge
+you as time goes on. Let me also add that I positively forbid you
+to consider this letter as an excuse for violating the terms
+agreed on between us, by writing again to my daughter. You have
+no need to justify yourself in her eyes, for I fortunately
+removed her from Thorpe Ambrose before this abominable report
+had time to reach her; and I shall take good care, for her sake,
+that she is not agitated and unsettled by hearing it where she
+is now.'
+
+"Armadale's petition to me, under these circumstances, entreats
+(as I am the innocent cause of the new attack on his character)
+that I will write to the major to absolve him of all indiscretion
+in the matter, and to say that he could not, in common
+politeness, do otherwise than accompany me to London.
+
+"I forgive the impudence of his request, in consideration of the
+news that he sends me. It is certainly another circumstance in my
+favor that the scandal at Thorpe Ambrose is not to be allowed to
+reach Miss Milroy's ears. With her temper (if she did hear it)
+she might do something desperate in the way of claiming her
+lover, and might compromise me seriously. As for my own course
+with Armadale, it is easy enough. I shall quiet him by promising
+to write to Major Milroy; and I shall take the liberty, in my own
+private interests, of not keeping my word.
+
+"Nothing in the least suspicious has happened to-day. Whoever
+my enemies are, they have lost me, and between this and the time
+when I leave England they shall not find me again. I have been to
+the post-office, and have got the ticket for my luggage, inclosed
+to me in a letter from All Saints' Terrace, as I directed. The
+luggage itself I shall still leave at the cloak-room, until I see
+the way before me more clearly than I see it now.
+
+
+"August 5th.--Two letters again from the hotel. Midwinter writes
+to remind me, in the prettiest possible manner, that he will have
+lived long enough in the parish by to-morrow to be able to get
+our marriage-license, and that he proposes applying for it in
+the usual way at Doctors' Commons. Now, if I am ever to say it,
+is the time to say No. I can't say No. There is the plain truth
+--and there is an end of it!
+
+"Armadale's letter is a letter of farewell. He thanks me for
+my kindness in consenting to write to the major, and bids me
+good-by, till we meet again at Naples. He has learned from his
+friend that there are private reasons which will oblige him to
+forbid himself the pleasure of being present at our marriage.
+Under these circumstances, there is nothing to keep him in
+London. He has made all his business arrangements; he goes to
+Somersetshire by to-night's train; and, after staying some time
+with Mr. Brock, he will sail for the Mediterranean from the
+Bristol Channel (in spite of Midwinter's objections) in his own
+yacht.
+
+"The letter incloses a jeweler's box, with a ring in it--
+Armadale's present to me on my marriage. It is a ruby--but rather
+a small one, and set in the worst possible taste. He would have
+given Miss Milroy a ring worth ten times the money, if it had
+been _her_ marriage present. There is no more hateful creature,
+in my opinion, than a miserly young man. I wonder whether his
+trumpery little yacht will drown him?
+
+"I am so excited and fluttered, I hardly know what I am writing.
+Not that I shrink from what is coming--I only feel as if I was
+being hurried on faster than I quite like to go. At this rate,
+if nothing happens, Midwinter will have married me by the end
+of the week. And then--!
+
+
+"August 6th.--If anything could startle me now, I should feel
+startled by the news that has reached me to-day.
+
+"On his return to the hotel this morning, after getting the
+marriage-license, Midwinter found a telegram waiting for him.
+It contained an urgent message from Armadale, announcing that
+Mr. Brock had had a relapse, and that all hope of his recovery
+was pronounced by the doctors to be at an end. By the dying
+man's own desire, Midwinter was summoned to take leave of him,
+and was entreated by Armadale not to lose a moment in starting
+for the rectory by the first train.
+
+"The hurried letter which tells me this tells me also that, by
+the time I receive it, Midwinter will be on his way to the West.
+He promises to write at greater length, after he has seen Mr.
+Brock, by to-night's post.
+
+"This news has an interest for me, which Midwinter little
+suspects. There is but one human creature, besides myself, who
+knows the secret of his birth and his name; and that one is the
+old man who now lies waiting for him at the point of death. What
+will they say to each other at the last moment? Will some chance
+word take them back to the time when I was in Mrs. Armadale's
+service at Madeira? Will they speak of Me?
+
+
+"August 7th.--The promised letter has just reached me. No parting
+words have been exchanged between them: it was all over before
+Midwinter reached Somersetshire. Armadale met him at the rectory
+gate with the news that Mr. Brock was dead.
+
+"I try to struggle against it, but, coming after the strange
+complication of circumstances that has been closing round me
+for weeks past, there is something in this latest event of all
+that shakes my nerves. But one last chance of detection stood
+in my way when I opened my diary yesterday. When I open it
+to-day, that chance is removed by Mr. Brock's death. It means
+something; I wish I knew what.
+
+"The funeral is to be on Saturday morning. Midwinter will attend
+it as well as Armadale. But he proposes returning to London
+first; and he writes word that he will call to-night, in the hope
+of seeing me, on his way from the station to the hotel. Even if
+there was any risk in it, I should see him, as things are now.
+But there is no risk if he comes here from the station instead
+of coming from the hotel.
+
+
+"Five o'clock.--I was not mistaken in believing that my nerves
+were all unstrung. Trifles that would not have cost me a second
+thought at other times weigh heavily on my mind now.
+
+"Two hours since, in despair of knowing how to get through the
+day, I bethought myself of the milliner who is making my summer
+dress. I had intended to go and try it on yesterday; but it
+slipped out of my memory in the excitement of hearing about Mr.
+Brock. So I went this afternoon, eager to do anything that might
+help me to get rid of myself. I have returned, feeling more
+uneasy and more depressed than I felt when I went out; for I have
+come back fearing that I may yet have reason to repent not having
+left my unfinished dress on the milliner's hands.
+
+"Nothing happened to me, this time, in the street. It was only
+in the trying-on room that my suspicions were roused; and there
+it certainly did cross my mind that the attempt to discover me,
+which I defeated at All Saints' Terrace, was not given up yet,
+and that some of the shop-women had been tampered with, if not
+the mistress herself.
+
+"Can I give myself anything in the shape of a reason for this
+impression? Let me think a little.
+
+"I certainly noticed two things which were out of the ordinary
+routine, under the circumstances. In the first place, there were
+twice as many women as were needed in the trying-on room. This
+looked suspicious; and yet I might have accounted for it in more
+ways than one. Is it not the slack time now? and don't I know by
+experience that I am the sort of woman about whom other women are
+always spitefully curious? I thought again, in the second place,
+that one of the assistants persisted rather oddly in keeping me
+turned in a particular direction, with my face toward the glazed
+and curtained door that led into the work-room. But, after all,
+she gave a reason when I asked for it. She said the light fell
+better on me that way; and, when I looked round, there was the
+window to prove her right. Still, these trifles produced such an
+effect on me, at the time, that I purposely found fault with the
+dress, so as to have an excuse for trying it on again, before I
+told them where I lived, and had it sent home. Pure fancy, I dare
+say. Pure fancy, perhaps, at the present moment. I don't care;
+I shall act on instinct (as they say), and give up the dress.
+In plainer words still, I won't go back.
+
+
+"Midnight.--Midwinter came to see me as he promised. An hour has
+passed since we said good-night; and here I still sit, with my
+pen in my hand, thinking of him. No words of mine can describe
+what has passed between us. The end of it is all I can write
+in these pages; and the end of it is that he has shaken my
+resolution. For the first time since I saw the easy way to
+Armadale's life at Thorpe Ambrose, I feel as if the man whom
+I have doomed in my own thoughts had a chance of escaping me.
+
+"Is it my love for Midwinter that has altered me? Or is it _his_
+love for _me_ that has taken possession not only of all I wish to
+give him, but of all I wish to keep from him as well? I feel as
+if I had lost myself--lost myself, I mean, in _him_--all through
+the evening. He was in great agitation about what had happened
+in Somersetshire; and he made me feel as disheartened and as
+wretched about it as he did. Though he never confessed it in
+words, I know that Mr. Brock's death has startled him as an ill
+omen for our marriage--I know it, because I feel Mr. Brock's
+death as an ill omen too. The superstition--_his_ superstition--
+took so strong a hold on me, that when we grew calmer and he
+spoke of time future--when he told me that he must either break
+his engagement with his new employers or go abroad, as he is
+pledged to go, on Monday next--I actually shrank at the thought
+of our marriage following close on Mr. Brock's funeral; I
+actually said to him, in the impulse of the moment, 'Go, and
+begin your new life alone! go, and leave me here to wait for
+happier times.'
+
+"He took me in his arms. He sighed, and kissed me with an angelic
+tenderness. He said--oh, so softly and so sadly!--I have no life
+now, apart from _you_.' As those words passed his lips, the
+thought seemed to rise in my mind like an echo, 'Why not live out
+all the days that are left to me, happy and harmless in a love
+like this!' I can't explain it--I can't realize it. That was the
+thought in me at the time; and that is the thought in me still. I
+see my own hand while I write the words--and I ask myself whether
+it is really the hand of Lydia Gwilt!
+
+"Armadale--
+
+"No! I will never write, I will never think of Armadale again.
+
+"Yes! Let me write once more--let me think once more of him,
+because it quiets me to know that he is going away, and that
+the sea will have parted us before I am married. His old home
+is home to him no longer, now that the loss of his mother has
+been followed by the loss of his best and earliest friend. When
+the funeral is over, he has decided to sail the same day for
+the foreign seas. We may, or we may not, meet at Naples. Shall
+I be an altered woman if we do? I wonder; I wonder!
+
+
+"August 8th.--A line from Midwinter. He has gone back to
+Somersetshire to be in readiness for the funeral to-morrow; and
+he will return here (after bidding Armadale good-by) to-morrow
+evening.
+
+"The last forms and ceremonies preliminary to our marriage have
+been complied with. I am to be his wife on Monday next. The hour
+must not be later than half-past ten--which will give us just
+time, when the service is over, to get from the church door to
+the railway, and to start on our journey to Naples the same day.
+
+"To-day--Saturday--Sunday! I am not afraid of the time; the time
+will pass. I am not afraid of myself, if I can only keep all
+thoughts but one out of my mind. I love him! Day and night, till
+Monday comes, I will think of nothing but that. I love him!
+
+
+"Four o'clock.--Other thoughts are forced into my mind in spite
+of me. My suspicions of yesterday were no mere fancies; the
+milliner has been tampered with. My folly in going back to her
+house has led to my being traced here. I am absolutely certain
+that I never gave the woman my address; and yet my new gown was
+sent home to me at two o'clock to-day!
+
+"A man brought it with the bill, and a civil message, to say
+that, as I had not called at the appointed time to try it on
+again, the dress had been finished and sent to me. He caught me
+in the passage; I had no choice but to pay the bill, and dismiss
+him. Any other proceeding, as events have now turned out, would
+have been pure folly. The messenger (not the man who followed me
+in the street, but another spy sent to look at me, beyond all
+doubt) would have declared he knew nothing about it, if I had
+spoken to him. The milliner would tell me to my face, if I went
+to her, that I had given her my address. The one useful thing
+to do now is to set my wits to work in the interests of my own
+security, and to step out of the false position in which my own
+rashness has placed me--if I can.
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--My spirits have risen again. I believe I am in
+a fair way of extricating myself already.
+
+"I have just come back from a long round in a cab. First, to the
+cloak-room of the Great Western, to get the luggage which I sent
+there from All Saints' Terrace. Next, to the cloak-room of the
+Southeastern, to leave my luggage (labeled in Midwinter's name),
+to wait for me till the starting of the tidal train on Monday.
+Next, to the General Post-office, to post a letter to Midwinter
+at the rectory, which he will receive to-morrow morning. Lastly,
+back again to this house--from which I shall move no more till
+Monday comes.
+
+"My letter to Midwinter will, I have little doubt, lead to his
+seconding (quite innocently) the precautions that I am taking
+for my own safety. The shortness of the time at our disposal on
+Monday will oblige him to pay his bill at the hotel and to remove
+his luggage before the marriage ceremony takes place. All I ask
+him to do beyond this is to take the luggage himself to the
+Southeastern (so as to make any inquiries useless which may
+address themselves to the servants at the hotel)--and, that done,
+to meet me at the church door, instead of calling for me here.
+The rest concerns nobody but myself. When Sunday night or Monday
+morning comes, it will be hard, indeed--freed as I am now from
+all incumbrances--if I can't give the people who are watching me
+the slip for the second time.
+
+"It seems needless enough to have written to Midwinter to-day,
+when he is coming back to me to-morrow night. But it was
+impossible to ask, what I have been obliged to ask of him,
+without making my false family circumstances once more the
+excuse; and having this to do--I must own the truth--I wrote
+to him because, after what I suffered on the last occasion,
+I can never again deceive him to his face.
+
+
+"August 9th.--Two o'clock.--I rose early this morning, more
+depressed in spirits than usual. The re-beginning of one's life,
+at the re-beginning of every day, has already been something
+weary and hopeless to me for years past. I dreamed, too, all
+through the night--not of Midwinter and of my married life, as
+I had hoped to dream--but of the wretched conspiracy to discover
+me, by which I have been driven from one place to another,
+like a hunted animal. Nothing in the shape of a new revelation
+enlightened me in my sleep. All I could guess dreaming was what
+I had guessed waking, that Mother Oldershaw is the enemy who
+is attacking me in the dark.
+
+"My restless night has, however, produced one satisfactory
+result. It has led to my winning the good graces of the servant
+here, and securing all the assistance she can give me when the
+time comes for making my escape.
+
+"The girl noticed this morning that I looked pale and anxious.
+I took her into my confidence, to the extent of telling her that
+I was privately engaged to be married, and that I had enemies who
+were trying to part me from my sweetheart. This instantly roused
+her sympathy, and a present of a ten-shilling piece for her kind
+services to me did the rest. In the intervals of her housework
+she has been with me nearly the whole morning; and I found out,
+among other things, that _her_ sweetheart is a private soldier
+in the Guards, and that she expects to see him to-morrow. I have
+got money enough left, little as it is, to turn the head of any
+Private in the British army; and, if the person appointed to
+watch me to-morrow is a man, I think it just possible that he may
+find his attention disagreeably diverted from Miss Gwilt in the
+course of the evening.
+
+"When Midwinter came here last from the railway, he came at
+half-past eight. How am I to get through the weary, weary hours
+between this and the evening? I think I shall darken my bedroom,
+and drink the blessing of oblivion from my bottle of Drops.
+
+
+"Eleven o'clock.--We have parted for the last time before the day
+comes that makes us man and wife.
+
+"He has left me, as he left me before, with an absorbing subject
+of interest to think of in his absence. I noticed a change in him
+the moment he entered the room. When he told me of the funeral,
+and of his parting with Armadale on board the yacht, though he
+spoke with feelings deeply moved, he spoke with a mastery over
+himself which is new to me in my experience of him. It was the
+same when our talk turned next on our own hopes and prospects.
+He was plainly disappointed when he found that my family
+embarrassments would prevent our meeting to-morrow, and plainly
+uneasy at the prospect of leaving me to find my way by myself
+on Monday to the church. But there was a certain hopefulness and
+composure of manner underlying it all, which produced so strong
+an impression on me that I was obliged to notice it.
+
+"'You know what odd fancies take possession of me sometimes,' I
+said. 'Shall I tell you the fancy that has taken possession of me
+now? I can't help thinking that something has happened since we
+last saw each other which you have not told me yet.
+
+" Something _has_ happened,' he answered. 'And it is something
+which you ought to know.'
+
+"With those words he took out his pocket-book, and produced two
+written papers from it. One he looked at and put back. The other
+he placed on the table.
+
+"'Before I tell you what this is, and how it came into my
+possession,' he said, 'I must own something that I have concealed
+from you. It is no more serious confession than the confession
+of my own weakness.'
+
+"He then acknowledged to me that the renewal of his friendship
+with Armadale had been clouded, through the whole period of their
+intercourse in London, by his own superstitious misgivings. He
+had obeyed the summons which called him to the rector's bedside,
+with the firm intention of confiding his previsions of coming
+trouble to Mr. Brock; and he had been doubly confirmed in his
+superstition when he found that Death had entered the house
+before him, and had parted them, in this world, forever. More
+than this, he had traveled back to be present at the funeral,
+with a secret sense of relief at the prospect of being parted
+from Armadale, and with a secret resolution to make the
+after-meeting agreed on between us three at Naples a meeting
+that should never take place. With that purpose in his heart,
+he had gone up alone to the room prepared for him on his arrival
+at the rectory, and had opened a letter which he found waiting
+for him on the table. The letter had only that day been
+discovered--dropped and lost--under the bed on which Mr. Brock
+had died. It was in the rector's handwriting throughout; and
+the person to whom it was addressed was Midwinter himself.
+
+"Having told me this, nearly in the words in which I have written
+it, he gave me the written paper that lay on the table between
+us.
+
+" 'Read it,' he said; 'and you will not need to be told that my
+mind is at peace again, and that I took Allan's hand at parting
+with a heart that was worthier of Allan's love.'
+
+"I read the letter. There was no superstition to be conquered
+in _my_ mind; there were no old feelings of gratitude toward
+Armadale to be roused in _my_ heart; and yet, the effect which
+the letter had had on Midwinter was, I firmly believe, more than
+matched by the effect that the letter now produced on me.
+
+"It was vain to ask him to leave it, and to let me read it again
+(as I wished) when I was left by myself. He is determined to keep
+it side by side with that other paper which I had seen him take
+out of his pocket-book, and which contains the written narrative
+of Armadale's Dream. All I could do was to ask his leave to copy
+it; and this he granted readily. I wrote the copy in his
+presence; and I now place it here in my diary, to mark a day
+which is one of the memorable days in my life.
+
+"Boscombe Rectory, August 2d.
+
+"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--For the first time since the beginning of
+my illness, I found strength enough yesterday to look over my
+letters. One among them is a letter from Allan, which has been
+lying unopened on my table for ten days past. He writes to me
+in great distress, to say that there has been dissension between
+you, and that you have left him. If you still remember what
+passed between us, when you first opened your heart to me in
+the Isle of Man, you will be at no loss to understand how I have
+thought over this miserable news, through the night that has now
+passed, and you will not be surprised to hear that I have roused
+myself this morning to make the effort of writing to you.
+
+"I want no explanation of the circumstances which have parted
+you from your friend. If my estimate of your character is not
+founded on an entire delusion, the one influence which can have
+led to your estrangement from Allan is the influence of that evil
+spirit of Superstition which I have once already cast out of your
+heart--which I will once again conquer, please God, if I have
+strength enough to make my pen speak my mind to you in this
+letter.
+
+"It is no part of my design to combat the belief which I know you
+to hold, that mortal creatures may be the objects of supernatural
+intervention in their pilgrimage through this world. Speaking
+as a reasonable man, I own that I cannot prove you to be wrong.
+Speaking as a believer in the Bible, I am bound to go further,
+and to admit that you possess a higher than any human warrant for
+the faith that is in you. The one object which I have it at heart
+to attain is to induce you to free yourself from the paralyzing
+fatalism of the heathen and the savage, and to look at the
+mysteries that perplex, and the portents that daunt you, from
+the Christian's point of view. If I can succeed in this, I shall
+clear your mind of the ghastly doubts that now oppress it, and
+I shall reunite you to your friend, never to be parted from him
+again.
+
+"I have no means of seeing and questioning you. I can only
+send this letter to Allan to be forwarded, if he knows, or can
+discover, your present address. Placed in this position toward
+you, I am bound to assume all that _can_ be assumed in your
+favor. I will take it for granted that something has happened
+to you or to Allan which to your mind has not only confirmed
+the fatalist conviction in which your father died, but has added
+a new and terrible meaning to the warning which he sent you in
+his death-bed letter.
+
+"On this common ground I meet you. On this common ground I appeal
+to your higher nature and your better sense.
+
+"Preserve your present conviction that the events which have
+happened (be they what they may) are not to be reconciled with
+ordinary mortal coincidences and ordinary mortal laws; and view
+your own position by the best and clearest light that your
+superstition can throw on it. What are you? You are a helpless
+instrument in the hands of Fate. You are doomed, beyond all human
+capacity of resistance, to bring misery and destruction blindfold
+on a man to whom you have harmlessly and gratefully united
+yourself in the bonds of a brother's love. All that is morally
+firmest in your will and morally purest in your aspirations
+avails nothing against the hereditary impulsion of you toward
+evil, caused by a crime which your father committed before you
+were born. In what does that belief end? It ends in the darkness
+in which you are now lost; in the self-contradictions in which
+you are now bewildered; in the stubborn despair by which a man
+profanes his own soul, and lowers himself to the level of the
+brutes that perish.
+
+"Look up, my poor suffering brother--look up, my hardly tried,
+my well-loved friend, higher than this! Meet the doubts that now
+assail you from the blessed vantage-ground of Christian courage
+and Christian hope; and your heart will turn again to Allan, and
+your mind will be at peace. Happen what may, God is all-merciful,
+God is all-wise: natural or supernatural, it happens through Him.
+The mystery of Evil that perplexes our feeble minds, the sorrow
+and the suffering that torture us in this little life, leave the
+one great truth unshaken that the destiny of man is in the hands
+of his Creator, and that God's blessed Son died to make us
+worthier of it. Nothing that is done in unquestioning submission
+to the wisdom of the Almighty is done wrong. No evil exists out
+of which, in obedience to his laws, Good may not come. Be true
+to what Christ tells you is true. Encourage in yourself, be the
+circumstances what they may, all that is loving, all that is
+grateful, all that is patient, all that is forgiving, toward your
+fellow-men. And humbly and trustfully leave the rest to the God
+who made you, and to the Saviour who loved you better than his
+own life.
+
+"This is the faith in which I have lived, by the Divine help
+and mercy, from my youth upward. I ask you earnestly, I ask you
+confidently, to make it your faith, too. It is the mainspring of
+all the good I have ever done, of all the happiness I have ever
+known; it lightens my darkness, it sustains my hope; it comforts
+and quiets me, lying here, to live or die, I know not which.
+Let it sustain, comfort, and enlighten you. It will help you
+in your sorest need, as it has helped me in mine. It will show
+you another purpose in the events which brought you and Allan
+together than the purpose which your guilty father foresaw.
+Strange things, I do not deny it, have happened to you already.
+Stranger things still may happen before long, which I may not
+live to see. Remember, if that time comes, that I died firmly
+disbelieving in your influence over Allan being other than an
+influence for good. The great sacrifice of the Atonement--I say
+it reverently--has its mortal reflections, even in this world. If
+danger ever threatens Allan, you, whose father took his father's
+life--YOU, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of
+God has appointed to save him.
+
+"Come to me if I live. Go back to the friend who loves you,
+whether I live or die.
+
+"Yours affectionately to the last,
+
+"DECIMUS BROCK."
+
+"'You, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of God
+has appointed to save him!'
+
+"Those are the words which have shaken me to the soul. Those
+are the words which make me feel as if the dead man had left
+his grave, and had put his hand on the place in my heart where
+my terrible secret lies hidden from every living creature but
+myself. One part of the letter has come true already. The danger
+that it foresees threatens Armadale at this moment--and threatens
+him from Me!
+
+"If the favoring circumstances which have driven me thus far
+drive me on to the end, and if that old man's last earthly
+conviction is prophetic of the truth, Armadale will escape me,
+do what I may. And Midwinter will be the victim who is sacrificed
+to save his life.
+
+"It is horrible! it is impossible! it shall never be! At the
+thinking of it only, my hand trembles and my heart sinks. I bless
+the trembling that unnerves me! I bless the sinking that turns me
+faint! I bless those words in the letter which have revived the
+relenting thoughts that first came to me two days since! Is it
+hard, now that events are taking me, smoothly and safely, nearer
+and nearer to the End--is it hard to conquer the temptation to go
+on? No! If there is only a chance of harm coming to Midwinter,
+the dread of that chance is enough to decide me--enough to
+strengthen me to conquer the temptation, for his sake. I have
+never loved him yet, never, never, never as I love him now!
+
+
+"Sunday, August 10th.--The eve of my wedding-day! I close and
+lock this book, never to write in it, never to open it again.
+
+"I have won the great victory; I have trampled my own wickedness
+under foot. I am innocent; I am happy again. My love! my angel!
+when to-morrow gives me to you, I will not have a thought in my
+heart which is not _your_ thought, as well as mine!"
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE WEDDING-DAY.
+
+The time was nine o'clock in the morning. The place was a private
+room in one of the old-fashioned inns which still remain on
+the Borough side of the Thames. The date was Monday, the 11th
+of August. And the person was Mr. Bashwood, who had traveled
+to London on a summons from his son, and had taken up his abode
+at the inn on the previous day.
+
+He had never yet looked so pitiably old and helpless as he looked
+now. The fever and chill of alternating hope and despair had
+dried, and withered, and wasted him. The angles of his figure had
+sharpened. The outline of his face had shrunk. His dress pointed
+the melancholy change in him with a merciless and shocking
+emphasis. Never, even in his youth, had he worn such clothes as
+he wore now. With the desperate resolution to leave no chance
+untried of producing an impression on Miss Gwilt, he had cast
+aside his dreary black garments; he had even mustered the courage
+to wear his blue satin cravat. His coat was a riding-coat of
+light gray. He had ordered it, with a vindictive subtlety of
+purpose, to be made on the pattern of a coat that he had seen
+Allan wear. His waistcoat was white; his trousers were of the
+gayest summer pattern, in the largest check. His wig was oiled
+and scented, and brushed round, on either side, to hide the
+wrinkles on his temples. He was an object to laugh at; he was an
+object to weep over. His enemies, if a creature so wretched could
+have had enemies, would have forgiven him, on seeing him in his
+new dress. His friends--had any of his friends been left--would
+have been less distressed if they had looked at him in his coffin
+than if they had looked at him as he was now. Incessantly
+restless, he paced the room from end to end. Now he looked at
+his watch; now he looked out of the window; now he looked at
+the well-furnished breakfast-table--always with the same wistful,
+uneasy inquiry in his eyes. The waiter coming in, with the urn
+of boiling water, was addressed for the fiftieth time in the one
+form of words which the miserable creature seemed to be capable
+of uttering that morning: "My son is coming to breakfast. My son
+is very particular. I want everything of the best--hot things and
+cold things--and tea and coffee--and all the rest of it, waiter;
+all the rest of it." For the fiftieth time, he now reiterated
+those anxious words. For the fiftieth time, the impenetrable
+waiter had just returned his one pacifying answer, "All right,
+sir; you may leave it to me"--when the sound of leisurely
+footsteps was heard on the stairs; the door opened; and the
+long-expected son sauntered indolently into the room, with a neat
+little black leather bag in his hand.
+
+"Well done, old gentleman!" said Bashwood the younger, surveying
+his father's dress with a smile of sardonic encouragement.
+"You're ready to be married to Miss Gwilt at a moment's notice!"
+
+The father took the son's hand, and tried to echo the son's
+laugh.
+
+"You have such good spirits, Jemmy," he said, using the name in
+its familiar form, as he had been accustomed to use it in happier
+days. "You always had good spirits, my dear, from a child. Come
+and sit down; I've ordered you a nice breakfast. Everything of
+the best! everything of the best! What a relief it is to see you!
+Oh, dear, dear, what a relief it is to see you." He stopped
+and sat down at the table, his face flushed with the effort
+to control the impatience that was devouring him. "Tell me about
+her!" he burst out, giving up the effort with a sudden
+self-abandonment. "I shall die, Jemmy, if I wait for it any
+longer. Tell me! tell me! tell me!"
+
+"One thing at a time," said Bashwood the younger, perfectly
+unmoved by his father's impatience. "We'll try the breakfast
+first, and come to the lady afterward! Gently does it, old
+gentleman--gently does it!"
+
+He put his leather bag on a chair, and sat down opposite to
+his father, composed, and smiling, and humming a little tune.
+
+No ordinary observation, applying the ordinary rules of analysis,
+would have detected the character of Bashwood the younger in his
+face. His youthful look, aided by his light hair and his plump
+beardless cheeks, his easy manner and his ever-ready smile,
+his eyes which met unshrinkingly the eyes of every one whom he
+addressed, all combined to make the impression of him a favorable
+impression in the general mind. No eye for reading character, but
+such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand,
+could have penetrated the smoothly deceptive surface of this man,
+and have seen him for what he really was--the vile creature whom
+the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There
+he sat--the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business
+is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily
+on the increase. There he sat--the necessary Detective attendant
+on the progress of our national civilization; a man who was, in
+this instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product
+of the vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready
+on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get
+under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors;
+a man who would have been useless to his employers if he could
+have felt a touch of human sympathy in his father's presence;
+and who would have deservedly forfeited his situation if, under
+any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible
+to a sense of pity or a sense of shame.
+
+"Gently does it, old gentleman," he repeated, lifting the covers
+from the dishes, and looking under them one after the other all
+round the table. "Gently does it!"
+
+"Don't be angry with me, Jemmy," pleaded his father. "Try, if you
+can, to think how anxious I must be. I got your letter so long
+ago as yesterday morning. I have had to travel all the way from
+Thorpe Ambrose--I have had to get through the dreadful long
+evening and the dreadful long night--with your letter telling me
+that you had found out who she is, and telling me nothing more.
+Suspense is very hard to bear, Jemmy, when you come to my age.
+What was it prevented you, my dear, from coming to me when I got
+here yesterday evening?"
+
+"A little dinner at Richmond," said Bashwood the younger. "Give
+me some tea."
+
+Mr. Bashwood tried to comply with the request; but the hand with
+which he lifted the teapot trembled so unmanageably that the tea
+missed the cup and streamed out on the cloth. "I'm very sorry;
+I can't help trembling when I'm anxious," said the old man, as
+his son took the tea-pot out of his hand. "I'm afraid you bear me
+malice, Jemmy, for what happened when I was last in town. I own
+I was obstinate and unreasonable about going back to Thorpe
+Ambrose. I'm more sensible now. You were quite right in taking it
+all on yourself, as soon as I showed you the veiled lady when we
+saw her come out of the hotel; and you were quite right to send
+me back the same day to my business in the steward's office
+at the Great House." He watched the effect of these concessions
+on his son, and ventured doubtfully on another entreaty. "If you
+won't tell me anything else just yet," he said, faintly, "will
+you tell me how you found her out. Do, Jemmy, do!"
+
+Bashwood the younger looked up from his plate. "I'll tell you
+that," he said. "The reckoning up of Miss Gwilt has cost more
+money and taken more time than I expected; and the sooner we come
+to a settlement about it, the sooner we shall get to what you
+want to know."
+
+Without a word of expostulation, the father laid his dingy old
+pocket-book and his purse on the table before the son. Bashwood
+the younger looked into the purse; observed, with a contemptuous
+elevation of the eyebrows, that it held no more than a sovereign
+and some silver; and returned it intact. The pocket-book,
+on being opened next, proved to contain four five-pound notes.
+Bashwood the younger transferred three of the notes to his own
+keeping; and handed the pocket-book back to his father, with
+a bow expressive of mock gratitude and sarcastic respect.
+
+"A thousand thanks," he said. "Some of it is for the people at
+our office, and the balance is for myself. One of the few stupid
+things, my dear sir, that I have done in the course of my life
+was to write you word, when you first consulted me, that you
+might have my services gratis. As you see, I hasten to repair
+the error. An hour or two at odd times I was ready enough to give
+you. But this business has taken days, and has got in the way of
+other jobs. I told you I couldn't be out of pocket by you--I put
+it in my letter, as plain as words could say it."
+
+"Yes, yes, Jemmy. I don't complain, my dear, I don't complain.
+Never mind the money--tell me how you found her out."
+
+"Besides," pursued Bashwood, the younger, proceeding impenetrably
+with his justification of himself, "I have given you the benefit
+of my experience; I've done it cheap. It would have cost double
+the money if another man had taken this in hand. Another man
+would have kept a watch on Mr. Armadale as well as Miss Gwilt.
+I have saved you that expense. You are certain that Mr. Armadale
+is bent on marrying her. Very good. In that case, while we have
+our eye on _her_, we have, for all useful purposes, got our eye
+on _him_. Know where the lady is, and you know that the gentleman
+can't be far off."
+
+"Quite true, Jemmy. But how was it Miss Gwilt came to give you
+so much trouble?"
+
+"She's a devilish clever woman," said Bashwood the younger;
+"that's how it was. She gave us the slip at a milliner's shop.
+We made it all right with the milliner, and speculated on the
+chance of her coming back to try on a gown she had ordered. The
+cleverest women lose the use of their wits in nine cases out of
+ten where there's a new dress in the case, and even Miss Gwilt
+was rash enough to go back. That was all we wanted. One of the
+women from our office helped to try on her new gown, and put her
+in the right position to be seen by one of our men behind the
+door. He instantly suspected who she was, on the strength of what
+he had been told of her; for she's a famous woman in her way.
+Of course, we didn't trust to that. We traced her to her new
+address; and we got a man from Scotland Yard, who was certain to
+know her, if our own man's idea was the right one. The man from
+Scotland Yard turned milliner's lad for the occasion, and took
+her gown home. He saw her in the passage, and identified her in
+an instant. You're in luck, I can tell you. Miss Gwilt's a public
+character. If we had had a less notorious woman to deal with,
+she might have cost us weeks of inquiry, and you might have had
+to pay hundreds of pounds. A day did it in Miss Gwilt's case; and
+another day put the whole story of her life, in black and white,
+into my hand. There it is at the present moment, old gentleman,
+in my black bag."
+
+Bashwood the father made straight for the bag with eager eyes and
+outstretched hand. Bashwood the son took a little key out of his
+waistcoat pocket, winked, shook his head, and put the key back
+again.
+
+"I haven't done breakfast yet," he said. "Gently does it, my dear
+sir--gently does it."
+
+"I can't wait!" cried the old man, struggling vainly to preserve
+his self-control. "It's past nine! It's a fortnight to-day since
+she went to London with Mr. Armadale! She may be married to him
+in a fortnight! She may be married to him this morning! I can't
+wait! I can't wait!"
+
+"There's no knowing what you can do till you try," rejoined
+Bashwood the younger. "Try, and you'll find you can wait. What
+has become of your curiosity?" he went on, feeding the fire
+ingeniously with a stick at a time. "Why don't you ask me what
+I mean by calling Miss Gwilt a public character? Why don't you
+wonder how I came to lay my hand on the story of her life, in
+black and white? If you'll sit down again, I'll tell you. If you
+won't, I shall confine myself to my breakfast."
+
+Mr. Bashwood sighed heavily, and went back to his chair.
+
+"I wish you were not so fond of your joke, Jemmy," he said.
+"I wish, my dear, you were not quite so fond of your joke."
+
+"Joke?" repeated his son. "It would be serious enough in some
+people's eyes, I can tell you. Miss Gwilt has been tried
+for her life; and the papers in that black bag are the lawyer's
+instructions for the Defense. Do you call that a joke?"
+
+The father started to his feet, and looked straight across the
+table at the son with a smile of exultation that was terrible
+to see.
+
+"She's been tried for her life!" he burst out, with a deep gasp
+of satisfaction. "She's been tried for her life!" He broke into
+a low, prolonged laugh, and snapped his fingers exultingly.
+"Aha-ha-ha! Something to frighten Mr. Armadale in _that_!"
+
+Scoundrel as he was, the son was daunted by the explosion
+of pent-up passion which burst on him in those words.
+
+"Don't excite yourself," he said, with a sullen suppression
+of the mocking manner in which he had spoken thus far.
+
+Mr. Bashwood sat down again, and passed his handkerchief over his
+forehead. "No," he said, nodding and smiling at his son. "No,
+no--no excitement, as you say--I can wait now, Jemmy; I can wait
+now."
+
+He waited with immovable patience. At intervals, he nodded,
+and smiled, and whispered to himself, "Something to frighten
+Mr. Armadale in _that_!" But he made no further attempt, by word,
+look, or action, to hurry his son.
+
+Bashwood the younger finished his breakfast slowly, out of pure
+bravado; lit a cigar with the utmost deliberation; looked at
+his father, and, seeing him still as immovably patient as ever,
+opened the black bag at last, and spread the papers on the table.
+
+"How will you have it?" he asked. "Long or short? I have got her
+whole life here. The counsel who defended her at the trial was
+instructed to hammer hard at the sympathies of the jury: he went
+head over ears into the miseries of her past career, and shocked
+everybody in court in the most workman-like manner. Shall I take
+the same line? Do you want to know all about her, from the time
+when she was in short frocks and frilled trousers? or do you
+prefer getting on at once to her first appearance as a prisoner
+in the dock?"
+
+"I want to know all about her," said his father, eagerly. "The
+worst, and the best--the worst particularly. Don't spare my
+feelings, Jemmy--whatever you do, don't spare my feelings! Can't
+I look at the papers myself?"
+
+"No, you can't. They would be all Greek and Hebrew to you. Thank
+your stars that you have got a sharp son, who can take the pith
+out of these papers, and give it a smack of the right flavor
+in serving it up. There are not ten men in England who could tell
+you this woman's story as I can tell it. It's a gift, old
+gentleman, of the sort that is given to very few people--and it
+lodges here."
+
+He tapped his forehead smartly, and turned to the first page
+of the manuscript before him, with an unconcealed triumph at the
+prospect of exhibiting his own cleverness, which was the first
+expression of a genuine feeling of any sort that had escaped him
+yet.
+
+
+"Miss Gwilt's story begins," said Bashwood the younger, "in the
+market-place at Thorpe Ambrose. One day, something like a quarter
+of a century ago, a traveling quack doctor, who dealt in
+perfumery as well as medicines, came to the town with his cart,
+and exhibited, as a living example of the excellence of his
+washes and hair-oils and so on, a pretty little girl, with a
+beautiful complexion and wonderful hair. His name was Oldershaw.
+He had a wife, who helped him in the perfumery part of his
+business, and who carried it on by herself after his death.
+She has risen in the world of late years; and she is identical
+with that sly old lady who employed me professionally a short
+time since. As for the pretty little girl, you know who she
+was as well as I do. While the quack was haranguing the mob and
+showing them the child's hair, a young lady, driving through the
+marketplace, stopped her carriage to hear what it was all about,
+saw the little girl, and took a violent fancy to her on the spot.
+The young lady was the daughter of Mr. Blanchard, of Thorpe
+Ambrose. She went home, and interested her father in the fate
+of the innocent little victim of the quack doctor. The same
+evening, the Oldershaws were sent for to the great house and were
+questioned. They declared themselves to be her uncle and aunt--a
+lie, of course!--and they were quite willing to let her attend
+the village school, while they stayed at Thorpe Ambrose, when
+the proposal was made to them. The new arrangement was carried
+out the next day. And the day after that, the Oldershaws had
+disappeared, and had left the little girl on the squire's hands!
+She evidently hadn't answered as they expected in the capacity
+of an advertisement, and that was the way they took of providing
+for her for life. There is the first act of the play for you!
+Clear enough, so far, isn't it?"
+
+"Clear enough, Jemmy, to clever people. But I'm old and slow.
+I don't understand one thing. Whose child was she?"
+
+"A very sensible question. Sorry to inform you that nobody can
+answer it--Miss Gwilt herself included. These Instructions that
+I'm refering to are founded, of course, on her own statements,
+sifted by her attorney. All she could remember, on being
+questioned, was that she was beaten and half starved, somewhere
+in the country, by a woman who took in children at nurse. The
+woman had a card with her, stating that her name was Lydia Gwilt,
+and got a yearly allowance for taking care of her (paid through a
+lawyer) till she was eight years old. At that time, the allowance
+stopped; the lawyer had no explanation to offer; nobody came to
+look after her; nobody wrote. The Oldershaws saw her, and thought
+she might answer to exhibit; and the woman parted with her for a
+trifle to the Oldershaws; and the Oldershaws parted with her for
+good and all to the Blanchards. That's the story of her birth,
+parentage, and education! She may be the daughter of a duke,
+or the daughter of a costermonger. The circumstances may be
+highly romantic, or utterly commonplace. Fancy anything you
+like--there's nothing to stop you. When you've had your fancy
+out, say the word, and I'll turn over the leaves and go on."
+
+"Please to go on, Jemmy--please to go on."
+
+"The next glimpse of Miss Gwilt," resumed Bashwood the younger,
+turning over the papers, "is a glimpse at a family mystery. The
+deserted child was in luck's way at last. She had taken the fancy
+of an amiable young lady with a rich father, and she was petted
+and made much of at the great house, in the character of Miss
+Blanchard's last new plaything. Not long afterward Mr. Blanchard
+and his daughter went abroad, and took the girl with them in the
+capacity of Miss Blanchard's little maid. When they came back,
+the daughter had married, and become a widow, in the interval;
+and the pretty little maid, instead of returning with them to
+Thorpe Ambrose, turns up suddenly, all alone, as a pupil at a
+school in France. There she was, at a first-rate establishment,
+with her maintenance and education secured until she married and
+settled in life, on this understanding--that she never returned
+to England. Those were all the particulars she could be prevailed
+on to give the lawyer who drew up these instructions. She
+declined to say what had happened abroad; she declined even,
+after all the years that had passed, to mention her mistress's
+married name. It's quite clear, of course, that she was in
+possession of some family secret; and that the Blanchards paid
+for her schooling on the Continent to keep her out of the way.
+And it's equally plain that she would never have kept her secret
+as she did if she had not seen her way to trading on it for her
+own advantage at some future time. A clever woman, as I've told
+you already! A devilish clever woman, who hasn't been knocked
+about in the world, and seen the ups and downs of life abroad
+and at home, for nothing."
+
+"Yes, yes, Jemmy; quite true. How long did she stop, please,
+at the school in France?"
+
+Bashwood the younger referred to the papers. "She stopped at the
+French school," he replied, "till she was seventeen. At that time
+something happened at the school which I find mildly described in
+these papers as 'something unpleasant.' The plain fact was that
+the music-master attached to the establishment fell in love with
+Miss Gwilt. He was a respectable middle-aged man, with a wife and
+family; and, finding the circumstances entirely hopeless, he took
+a pistol, and, rashly assuming that he had brains in his head,
+tried to blow them out. The doctor saved his life, but not his
+reason; he ended, where he had better have begun, in an asylum.
+Miss Gwilt's beauty having been at the bottom of the scandal,
+it was, of course, impossible--though she was proved to have been
+otherwise quite blameless in the matter--for her to remain at the
+school after what had happened. Her 'friends' (the Blanchards)
+were communicated with. And her friends transferred her to
+another school; at Brussels, this time--What are you sighing
+about? What's wrong now?"
+
+"I can't help feeling a little for the poor music-master, Jemmy.
+Go on."
+
+"According to her own account of it, dad, Miss Gwilt seems
+to have felt for him too. She took a serious turn; and was
+'converted' (as they call it) by the lady who had charge of her
+in the interval before she went to Brussels. The priest at
+the Belgium school appears to have been a man of some discretion,
+and to have seen that the girl's sensibilities were getting into
+a dangerously excited state. Before he could quiet her down, he
+fell ill, and was succeeded by another priest, who was a fanatic.
+You will understand the sort of interest he took in the girl, and
+the way in which he worked on her feelings, when I tell you that
+she announced it as her decision, after having been nearly two
+years at the school, to end her days in a convent! You may well
+stare! Miss Gwilt, in the character of a Nun, is the sort of
+female phenomenon you don't often set eyes on."
+
+"Did she go into the convent?" asked Mr. Bashwood. "Did they let
+her go in, so friendless and so young, with nobody to advise her
+for the best?"
+
+"The Blanchards were consulted, as a matter of form," pursued
+Bashwood the younger. "_They_ had no objection to her shutting
+herself up in a convent, as you may well imagine. The pleasantest
+letter they ever had from her, I'll answer for it, was the letter
+in which she solemnly took leave of them in this world forever.
+The people at the convent were as careful as usual not to commit
+themselves. Their rules wouldn't allow her to take the veil till
+she had tried the life for a year first, and then, if she had any
+doubt, for another year after that. She tried the life for the
+first year, accordingly, and doubted. She tried it for the second
+year, and was wise enough, by that time, to give it up without
+further hesitation. Her position was rather an awkward one when
+she found herself at liberty again. The sisters at the convent
+had lost their interest in her; the mistress at the school
+declined to take her back as teacher, on the ground that she was
+too nice-looking for the place; the priest considered her to be
+possessed by the devil. There was nothing for it but to write
+to the Blanchards again, and ask them to start her in life as
+a teacher of music on her own account. She wrote to her former
+mistress accordingly. Her former mistress had evidently doubted
+the genuineness of the girl's resolution to be a nun, and had
+seized the opportunity offered by her entry into the convent to
+cut off all further communication between her ex-waiting-maid and
+herself. Miss Gwilt's letter was returned by the post-office. She
+caused inquiries to be made; and found that Mr. Blanchard was
+dead, and that his daughter had left the great house for some
+place of retirement unknown. The next thing she did, upon this,
+was to write to the heir in possession of the estate. The letter
+was answered by his solicitors, who were instructed to put the
+law in force at the first attempt she made to extort money from
+any member of the family at Thorpe Ambrose. The last chance was
+to get at the address of her mistress's place of retirement.
+The family bankers, to whom she wrote, wrote back to say that
+they were instructed not to give the lady's address to any one
+applying for it, without being previously empowered to do so by
+the lady herself. That last letter settled the question--Miss
+Gwilt could do nothing more. With money at her command, she might
+have gone to England and made the Blanchards think twice before
+they carried things with too high a hand. Not having a half-penny
+at command, she was helpless. Without money and without friends,
+you may wonder how she supported herself while the correspondence
+was going on. She supported herself by playing the piano-forte
+at a low concert-room in Brussels. The men laid siege to her,
+of course, in all directions; but they found her insensible as
+adamant. One of these rejected gentlemen was a Russian; and he
+was the means of making her acquainted with a countrywoman of
+his, whose name is unpronounceable by English lips. Let us give
+her her title, and call her the baroness. The two women liked
+each other at their first introduction; and a new scene opened
+in Miss Gwilt's life. She became reader and companion to the
+baroness. Everything was right, everything was smooth on the
+surface. Everything was rotten and everything was wrong under
+it."
+
+"In what way, Jemmy? Please to wait a little, and tell me in
+what way."
+
+"In this way. The baroness was fond of traveling, and she had
+a select set of friends about her who were quite of her way of
+thinking. They went from one city on the Continent to another,
+and were such charming people that they picked up acquaintances
+everywhere. The acquaintances were invited to the baroness's
+receptions, and card-tables were invariably a part of the
+baroness's furniture. Do you see it now? or must I tell you, in
+the strictest confidence, that cards were not considered sinful
+on these festive occasions, and that the luck, at the end of the
+evening, turned out to be almost invariably on the side of the
+baroness and her friends? Swindlers, all of them; and there isn't
+a doubt on my mind, whatever there may be on yours, that Miss
+Gwilt's manners and appearance made her a valuable member of the
+society in the capacity of a decoy. Her own statement is that she
+was innocent of all knowledge of what really went on; that she
+was quite ignorant of card-playing; that she hadn't such a thing
+as a respectable friend to turn to in the world; and that she
+honestly liked the baroness, for the simple reason that the
+baroness was a hearty good friend to her from first to last.
+Believe that or not, as you please. For five years she traveled
+about all over the Continent with these card-sharpers in high
+life, and she might have been among them at this moment, for
+anything I know to the contrary, if the baroness had not caught
+a Tartar at Naples, in the shape of a rich traveling Englishman,
+named Waldron. Aha! that name startles you, does it? You've read
+the Trial of the famous Mrs. Waldron, like the rest of the world?
+And you know who Miss Gwilt is now, without my telling you?"
+
+He paused, and looked at his father in sudden perplexity. Far
+from being overwhelmed by the discovery which had just burst on
+him, Mr. Bashwood, after the first natural movement of surprise,
+faced his son with a self-possession which was nothing short of
+extraordinary under the circumstances. There was a new brightness
+in his eyes, and a new color in his face. If it had been possible
+to conceive such a thing of a man in his position, he seemed to
+be absolutely encouraged instead of depressed by what he had just
+heard. "Go on, Jemmy," he said, quietly; "I am one of the few
+people who didn't read the trial; I only heard of it."
+
+Still wondering inwardly, Bashwood the younger recovered himself,
+and went on.
+
+"You always were, and you always will be, behind the age,"
+he said. "When we come to the trial, I can tell you as much
+about it as you need know. In the meantime, we must go back
+to the baroness and Mr. Waldron. For a certain number of nights
+the Englishman let the card-sharpers have it all their own way;
+in other words, he paid for the privilege of making himself
+agreeable to Miss Gwilt. When he thought he had produced the
+necessary impression on her, he exposed the whole confederacy
+without mercy. The police interfered; the baroness found herself
+in prison; and Miss Gwilt was put between the two alternatives of
+accepting Mr. Waldron's protection or being thrown on the world
+again. She was amazingly virtuous, or amazingly clever, which
+you please. To Mr. Waldron's astonishment, she told him that she
+could face the prospect of being thrown on the world; and that
+he must address her honorably or leave her forever. The end of it
+was what the end always is, where the man is infatuated and the
+woman is determined. To the disgust of his family and friends,
+Mr. Waldron made a virtue of necessity, and married her."
+
+"How old was he?" asked Bashwood the elder, eagerly.
+
+Bashwood the younger burst out laughing. "He was about old
+enough, daddy, to be your son, and rich enough to have burst that
+precious pocket-book of yours with thousand-pound notes! Don't
+hang your head. It wasn't a happy marriage, though he _was_ so
+young and so rich. They lived abroad, and got on well enough at
+first. He made a new will, of course, as soon as he was married,
+and provided handsomely for his wife, under the tender pressure
+of the honey-moon. But women wear out, like other things, with
+time; and one fine morning Mr. Waldron woke up with a doubt
+in his mind whether he had not acted like a fool. He was an
+ill-tempered man; he was discontented with himself; and of course
+he made his wife feel it. Having begun by quarreling with her,
+he got on to suspecting her, and became savagely jealous of every
+male creature who entered the house. They had no incumbrances in
+the shape of children, and they moved from one place to another,
+just as his jealousy inclined him, till they moved back to
+England at last, after having been married close on four years.
+He had a lonely old house of his own among the Yorkshire moors,
+and there he shut his wife and himself up from every living
+creature, except his servants and his dogs. Only one result
+could come, of course, of treating a high-spirited young woman in
+that way. It may be her fate, or it may be chance; but, whenever
+a woman is desperate, there is sure to be a man handy to take
+advantage of it. The man in this case was rather a 'dark horse,'
+as they say on the turf. He was a certain Captain Manuel, a
+native of Cuba, and (according to his own account) an ex-officer
+in the Spanish navy. He had met Mr. Waldron's beautiful wife
+on the journey back to England; had contrived to speak to her
+in spite of her husband's jealousy; and had followed her to her
+place of imprisonment in Mr. Waldron's house on the moors. The
+captain is described as a clever, determined fellow--of the
+daring piratical sort--with the dash of mystery about him that
+women like--"
+
+"She's not the same as other women!" interposed Mr. Bashwood,
+suddenly interrupting his son. "Did she--?" His voice failed him,
+and he stopped without bringing the question to an end.
+
+"Did she like the captain?" suggested Bashwood the younger, with
+another laugh. "According to her own account of it, she adored
+him. At the same time her conduct (as represented by herself) was
+perfectly innocent. Considering how carefully her husband watched
+her, the statement (incredible as it appears) is probably true.
+For six weeks or so they confined themselves to corresponding
+privately, the Cuban captain (who spoke and wrote English
+perfectly) having contrived to make a go-between of one of the
+female servants in the Yorkshire house. How it might have ended
+we needn't trouble ourselves to inquire--Mr. Waldron himself
+brought matters to a crisis. Whether he got wind of the
+clandestine correspondence or not, doesn't appear. But this
+is certain, that he came home from a ride one day in a fiercer
+temper than usual; that his wife showed him a sample of that high
+spirit of hers which he had never yet been able to break; and
+that it ended in his striking her across the face with his
+riding-whip. Ungentlemanly conduct, I am afraid we must admit;
+but, to all outward appearance, the riding-whip produced the most
+astonishing results. From that moment the lady submitted as she
+had never submitted before. For a fortnight afterward he did what
+he liked, and she never thwarted him; he said what he liked,
+and she never uttered a word of protest. Some men might have
+suspected this sudden reformation of hiding something dangerous
+under the surface. Whether Mr. Waldron looked at it in that
+light, I can't tell you. All that is known is that, before the
+mark of the whip was off his wife's face, he fell ill, and that
+in two days afterward he was a dead man. What do you say to
+that?"
+
+"I say he deserved it!" answered Mr. Bashwood, striking his hand
+excitedly on the table, as his son paused and looked at him.
+
+"The doctor who attended the dying man was not of your way of
+thinking," remarked Bashwood the younger, dryly. "He called in
+two other medical men, and they all three refused to certify the
+death. The usual legal investigation followed. The evidence of
+the doctors and the evidence of the servants pointed irresistibly
+in one and the same direction; and Mrs. Waldron was committed
+for trial, on the charge of murdering her husband by poison.
+A solicitor in first-rate criminal practice was sent for from
+London to get up the prisoner's defense, and these 'Instructions'
+took their form and shape accordingly.--What's the matter? What
+do you want now?"
+
+Suddenly rising from his chair, Mr. Bashwood stretched across
+the table, and tried to take the papers from his son. "I want
+to look at them," he burst out, eagerly. "I want to see what
+they say about the captain from Cuba. He was at the bottom of it,
+Jemmy--I'll swear he was at the bottom of it!"
+
+"Nobody doubted that who was in the secret of the case at the
+time," rejoined his son. "But nobody could prove it. Sit down
+again, dad, and compose yourself. There's nothing here about
+Captain Manuel but the lawyer's private suspicions of him, for
+the counsel to act on or not, at the counsel's discretion. From
+first to last she persisted in screening the captain. At the
+outset of the business she volunteered two statements to the
+lawyer--both of which he suspected to be false. In the first
+place she declared that she was innocent of the crime. He wasn't
+surprised, of course, so far; his clients were, as a general
+rule, in the habit of deceiving him in that way. In the second
+place, while admitting her private correspondence with the Cuban
+captain, she declared that the letters on both sides related
+solely to a proposed elopement, to which her husband's barbarous
+treatment had induced her to consent. The lawyer naturally asked
+to see the letters. 'He has burned all my letters, and I have
+burned all his,' was the only answer he got. It was quite
+possible that Captain Manuel might have burned _her_ letters when
+he heard there was a coroner's inquest in the house. But it was
+in her solicitor's experience (as it is in my experience too)
+that, when a woman is fond of a man, in ninety-nine cases out
+of a hundred, risk or no risk, she keeps his letters. Having his
+suspicions roused in this way, the lawyer privately made some
+inquiries about the foreign captain, and found that he was as
+short of money as a foreign captain could be. At the same time,
+he put some questions to his client about her expectations from
+her deceased husband. She answered, in high indignation, that
+a will had been found among her husband's papers, privately
+executed only a few days before his death, and leaving her no
+more, out of all his immense fortune, than five thousand pounds.
+'Was there an older will, then,' says the lawyer, 'which the new
+will revoked?' Yes, there was; a will that he had given into her
+own possession--a will made when they were first married.
+'Leaving his widow well provided for?' Leaving her just ten times
+as much as the second will left her. 'Had she ever mentioned that
+first will, now revoked, to Captain Manuel?' She saw the trap set
+for her, and said, 'No, never!' without an instant's hesitation.
+That reply confirmed the lawyer's suspicions. He tried to
+frighten her by declaring that her life might pay the forfeit
+of her deceiving him in this matter. With the usual obstinacy
+of women, she remained just as immovable as ever. The captain,
+on his side, behaved in the most exemplary manner. He confessed
+to planning the elopement; he declared that he had burned all
+the lady's letters as they reached him, out of regard for her
+reputation; he remained in the neighborhood; and he volunteered
+to attend before the magistrates. Nothing was discovered that
+could legally connect him with the crime, or that could put him
+into court on the day of the trial, in any other capacity than
+the capacity of a witness. I don't believe myself that there's
+any moral doubt (as they call it) that Manuel knew of the will
+which left her mistress of fifty thousand pounds; and that he was
+ready and willing, in virtue of that circumstance, to marry her
+on Mr. Waldron's death. If anybody tempted her to effect her own
+release from her husband by making herself a widow, the captain
+must have been the man. And unless she contrived, guarded and
+watched as she was, to get the poison for herself, the poison
+must have come to her in one of the captain's letters."
+
+"I don't believe she used it, if it did come to her!" exclaimed
+Mr. Bashwood. "I believe it was the captain himself who poisoned
+her husband!"
+
+Bashwood the younger, without noticing the interruption, folded
+up the Instructions for the Defense, which had now served their
+purpose, put them back in his bag, and produced a printed
+pamphlet in their place.
+
+"Here is one of the published Reports of the Trial," he said,
+"which you can read at your leisure, if you like. We needn't
+waste time now by going into details. I have told you already
+how cleverly her counsel paved his way for treating the charge
+of murder as the crowning calamity of the many that had already
+fallen on an innocent woman. The two legal points relied on
+for the defense (after this preliminary flourish) were: First,
+that there was no evidence to connect her with the possession
+of poison; and, secondly, that the medical witnesses, while
+positively declaring that her husband had died by poison,
+differed in their conclusions as to the particular drug that
+had killed him. Both good points, and both well worked; but
+the evidence on the other side bore down everything before it.
+The prisoner was proved to have had no less than three excellent
+reasons for killing her husband. He had treated her with almost
+unexampled barbarity; he had left her in a will (unrevoked so far
+as she knew) mistress of a fortune on his death; and she was, by
+her own confession, contemplating an elopement with another man.
+Having set forth these motives, the prosecution next showed by
+evidence, which was never once shaken on any single point, that
+the one person in the house who could by any human possibility
+have administered the poison was the prisoner at the bar. What
+could the judge and jury do, with such evidence before them as
+this? The verdict was Guilty, as a matter of course; and the
+judge declared that he agreed with it. The female part of the
+audience was in hysterics; and the male part was not much better.
+The judge sobbed, and the bar shuddered. She was sentenced to
+death in such a scene as had never been previously witnessed
+in an English court of justice. And she is alive and hearty at
+the present moment; free to do any mischief she pleases, and to
+poison, at her own entire convenience, any man, woman, or child
+that happens to stand in her way. A most interesting woman! Keep
+on good terms with her, my dear sir, whatever you do, for the Law
+has said to her in the plainest possible English, 'My charming
+friend, I have no terrors for _you_!'"
+
+"How was she pardoned?" asked Mr. Bashwood, breathlessly. "They
+told me at the time, but I have forgotten. Was it the Home
+Secretary? If it was, I respect the Home Secretary! I say the
+Home Secretary was deserving of his place."
+
+"Quite right, old gentleman!" rejoined Bashwood the younger. "The
+Home Secretary was the obedient humble servant of an enlightened
+Free Press, and he _was_ deserving of his place. Is it possible
+you don't know how she cheated the gallows? If you don't, I must
+tell you. On the evening of the trial, two or three of the young
+buccaneers of literature went down to two or three newspaper
+offices, and wrote two or three heart-rending leading articles
+on the subject of the proceedings in court. The next morning
+the public caught light like tinder; and the prisoner was tried
+over again, before an amateur court of justice, in the columns
+of the newspapers. All the people who had no personal experience
+whatever on the subject seized their pens, and rushed (by kind
+permission of the editor) into print. Doctors who had _not_
+attended the sick man, and who had _not_ been present at the
+examination of the body, declared by dozens that he had died
+a natural death. Barristers without business, who had _not_ heard
+the evidence, attacked the jury who had heard it, and judged the
+judge, who had sat on the bench before some of them were born.
+The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the
+doctors, and the young buccaneers who had set the thing going.
+Here was the law that they all paid to protect them actually
+doing its duty in dreadful earnest! Shocking! shocking! The
+British Public rose to protest as one man against the working
+of its own machinery; and the Home Secretary, in a state of
+distraction, went to the judge. The judge held firm. He had
+said it was the right verdict at the time, and he said so still.
+'But suppose,' says the Home Secretary, 'that the prosecution
+had tried some other way of proving her guilty at the trial
+than the way they did try, what would you and the jury have done
+then?' Of course it was quite impossible for the judge to say.
+This comforted the Home Secretary, to begin with. And, when he
+got the judge's consent, after that, to having the conflict of
+medical evidence submitted to one great doctor; and when the one
+great doctor took the merciful view, after expressly stating,
+in the first instance, that he knew nothing practically of the
+merits of the case, the Home Secretary was perfectly satisfied.
+The prisoner's death-warrant went into the waste-paper basket;
+the verdict of the law was reversed by general acclamation;
+and the verdict of the newspapers carried the day. But the best
+of it is to come. You know what happened when the people found
+themselves with the pet object of their sympathy suddenly cast
+loose on their hands? A general impression prevailed directly
+that she was not quite innocent enough, after all, to be let out
+of prison then and there! Punish her a little--that was the state
+of the popular feeling--punish her a little, Mr. Home Secretary,
+on general moral grounds. A small course of gentle legal
+medicine, if you love us, and then we shall feel perfectly easy
+on the subject to the end of our days."
+
+"Don't joke about it!" cried his father. "Don't, don't, don't,
+Jemmy! Did they try her again? They couldn't! They dursn't!
+Nobody can be tried twice over for the same offense."
+
+"Pooh! pooh! she could be tried a second time for a second
+offense," retorted Bashwood the younger--"and tried she was.
+Luckily for the pacification of the public mind, she had rushed
+headlong into redressing her own grievances (as women will), when
+she discovered that her husband had cut her down from a legacy
+of fifty thousand pounds to a legacy of five thousand by a stroke
+of his pen. The day before the inquest a locked drawer in Mr.
+Waldron's dressing-room table, which contained some valuable
+jewelry, was discovered to have been opened and emptied; and
+when the prisoner was committed by the magistrates, the precious
+stones were found torn out of their settings and sewed up in
+her stays. The lady considered it a case of justifiable
+self-compensation. The law declared it to be a robbery committed
+on the executors of the dead man. The lighter offense--which had
+been passed over when such a charge as murder was brought against
+her--was just the thing to revive, to save appearances in the
+eyes of the public. They had stopped the course of justice, in
+the case of the prisoner, at one trial; and now all they wanted
+was to set the course of justice going again, in the case of the
+prisoner, at another! She was arraigned for the robbery, after
+having been pardoned for the murder. And, what is more, if her
+beauty and her misfortunes hadn't made a strong impression on her
+lawyer, she would not only have had to stand another trial, but
+would have had even the five thousand pounds, to which she was
+entitled by the second will, taken away from her, as a felon,
+by the Crown."
+
+"I respect her lawyer! I admire her lawyer!" exclaimed Mr.
+Bashwood. "I should like to take his hand, and tell him so."
+
+"He wouldn't thank you, if you did," remarked Bashwood the
+younger. "He is under a comfortable impression that nobody knows
+how he saved Mrs. Waldron's legacy for her but himself."
+
+"I beg your pardon, Jemmy," interposed his father. "But don't
+call her Mrs. Waldron. Speak of her, please, by her name when she
+was innocent, and young, and a girl at school. Would you mind,
+for my sake, calling her Miss Gwilt?"
+
+"Not I! It makes no difference to me what name I give her. Bother
+your sentiment! let's go on with the facts. This is what the
+lawyer did before the second trial came off. He told her she
+would be found guilty _again_, to a dead certainty. 'And this
+time,' he said, 'the public will let the law take its course.
+Have you got an old friend whom you can trust?' She hadn't such
+a thing as an old friend in the world. 'Very well, then,' says
+the lawyer, you must trust me. Sign this paper; and you will have
+executed a fictitious sale of all your property to myself. When
+the right time comes, I shall first carefully settle with your
+husband's executors; and I shall then reconvey the money to you,
+securing it properly (in case you ever marry again) in your own
+possession. The Crown, in other transactions of this kind,
+frequently waives its right of disputing the validity of the
+sale; and, if the Crown is no harder on you than on other people,
+when you come out of prison you will have your five thousand
+pounds to begin the world with again.' Neat of the lawyer, when
+she was going to be tried for robbing the executors, to put her
+up to a way of robbing the Crown, wasn't it? Ha! ha! what a world
+it is!"
+
+The last effort of the son's sarcasm passed unheeded by the
+father. "In prison!" he said to himself. "Oh me, after all that
+misery, in prison again!"
+
+"Yes," said Bashwood the younger, rising and stretching himself,
+"that's how it ended. The verdict was Guilty; and the sentence
+was imprisonment for two years. She served her time; and came
+out, as well as I can reckon it, about three years since. If you
+want to know what she did when she recovered her liberty, and how
+she went on afterward, I may be able to tell you something about
+it--say, on another occasion, when you have got an extra note or
+two in your pocket-book. For the present, all you need know, you
+do know. There isn't the shadow of a doubt that this fascinating
+lady has the double slur on her of having been found guilty of
+murder, and of having served her term of imprisonment for theft.
+There's your money's worth for your money--with the whole of my
+wonderful knack at stating a case clearly, thrown in for nothing.
+If you have any gratitude in you, you ought to do something
+handsome, one of these days, for your son. But for me, I'll tell
+you what you would have done, old gentleman. If you could have
+had your own way, you would have married Miss Gwilt."
+
+Mr. Bashwood rose to his feet, and looked his son steadily in
+the face.
+
+"If I could have my own way," he said, "I would marry her now."
+
+Bashwood the younger started back a step. "After all I have told
+you?" he asked, in the blankest astonishment.
+
+"After all you have told me."
+
+"With the chance of being poisoned, the first time you happened
+to offend her?"
+
+"With the chance of being poisoned," answered Mr. Bashwood,
+"in four-and-twenty hours."
+
+The Spy of the Private Inquiry Office dropped back into his
+chair, cowed by his father's words and his father's looks.
+
+"Mad!" he said to himself. "Stark mad, by jingo!"
+
+Mr. Bashwood looked at his watch, and hurriedly took his hat
+from a side-table.
+
+"I should like to hear the rest of it," he said. "I should like
+to hear every word you have to tell me about her, to the very
+last. But the time, the dreadful, galloping time, is getting on.
+For all I know, they may be on their way to be married at this
+very moment."
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Bashwood the younger, getting
+between his father and the door.
+
+"I am going to the hotel," said the old man, trying to pass him.
+"I am going to see Mr. Armadale."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To tell him everything you have told me." He paused after making
+that reply. The terrible smile of triumph which had once already
+appeared on his face overspread it again. "Mr. Armadale is
+young; Mr. Armadale has all his life before him," he whispered,
+cunningly, with his trembling fingers clutching his son's arm.
+"What doesn't frighten _me_ will frighten _him_!"
+
+"Wait a minute," said Bashwood the younger. "Are you as certain
+as ever that Mr. Armadale is the man?"
+
+"What man?"
+
+"The man who is going to marry her."
+
+"Yes! yes! yes! Let me go, Jemmy--let me go."
+
+The spy set his back against the door, and considered for a
+moment. Mr. Armadale was rich--Mr. Armadale (if _he_ was not
+stark mad too) might be made to put the right money-value on
+information that saved him from the disgrace of marrying Miss
+Gwilt. "It may be a hundred pounds in my pocket if I work it
+myself," thought Bashwood the younger. "And it won't be a
+half-penny if I leave it to my father." He took up his hat and
+his leather bag. "Can you carry it all in your own addled old
+head, daddy?" he asked, with his easiest impudence of manner.
+"Not you! I'll go with you and help you. What do you think of
+that?"
+
+The father threw his arms in an ecstasy round the son's neck. "I
+can't help it, Jemmy," he said, in broken tones. "You are so good
+to me. Take the other note, my dear--I'll manage without it--take
+the other note."
+
+The son threw open the door with a flourish; and magnanimously
+turned his back on the father's offered pocket-book. "Hang it,
+old gentleman, I'm not quite so mercenary as _that_!" he said,
+with an appearance of the deepest feeling. "Put up your
+pocket-book, and let's be off." "If I took my respected parent's
+last five-pound note," he thought to himself, as he led the way
+downstairs, "how do I know he mightn't cry halves when he sees
+the color of Mr. Armadale's money?" "Come along, dad!" he
+resumed. "We'll take a cab and catch the happy bridegroom before
+he starts for the church!"
+
+They hailed a cab in the street, and started for the hotel which
+had been the residence of Midwinter and Allan during their stay
+in London. The instant the door of the vehicle had closed, Mr.
+Bashwood returned to the subject of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"Tell me the rest," he said, taking his son's hand, and patting
+it tenderly. "Let's go on talking about her all the way to the
+hotel. Help me through the time, Jemmy--help me through the
+time."
+
+Bashwood the younger was in high spirits at the prospect of
+seeing the color of Mr. Armadale's money. He trifled with his
+father's anxiety to the very last.
+
+"Let's see if you remember what I've told you already," he began.
+"There's a character in the story that's dropped out of it
+without being accounted for. Come! can you tell me who it is?"
+
+He had reckoned on finding his father unable to answer the
+question. But Mr. Bashwood's memory, for anything that related
+to Miss Gwilt, was as clear and ready as his son's. "The foreign
+scoundrel who tempted her, and let her screen him at the risk of
+her own life," he said, without an instant's hesitation. "Don't
+speak of him, Jemmy--don't speak of him again!"
+
+"I _must_ speak of him," retorted the other. "You want to know
+what became of Miss Gwilt when she got out of prison, don't you?
+Very good--I'm in a position to tell you. She became Mrs. Manuel.
+It's no use staring at me, old gentleman. I know it officially.
+At the latter part of last year, a foreign lady came to our
+place, with evidence to prove that she had been lawfully married
+to Captain Manuel, at a former period of his career, when he
+had visited England for the first time. She had only lately
+discovered that he had been in this country again; and she had
+reason to believe that he had married another woman in Scotland.
+Our people were employed to make the necessary inquiries.
+Comparison of dates showed that the Scotch marriage--if it was
+a marriage at all, and not a sham--had taken place just about
+the time when Miss Gwilt was a free woman again. And a little
+further investigation showed us that the second Mrs. Manuel was
+no other than the heroine of the famous criminal trial--whom we
+didn't know then, but whom we do know now, to be identical with
+your fascinating friend, Miss Gwilt."
+
+Mr. Bashwood's head sank on his breast. He clasped his trembling
+hands fast in each other, and waited in silence to hear the rest.
+
+"Cheer up!" pursued his son. "She was no more the captain's wife
+than you are; and what is more, the captain himself is out of
+your way now. One foggy day in December last he gave us the slip;
+and was off to the continent, nobody knew where. He had spent
+the whole of the second Mrs. Manuel's five thousand pounds,
+in the time that had elapsed (between two and three years) since
+she had come out of prison; and the wonder was, where he had got
+the money to pay his traveling expenses. It turned out that
+he had got it from the second Mrs. Manuel herself. She had filled
+his empty pockets; and there she was, waiting confidently in
+a miserable London lodging, to hear from him and join him as soon
+as he was safely settled in foreign parts! Where had _she_ got
+the money, you may ask naturally enough? Nobody could tell at the
+time. My own notion is, now, that her former mistress must have
+been still living, and that she must have turned her knowledge
+of the Blanchards' family secret to profitable account at last.
+This is mere guess-work, of course; but there's a circumstance
+that makes it likely guess-work to my mind. She had an elderly
+female friend to apply to at the time, who was just the woman to
+help her in ferreting out her mistress's address. Can you guess
+the name of the elderly female friend? Not you! Mrs. Oldershaw,
+of course!"
+
+Mr. Bashwood suddenly looked up. "Why should she go back," he
+asked, "to the woman who had deserted her when she was a child?"
+
+"I can't say," rejoined his son, "unless she went back in the
+interests of her own magnificent head of hair. The
+prison-scissors, I needn't tell you, had made short work of it
+with Miss Gwilt's love-locks, in every sense of the word
+and Mrs. Oldershaw, I beg to add, is the most eminent woman in
+England, as restorer-general of the dilapidated heads and faces
+of the female sex. Put two and two together; and perhaps you'll
+agree with me, in this case, that they make four."
+
+"Yes, yes; two and two make four," repeated his father,
+impatiently. "But I want to know something else. Did she hear
+from him again? Did he send for her after he had gone away
+to foreign parts?"
+
+"The captain? Why, what on earth can you be thinking of? Hadn't
+he spent every farthing of her money? and wasn't he loose on the
+Continent out of her reach? She waited to hear from him. I dare
+say, for she persisted in believing in him. But I'll lay you any
+wager you like, she never saw the sight of his handwriting again.
+We did our best at the office to open her eyes; we told her
+plainly that he had a first wife living, and that she hadn't the
+shadow of a claim on him. She wouldn't believe us, though we met
+her with the evidence. Obstinate, devilish obstinate. I dare say
+she waited for months together before she gave up the last hope
+of ever seeing him again."
+
+Mr. Bashwood looked aside quickly out of the cab window. "Where
+could she turn for refuge next?" he said, not to his son, but
+to himself. "What, in Heaven's name, could she do?"
+
+"Judging by my experience of women," remarked Bashwood the
+younger, overhearing him, "I should say she probably tried
+to drown herself. But that's only guess-work again: it's all
+guess-work at this part of her story. You catch me at the end
+of my evidence, dad, when you come to Miss Gwilt's proceedings
+in the spring and summer of the present year. She might, or
+she might not, have been desperate enough to attempt suicide;
+and she might, or she might not, have been at the bottom of those
+inquiries that I made for Mrs. Oldershaw. I dare say you'll see
+her this morning; and perhaps, if you use your influence, you may
+he able to make her finish her own story herself."
+
+Mr. Bashwood, still looking out of the cab window, suddenly laid
+his hand on his son's arm.
+
+"Hush! hush!" he exclaimed, in violent agitation. "We have got
+there at last. Oh, Jemmy, feel how my heart beats! Here is the
+hotel."
+
+"Bother your heart," said Bashwood the younger. "Wait here while
+I make the inquiries."
+
+"I'll come with you!" cried his father. "I can't wait! I tell
+you, I can't wait!"
+
+They went into the hotel together, and asked for "Mr. Armadale."
+
+The answer, after some little hesitation and delay, was that Mr.
+Armadale had gone away six days since. A second waiter added that
+Mr. Armadale's friend--Mr. Midwinter--had only left that morning.
+Where had Mr. Armadale gone? Somewhere into the country. Where
+had Mr. Midwinter gone? Nobody knew.
+
+Mr. Bashwood looked at his son in speechless and helpless dismay.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" said Bashwood the younger, pushing his
+father back roughly into the cab. "He's safe enough. We shall
+find him at Miss Gwilt's."
+
+The old man took his son's hand and kissed it.	"Thank you, my
+dear," he said, gratefully. "Thank you for comforting me."
+
+The cab was driven next to the second lodging which Miss Gwilt
+had occupied, in the neighborhood of Tottenham Court Road.
+
+"Stop here," said the spy, getting out, and shutting his father
+into the cab. "I mean to manage this part of the business
+myself."
+
+He knocked at the house door. "I have got a note for Miss Gwilt,"
+he said, walking into the passage, the moment the door was
+opened.
+
+"She's gone," answered the servant. "She went away last night."
+
+Bashwood the younger wasted no more words with the servant.
+He insisted on seeing the mistress. The mistress confirmed the
+announcement of Miss Gwilt's departure on the previous evening.
+Where had she gone to? The woman couldn't say. How had she left?
+On foot. At what hour? Between nine and ten. What had she done
+with her luggage? She had no luggage. Had a gentleman been to see
+her on the previous day? Not a soul, gentle or simple, had come
+to the house to see Miss Gwilt.
+
+The father's face, pale and wild, was looking out of the cab
+window as the son descended the house steps. "Isn't she there,
+Jemmy?" he asked, faintly--"isn't she there?"
+
+"Hold your tongue," cried the spy, with the native coarseness
+of his nature rising to the surface at last. "I'm not at the end
+of my inquiries yet."
+
+He crossed the road, and entered a coffee-shop situated exactly
+opposite the house he had just left.
+
+In the box nearest the window two men were sitting talking
+together anxiously.
+
+"Which of you was on duty yesterday evening, between nine and ten
+o'clock?" asked Bashwood the younger, suddenly joining them, and
+putting his question in a quick, peremptory whisper.
+
+"I was, sir," said one of the men, unwillingly.
+
+"Did you lose sight of the house?--Yes! I see you did."
+
+"Only for a minute, sir. An infernal blackguard of a soldier
+came in--"
+
+"That will do," said Bashwood the younger. "I know what the
+soldier did, and who sent him to do it. She has given us the slip
+again. You are the greatest ass living. Consider yourself
+dismissed." With those words, and with an oath to emphasize them,
+he left the coffee-shop and returned to the cab.
+
+"She's gone!" cried his father. "Oh, Jemmy, Jemmy, I see it in
+your face!" He fell back into his own corner of the cab, with
+a faint, wailing cry. "They're married," he moaned to himself;
+his hands falling helplessly on his knees; his hat falling
+unregarded from his head. "Stop them!" he exclaimed, suddenly
+rousing himself, and seizing his son in a frenzy by the collar
+of the coat.
+
+"Go back to the hotel," shouted Bashwood the younger to the
+cabman. "Hold your noise!" he added, turning fiercely on his
+father. "I want to think."
+
+The varnish of smoothness was all off him by this time. His
+temper was roused. His pride--even such a man has his pride!
+--was wounded to the quick. Twice had he matched his wits against
+a woman's; and twice the woman had baffled him.
+
+He got out, on reaching the hotel for the second time, and
+privately tried the servants with the offer of money. The result
+of the experiment satisfied him that they had, in this instance,
+really and truly no information to sell. After a moment's
+reflection, he stopped, before leaving the hotel, to ask
+the way to the parish church. "The chance may be worth trying,"
+he thought to himself, as he gave the address to the driver.
+"Faster!" he called out, looking first at his watch, and then at
+his father. "The minutes are precious this morning; and the old
+one is beginning to give in."
+
+It was true. Still capable of hearing and of understanding, Mr.
+Bashwood was past speaking by this time. He clung with both hands
+to his son's grudging arm, and let his head fall helplessly on
+his son's averted shoulder.
+
+The parish church stood back from the street, protected by gates
+and railings, and surrounded by a space of open ground. Shaking
+off his father's hold, Bashwood the younger made straight for
+the vestry. The clerk, putting away the books, and the clerk's
+assistant, hanging up a surplice, were the only persons in the
+room when he entered it and asked leave to look at the marriage
+register for the day.
+
+The clerk gravely opened the book, and stood aside from the desk
+on which it lay.
+
+The day's register comprised three marriages solemnized that
+morning; and the first two signatures on the page were "Allan
+Armadale" and "Lydia Gwilt!"
+
+Even the spy--ignorant as he was of the truth, unsuspicious as he
+was of the terrible future consequences to which the act of that
+morning might lead--even the spy started, when his eye first fell
+on the page. It was done! Come what might of it, it was done now.
+There, in black and white, was the registered evidence of the
+marriage, which was at once a truth in itself, and a lie in the
+conclusion to which it led! There--through the fatal similarity
+in the names--there, in Midwinter's own signature, was the proof
+to persuade everybody that, not Midwinter, but Allan, was the
+husband of Miss Gwilt!
+
+Bashwood the younger closed the book, and returned it to the
+clerk. He descended the vestry steps, with his hands thrust
+doggedly into his pockets, and with a serious shock inflicted
+on his professional self-esteem.
+
+The beadle met him under the church wall. He considered for
+a moment whether it was worth while to spend a shilling in
+questioning the man, and decided in the affirmative. If they
+could be traced and overtaken, there might be a chance of seeing
+the color of Mr. Armadale's money even yet.
+
+"How long is it," he asked, "since the first couple married here
+this morning left the church?"
+
+"About an hour," said the beadle.
+
+"How did they go away?"
+
+The beadle deferred answering that second question until he had
+first pocketed his fee.
+
+"You won't trace them from here, sir," he said, when he had got
+his shilling. "They went away on foot."
+
+"And that is all you know about it?"
+
+"That, sir, is all I know about it."
+
+Left by himself, even the Detective of the Private Inquiry Office
+paused for a moment before he returned to his father at the gate.
+He was roused from his hesitation by the sudden appearance,
+within the church inclosure, of the driver of the cab.
+
+"I'm afraid the old gentleman is going to be taken ill, sir,"
+said the man.
+
+Bashwood the younger frowned angrily, and walked back to the cab.
+As he opened the door and looked in, his father leaned forward
+and confronted him, with lips that moved speechlessly, and with
+a white stillness over all the rest of his face.
+
+"She's done us," said the spy. "They were married here this
+morning."
+
+The old man's body swayed for a moment from one side to the
+other. The instant after, his eyes closed and his head fell
+forward toward the front seat of the cab. "Drive to the
+hospital!" cried his son. "He's in a fit. This is what comes of
+putting myself out of my way to please my father," he muttered,
+sullenly raising Mr. Bashwood's head, and loosening his cravat.
+"A nice morning's work. Upon my soul, a nice morning's work!"
+
+The hospital was near, and the house surgeon was at his post.
+
+"Will he come out of it?" asked Bashwood the younger, roughly.
+
+"Who are _you_?" asked the surgeon, sharply, on his side.
+
+"I am his son."
+
+"I shouldn't have thought it," rejoined the surgeon, taking the
+restoratives that were handed to him by the nurse, and turning
+from the son to the father with an air of relief which he was
+at no pains to conceal. "Yes," he added, after a minute or two;
+"your father will come out of it this time."
+
+"When can he be moved away from here?"
+
+"He can be moved from the hospital in an hour or two."
+
+The spy laid a card on the table. "I'll come back for him or send
+for him," he said. "I suppose I can go now, if I leave my name
+and address?" With those words, he put on his hat, and walked
+out.
+
+"He's a brute!" said the nurse.
+
+"No," said the surgeon, quietly. "He's a man."
+
+* * * * * * *
+
+Between nine and ten o'clock that night, Mr. Bashwood awoke in
+his bed at the inn in the Borough. He had slept for some hours
+since he had been brought back from the hospital; and his mind
+and body were now slowly recovering together.
+
+A light was burning on the bedside table, and a letter lay on it,
+waiting for him till he was awake. It was in his son's
+handwriting, and it contained these words:
+
+
+"MY DEAR DAD--Having seen you safe out of the hospital, and back
+at your hotel, I think I may fairly claim to have done my duty by
+you, and may consider myself free to look after my own affairs.
+Business will prevent me from seeing you to-night; and I don't
+think it at all likely I shall be in your neighborhood to-morrow
+morning. My advice to you is to go back to Thorpe Ambrose, and
+to stick to your employment in the steward's office. Wherever
+Mr. Armadale may be, he must, sooner or later, write to you on
+business. I wash my hands of the whole matter, mind, so far as
+I am concerned, from this time forth. But if _you_ like to go on
+with it, my professional opinion is (though you couldn't hinder
+his marriage), you may part him from his wife.
+
+"Pray take care of yourself.
+
+"Your affectionate son,
+
+"JAMES BASHWOOD."
+
+The letter dropped from the old man's feeble hands. "I wish Jemmy
+could have come to see me to-night," he thought. "But it's very
+kind of him to advise me, all the same."
+
+He turned wearily on the pillow, and read the letter a second
+time. "Yes," he said, "there's nothing left for me but to go
+back. I'm too poor and too old to hunt after them all by myself."
+He closed his eyes: the tears trickled slowly over his wrinkled
+cheeks. "I've been a trouble to Jemmy," he murmured, faintly;
+"I've been a sad trouble, I'm afraid, to poor Jemmy!" In a minute
+more his weakness overpowered him, and he fell asleep again.
+
+The clock of the neighboring church struck. It was ten. As the
+bell tolled the hour, the tidal train--with Midwinter and his
+wife among the passengers--was speeding nearer and nearer to
+Paris. As the bell tolled the hour, the watch on board Allan's
+outward-bound yacht had sighted the light-house off the Land's
+End, and had set the course of the vessel for Ushant and
+Finisterre.
+
+THE END OF THE THIRD BOOK.
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
+
+"NAPLES, October 10th.--It is two months to-day since I declared
+that I had closed my Diary, never to open it again.
+
+"Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to this
+secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am
+more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever,
+though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me. My
+misery is a woman's misery, and it _will_ speak--here, rather
+than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one
+else to hear me.
+
+"How happy I was in the first days that followed our marriage,
+and how happy I made _him_! Only two months have passed, and that
+time is a by-gone time already! I try to think of anything I
+might have said or done wrongly, on my side--of anything he might
+have said or done wrongly, on his; and I can remember nothing
+unworthy of my husband, nothing unworthy of myself. I cannot even
+lay my finger on the day when the cloud first rose between us.
+
+"I could bear it, if I loved him less dearly than I do. I could
+conquer the misery of our estrangement, if he only showed the
+change in him as brutally as other men would show it.
+
+"But this never has happened--never will happen. It is not
+in his nature to inflict suffering on others. Not a hard word,
+not a hard look, escapes him. It is only at night, when I hear
+him sighing in his sleep, and sometimes when I see him dreaming
+in the morning hours, that I know how hopelessly I am losing
+the love he once felt for me. He hides, or tries to hide, it in
+the day, for my sake. He is all gentleness, all kindness; but
+his heart is not on his lips when he kisses me now; his hand
+tells me nothing when it touches mine. Day after day the hours
+that he gives to his hateful writing grow longer and longer;
+day after day he becomes more and more silent in the hours that
+he gives to me.
+
+"And, with all this, there is nothing that I can complain
+of--nothing marked enough to justify me in noticing it. His
+disappointment shrinks from all open confession; his resignation
+collects itself by such fine degrees that even my watchfulness
+fails to see the growth of it. Fifty times a day I feel the
+longing in me to throw my arms round his neck, and say: 'For
+God's sake, do anything to me, rather than treat me like this!'
+and fifty times a day the words are forced back into my heart
+by the cruel considerateness of his conduct; which gives me no
+excuse for speaking them. I thought I had suffered the sharpest
+pain that I could feel when my first husband laid his whip across
+my face. I thought I knew the worst that despair could do on the
+day when I knew that the other villain, the meaner villain still,
+had cast me off. Live and learn. There is sharper pain than
+I felt under Waldron's whip; there is bitterer despair than
+the despair I knew when Manuel deserted me.
+
+"Am I too old for him? Surely not yet! Have I lost my beauty?
+Not a man passes me in the street but his eyes tell me I am as
+handsome as ever.
+
+"Ah, no! no! the secret lies deeper than _that_! I have thought
+and thought about it till a horrible fancy has taken possession
+of me. He has been noble and good in his past life, and I have
+been wicked and disgraced. Who can tell what a gap that dreadful
+difference may make between us, unknown to him and unknown to me?
+It is folly, it is madness; but, when I lie awake by him in
+the darkness, I ask myself whether any unconscious disclosure
+of the truth escapes me in the close intimacy that now unites us?
+Is there an unutterable Something left by the horror of my past
+life, which clings invisibly to me still? And is he feeling the
+influence of it, sensibly, and yet incomprehensibly to himself?
+Oh me! is there no purifying power in such love as mine? Are
+there plague-spots of past wickedness on my heart which no
+after-repentance can wash out?
+
+"Who can tell? There is something wrong in our married life--
+I can only come back to that. There is some adverse influence
+that neither he nor I can trace which is parting us further and
+further from each other day by day. Well! I suppose I shall be
+hardened in time, and learn to bear it.
+
+"An open carriage has just driven by my window, with a nicely
+dressed lady in it. She had her husband by her side, and her
+children on the seat opposite. At the moment when I saw her
+she was laughing and talking in high spirits--a sparkling,
+light-hearted, happy woman. Ah, my lady, when you were a few
+years younger, if you had been left to yourself, and thrown
+on the world like me--
+
+
+"October 11th.--The eleventh day of the month was the day (two
+months since) when we were married. He said nothing about it
+to me when we woke, nor I to him. But I thought I would make it
+the occasion, at breakfast-time, of trying to win him back.
+
+"I don't think I ever took such pains with my toilet before.
+I don't think I ever looked better than I looked when I went
+downstairs this morning. He had breakfasted by himself, and
+I found a little slip of paper on the table with an apology
+written on it. The post to England, he said, went out that day
+ and his letter to the newspaper must be finished. In his place
+I would have let fifty posts go out rather than breakfast without
+him. I went into his room. There he was, immersed body and soul
+in his hateful writing! 'Can't you give me a little time this
+morning?' I asked. He got up with a start. 'Certainly, if you
+wish it.' He never even looked at me as he said the words.
+The very sound of his voice told me that all his interest
+was centered in the pen that he had just laid down. 'I see you
+are occupied,' I said; 'I don't wish it.' Before I had closed
+the door on him he was back at his desk. I have often heard that
+the wives of authors have been for the most part unhappy women.
+And now I know why.
+
+"I suppose, as I said yesterday, I shall learn to bear it. (What
+_stuff_, by-the-by, I seem to have written yesterday! How ashamed
+I should be if anybody saw it but myself!) I hope the trumpery
+newspaper he writes for won't succeed! I hope his rubbishing
+letter will be well cut up by some other newspaper as soon as
+it gets into print!
+
+"What am I to do with myself all the morning? I can't go out,
+it's raining. If I open the piano, I shall disturb the
+industrious journalist who is scribbling in the next room.
+Oh, dear, it was lonely enough in my lodging in Thorpe Ambrose,
+but how much lonelier it is here! Shall I read? No; books don't
+interest me; I hate the whole tribe of authors. I think I shall
+look back through these pages, and live my life over again when
+I was plotting and planning, and finding a new excitement to
+occupy me in every new hour of the day.
+
+"He might have looked at me, though he _was_ so busy with his
+writing.--He might have said, 'How nicely you are dressed this
+morning!' He might have remembered--never mind what! All he
+remembers is the newspaper.
+
+
+"Twelve o'clock.--I have been reading and thinking; and, thanks
+to my Diary, I have got through an hour.
+
+"What a time it was--what a life it was, at Thorpe Ambrose!
+I wonder I kept my senses. It makes my heart beat, it makes
+my face flush, only to read about it now!
+
+"The rain still falls, and the journalist still scribbles.
+I don't want to think the thoughts of that past time over
+again. And yet, what else can I do?
+
+"Supposing--I only say supposing--I felt now, as I felt when
+I traveled to London with Armadale; and when I saw my way to
+his life as plainly as I saw the man himself all through the
+journey...?
+
+"I'll go and look out of the window. I'll go and count the people
+as they pass by.
+
+"A funeral has gone by, with the penitents in their black hoods,
+and the wax torches sputtering in the wet, and the little bell
+ringing, and the priests droning their monotonous chant.
+A pleasant sight to meet me at the window! I shall go back to
+my Diary.
+
+"Supposing I was not the altered woman I am--I only say,
+supposing--how would the Grand Risk that I once thought of
+running look now? I have married Midwinter in the name that
+is really his own. And by doing that I have taken the first of
+those three steps which were once to lead me, through Armadale's
+life, to the fortune and the station of Armadale's widow. No
+matter how innocent my intentions might have been on the wedding-
+day--and they _were_ innocent--this is one of the unalterable
+results of the marriage. Well, having taken the first step, then,
+whether I would or no, how--supposing I meant to take the second
+step, which I don't--how would present circumstances stand toward
+me? Would they warn me to draw back, I wonder? or would they
+encourage me to go on?
+
+"It will interest me to calculate the chances; and I can easily
+tear the leaf out, and destroy it, if the prospect looks too
+encouraging.
+
+"We are living here (for economy's sake) far away from the
+expensive English quarter, in a suburb of the city, on the
+Portici side. We have made no traveling acquaintances among
+our own country people. Our poverty is against us; Midwinter's
+shyness is against us; and (with the women) my personal
+appearance is against us. The men from whom my husband gets
+his information for the newspaper meet him at the cafe, and never
+come here. I discourage his bringing any strangers to see me;
+for, though years have passed since I was last at Naples,
+I cannot be sure that some of the many people I once knew in
+this place may not be living still. The moral of all this is
+(as the children's storybooks say), that not a single witness
+has come to this house who could declare, if any after-inquiry
+took place in England, that Midwinter and I had been living here
+as man and wife. So much for present circumstances as they
+affect me.
+
+"Armadale next. Has any unforeseen accident led him to
+communicate with Thorpe Ambrose? Has he broken the conditions
+which the major imposed on him, and asserted himself in the
+character of Miss Milroy's promised husband since I saw him last?
+
+"Nothing of the sort has taken place. No unforeseen accident
+has altered his position--his tempting position--toward myself.
+I know all that has happened to him since he left England,
+through the letters which he writes to Midwinter, and which
+Midwinter shows to me.
+
+"He has been wrecked, to begin with. His trumpery little yacht
+has actually tried to drown him, after all, and has failed! It
+happened (as Midwinter warned him it might happen with so small
+a vessel) in a sudden storm. They were blown ashore on the coast
+of Portugal. The yacht went to pieces, but the lives, and papers,
+and so on, were saved. The men have been sent back to Bristol,
+with recommendations from their master which have already got
+them employment on board an outward-bound ship. And the master
+himself is on his way here, after stopping first at Lisbon, and
+next at Gibraltar, and trying ineffectually in both places to
+supply himself with another vessel. His third attempt is to be
+made at Naples, where there is an English yacht 'laid up,' as
+they call it, to be had for sale or hire. He has had no occasion
+to write home since the wreck; for he took away from Coutts's the
+whole of the large sum of money lodged there for him, in circular
+notes. And he has felt no inclination to go back to England
+himself; for, with Mr. Brock dead, Miss Milroy at school, and
+Midwinter here, he has not a living creature in whom he is
+interested to welcome him if he returned. To see us, and to see
+the new yacht, are the only two present objects he has in view.
+Midwinter has been expecting him for a week past, and he may walk
+into this very room in which I am writing, at this very moment,
+for all I know to the contrary.
+
+"Tempting circumstances, these--with all the wrongs I have
+suffered at his mother's hands and at his, still alive in my
+memory; with Miss Milroy confidently waiting to take her place
+at the head of his household; with my dream of living happy and
+innocent in Midwinter's love dispelled forever, and with nothing
+left in its place to help me against myself. I wish it wasn't
+raining; I wish I could go out.
+
+"Perhaps something may happen to prevent Armadale from coming to
+Naples? When he last wrote, he was waiting at Gibraltar for an
+English steamer in the Mediterranean trade to bring him on here.
+He may get tired of waiting before the steamer comes, or he may
+hear of a yacht at some other place than this. A little bird
+whispers in my ear that it may possibly be the wisest thing
+he ever did in his life if he breaks his engagement to join us
+at Naples.
+
+"Shall I tear out the leaf on which all these shocking things
+have been written? No. My Diary is so nicely bound--it would be
+positive barbarity to tear out a leaf. Let me occupy myself
+harmlessly with something else. What shall it be? My
+dressing-case--I will put my dressing-case tidy, and polish up
+the few little things in it which my misfortunes have still left
+in my possession.
+
+"I have shut up the dressing-case again. The first thing I found
+in it was Armadale's shabby present to me on my marriage--the
+rubbishing little ruby ring. That irritated me, to begin with.
+The second thing that turned up was my bottle of Drops. I caught
+myself measuring the doses with my eye, and calculating how many
+of them would be enough to take a living creature over the
+border-land between sleep and death. Why I should have locked
+the dressing-case in a fright, before I had quite completed my
+calculation, I don't know; but I did lock it. And here I am back
+again at my Diary, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to write
+about. Oh, the weary day! the weary day! Will nothing happen to
+excite me a little in this horrible place?
+
+
+"October 12th.--Midwinter's all-important letter to the newspaper
+was dispatched by the post last night. I was foolish enough
+to suppose that I might be honored by having some of his spare
+attention bestowed on me to-day. Nothing of the sort! He had
+a restless night, after all his writing, and got up with his head
+aching, and his spirits miserably depressed. When he is in
+this state, his favorite remedy is to return to his old vagabond
+habits, and go roaming away by himself nobody knows where.
+He went through the form this morning (knowing I had no riding
+habit) of offering to hire a little broken-kneed brute of a pony
+for me, in case I wished to accompany him! I preferred remaining
+at home. I will have a handsome horse and a handsome habit, or
+I won't ride at all. He went away, without attempting to persuade
+me to change my mind. I wouldn't have changed it, of course; but
+he might have tried to persuade me all the same.
+
+"I can open the piano in his absence--that is one comfort. And
+I am in a fine humor for playing--that is another. There is
+a sonata of Beethoven's (I forget the number), which always
+suggests to me the agony of lost spirits in a place of torment.
+Come, my fingers and thumbs, and take me among the lost spirits
+this morning!
+
+
+"October 13th.--Our windows look out on the sea. At noon to-day
+we saw a steamer coming in, with the English flag flying.
+Midwinter has gone to the port, on the chance that this may be
+the vessel from Gibraltar, with Armadale on board.
+
+"Two o'clock.--It is the vessel from Gibraltar. Armadale has
+added one more to the long list of his blunders: he has kept
+his engagement to join us at Naples.
+
+"How will it end _now_?
+
+"Who knows?
+
+
+"October 16th.--Two days missed out of my Diary! I can hardly
+tell why, unless it is that Armadale irritates me beyond all
+endurance. The mere sight of him takes me back to Thorpe Ambrose.
+I fancy I must have been afraid of what I might write about him,
+in the course of the last two days, if I indulged myself in
+the dangerous luxury of opening these pages.
+
+"This morning I am afraid of nothing, and I take up my pen again
+accordingly.
+
+"Is there any limit, I wonder, to the brutish stupidity of some
+men? I thought I had discovered Armadale's limit when I was
+his neighbor in Norfolk; but my later experience at Naples shows
+me that I was wrong. He is perpetually in and out of this house
+(crossing over to us in a boat from the hotel at Santa Lucia,
+where he sleeps); and he has exactly two subjects of conversation
+--the yacht for sale in the harbor here, and Miss Milroy. Yes!
+he selects ME as the _confidante_ of his devoted attachment to
+the major's daughter! 'It's so nice to talk to a woman about it!'
+That is all the apology he has thought it necessary to make for
+appealing to my sympathies--_my_ sympathies!--on the subject
+of 'his darling Neelie,' fifty times a day. He is evidently
+persuaded (if he thinks about it at all) that I have forgotten,
+as completely as he has forgotten, all that once passed between
+us when I was first at Thorpe Ambrose. Such an utter want of
+the commonest delicacy and the commonest tact, in a creature
+who is, to all appearance, possessed of a skin, and not a hide,
+and who does, unless my ears deceive me, talk, and not bray,
+is really quite incredible when one comes to think of it. But
+it is, for all that, quite true. He asked me--he actually asked
+me, last night--how many hundreds a year the wife of a rich man
+could spend on her dress. 'Don't put it too low,' the idiot
+added, with his intolerable grin. 'Neelie shall be one of
+the best-dressed women in England when I have married her.'
+And this to me, after having had him at my feet, and then losing
+him again through Miss Milroy! This to me, with an alpaca gown
+on, and a husband whose income must be helped by a newspaper!
+
+"I had better not dwell on it any longer. I had better think
+and write of something else.
+
+"The yacht. As a relief from hearing about Miss Milroy, I declare
+the yacht in the harbor is quite an interesting subject to me!
+She (the men call a vessel 'She'; and I suppose, if the women
+took an interest in such things, _they_ would call a vessel
+'He')--she is a beautiful model; and her 'top-sides' (whatever
+they may be) are especially distinguished by being built of
+mahogany. But, with these merits, she has the defect, on the
+other hand, of being old--which is a sad drawback--and the crew
+and the sailing-master have been 'paid off,' and sent home to
+England--which is additionally distressing. Still, if a new crew
+and a new sailing-master can be picked up here, such a beautiful
+creature (with all her drawbacks), is not to be despised.
+It might answer to hire her for a cruise, and to see how she
+behaves. (If she is of _my_ mind, her behavior will rather
+astonish her new master!) The cruise will determine what faults
+she has, and what repairs, through the unlucky circumstance of
+her age, she really stands in need of. And then it will be time
+to settle whether to buy her outright or not. Such is Armadale's
+conversation when he is not talking of 'his darling Neelie.' And
+Midwinter, who can steal no time from his newspaper work for
+his wife, can steal hours for his friend, and can offer them
+unreservedly to my irresistible rival, the new yacht.
+
+"I shall write no more to-day. If so lady-like a person as I am
+could feel a tigerish tingling all over her to the very tips
+of her fingers, I should suspect myself of being in that
+condition at the present moment. But, with _my_ manners and
+accomplishments, the thing is, of course, out of the question.
+We all know that a lady has no passions.
+
+
+"October 17th.--A letter for Midwinter this morning from the
+slave-owners--I mean the newspaper people in London--which has
+set him at work again harder than ever. A visit at luncheon-time
+and another visit at dinner-time from Armadale. Conversation
+at luncheon about the yacht. Conversation at dinner about Miss
+Milroy. I have been honored, in regard to that young lady, by an
+invitation to go with Armadale to-morrow to the Toledo, and help
+him to buy some presents for the beloved object. I didn't fly out
+at him--I only made an excuse. Can words express the astonishment
+I feel at my own patience? No words can express it.
+
+
+"October 18th.--Armadale came to breakfast this morning, by way
+of catching Midwinter before he shuts himself up over his work.
+
+"Conversation the same as yesterday's conversation at lunch.
+Armadale has made his bargain with the agent for hiring
+the yacht. The agent (compassionating his total ignorance of
+the language) has helped him to find an interpreter, but can't
+help him to find a crew. The interpreter is civil and willing,
+but doesn't understand the sea. Midwinter's assistance is
+indispensable; and Midwinter is requested (and consents!) to work
+harder than ever, so as to make time for helping his friend. When
+the crew is found, the merits and defects of the vessel are to be
+tried by a cruise to Sicily, with Midwinter on board to give
+his opinion. Lastly (in case she should feel lonely), the ladies'
+cabin is most obligingly placed at the disposal of Midwinter's
+wife. All this was settled at the breakfast-table; and it ended
+with one of Armadale's neatly-turned compliments, addressed
+to myself: 'I mean to take Neelie sailing with me, when we are
+married. And you have such good taste, you will be able to tell
+me everything the ladies' cabin wants between that time and
+this.'
+
+"If some women bring such men as this into the world, ought other
+women to allow them to live? It is a matter of opinion. _I_ think
+not.
+
+"What maddens me is to see, as I do see plainly, that Midwinter
+finds in Armadale's company, and in Armadale's new yacht,
+a refuge from me. He is always in better spirits when Armadale
+is here. He forgets me in Armadale almost as completely as he
+forgets me in his work. And I bear it! What a pattern wife,
+what an excellent Christian I am!
+
+
+"October 19th.--Nothing new. Yesterday over again.
+
+
+"October 20th.--One piece of news. Midwinter is suffering from
+nervous headache; and is working in spite of it, to make time
+for his holiday with his friend.
+
+
+"October 21st.--Midwinter is worse. Angry and wild and
+unapproachable, after two bad nights, and two uninterrupted
+days at his desk. Under any other circumstances he would take
+the warning and leave off. But nothing warns him now. He is still
+working as hard as ever, for Armadale's sake. How much longer
+will my patience last?
+
+
+"October 22d.--Signs, last night, that Midwinter is taxing his
+brains beyond what his brains will bear. When he did fall asleep,
+he was frightfully restless; groaning and talking and grinding
+his teeth. From some of the words I heard, he seemed at one time
+to be dreaming of his life when he was a boy, roaming the country
+with the dancing dogs. At another time he was back again with
+Armadale, imprisoned all night on the wrecked ship. Toward the
+early morning hours he grew quieter. I fell asleep; and, waking
+after a short interval, found myself alone. My first glance round
+showed me a light burning in Midwinter's dressing-room. I rose
+softly, and went to look at him.
+
+"He was seated in the great, ugly, old-fashioned chair, which
+I ordered to be removed into the dressing-room out of the way
+when we first came here. His head lay back, and one of his hands
+hung listlessly over the arm of the chair. The other hand was
+on his lap. I stole a little nearer, and saw that exhaustion had
+overpowered him while he was either reading or writing, for there
+were books, pens, ink, and paper on the table before him. What
+had he got up to do secretly, at that hour of the morning?
+I looked closer at the papers on the table. They were all neatly
+folded (as he usually keeps them), with one exception; and that
+exception, lying open on the rest, was Mr. Brock's letter.
+
+"I looked round at him again, after making this discovery, and
+then noticed for the first time another written paper, lying
+under the hand that rested on his lap. There was no moving it
+away without the risk of waking him. Part of the open manuscript,
+however, was not covered by his hand. I looked at it to see what
+he had secretly stolen away to read, besides Mr. Brock's letter;
+and made out enough to tell me that it was the Narrative of
+Armadale's Dream.
+
+"That second discovery sent me back at once to my bed--with
+something serious to think of.
+
+"Traveling through France, on our way to this place, Midwinter's
+shyness was conquered for once, by a very pleasant man--an Irish
+doctor--whom we met in the railway carriage, and who quite
+insisted on being friendly and sociable with us all through
+the day's journey. Finding that Midwinter was devoting himself to
+literary pursuits, our traveling companion warned him not to pass
+too many hours together at his desk. 'Your face tells me more
+than you think,' the doctor said: 'If you are ever tempted to
+overwork your brain, you will feel it sooner than most men. When
+you find your nerves playing you strange tricks, don't neglect
+the warning--drop your pen.'
+
+"After my last night's discovery in the dressing-room, it looks
+as if Midwinter's nerves were beginning already to justify
+the doctor's opinion of them. If one of the tricks they are
+playing him is the trick of tormenting him again with his old
+superstitious terrors, there will be a change in our lives here
+before long. I shall wait curiously to see whether the conviction
+that we two are destined to bring fatal danger to Armadale takes
+possession of Midwinter's mind once more. If it does, I know what
+will happen. He will not stir a step toward helping his friend to
+find a crew for the yacht; and he will certainly refuse to sail
+with Armadale, or to let me sail with him, on the trial cruise.
+
+
+"October 23d.--Mr. Brock's letter has, apparently, not lost
+its influence yet. Midwinter is working again to-day, and is
+as anxious as ever for the holiday-time that he is to pass with
+his friend.
+
+"Two o'clock.--Armadale here as usual; eager to know when
+Midwinter will be at his service. No definite answer to be given
+to the question yet, seeing that it all depends on Midwinter's
+capacity to continue at his desk. Armadale sat down disappointed;
+he yawned, and put his great clumsy hands in his pockets. I took
+up a book. The brute didn't understand that I wanted to be left
+alone; he began again on the unendurable subject of Miss Milroy,
+and of all the fine things she was to have when he married her.
+Her own riding-horse; her own pony-carriage; her own beautiful
+little sitting-room upstairs at the great house, and so on. All
+that I might have had once Miss Milroy is to have now--_if I let
+her_.
+
+
+"Six o'clock.--More of the everlasting Armadale! Half an hour
+since, Midwinter came in from his writing, giddy and exhausted.
+I had been pining all day for a little music, and I knew they
+were giving 'Norma' at the theater here. It struck me that
+an hour or two at the opera might do Midwinter good, as well as
+me; and I said: 'Why not take a box at the San Carlo to-night?'
+He answered, in a dull, uninterested manner, that he was not
+rich enough to take a box. Armadale was present, and flourished
+his well-filled purse in his usual insufferable way. '_I'm_
+rich enough, old boy, and it comes to the same thing.' With
+those words he took up his hat, and trampled out on his great
+elephant's feet to get the box. I looked after him from
+the window as he went down the street. 'Your widow, with her
+twelve hundred a year,' I thought to myself, 'might take a box
+at the San Carlo whenever she pleased, without being beholden
+to anybody.' The empty-headed wretch whistled as he went his way
+to the theater, and tossed his loose silver magnificently
+to every beggar who ran after him.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Midnight.--I am alone again at last. Have I nerve enough to
+write the history of this terrible evening, just as it has
+passed? I have nerve enough, at any rate, to turn to a new leaf,
+and try.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE DIARY CONTINUED.
+
+
+"We went to the San Carlo. Armadale's stupidity showed itself,
+even in such a simple matter as taking a box. He had confounded
+an opera with a play, and had chosen a box close to the stage,
+with the idea that one's chief object at a musical performance
+is to see the faces of the singers as plainly as possible!
+Fortunately for our ears, Bellini's lovely melodies are, for the
+most part, tenderly and delicately accompanied--or the orchestra
+might have deafened us.
+
+"I sat back in the box at first, well out of sight; for it was
+impossible to be sure that some of my old friends of former days
+at Naples might not be in the theater. But the sweet music
+gradually tempted me out of my seclusion. I was so charmed and
+interested that I leaned forward without knowing it, and looked
+at the stage.
+
+"I was made aware of my own imprudence by a discovery which,
+for the moment, literally chilled my blood. One of the singers,
+among the chorus of Druids, was looking at me while he sang with
+the rest. His head was disguised in the long white hair, and the
+lower part of his face was completely covered with the flowing
+white beard proper to the character. But the eyes with which
+he looked at me were the eyes of the one man on earth whom I have
+most reason to dread ever seeing again--Manuel!
+
+"If it had not been for my smelling-bottle, I believe I should
+have lost my senses. As it was, I drew back again into the
+shadow. Even Armadale noticed the sudden change in me: he, as
+well as Midwinter, asked if I was ill. I said I felt the heat,
+but hoped I should be better presently; and then leaned back in
+the box, and tried to rally my courage. I succeeded in recovering
+self-possession enough to be able to look again at the stage
+(without showing myself) the next time the chorus appeared. There
+was the man again! But to my infinite relief he never looked
+toward our box a second time. This welcome indifference, on his
+part, helped to satisfy me that I had seen an extraordinary
+accidental resemblance, and nothing more. I still hold to this
+conclusion, after having had leisure to think; but my mind would
+be more completely at ease than it is if I had seen the rest of
+the man's face without the stage disguises that hid it from all
+investigation.
+
+"When the curtain fell on the first act, there was a tiresome
+ballet to be performed (according to the absurd Italian custom),
+before the opera went on. Though I had got over my first fright,
+I had been far too seriously startled to feel comfortable in the
+theater. I dreaded all sorts of impossible accidents; and when
+Midwinter and Armadale put the question to me, I told them I was
+not well enough to stay through the rest of the performance.
+
+"At the door of the theater Armadale proposed to say good-night.
+But Midwinter--evidently dreading the evening with _me_--asked
+him to come back to supper, if I had no objection. I said the
+necessary words, and we all three returned together to this
+house.
+
+"Ten minutes' quiet in my own room (assisted by a little dose of
+eau-de-cologne and water) restored me to myself. I joined the men
+at the supper-table. They received my apologies for taking them
+away from the opera, with the complimentary assurance that
+I had not cost either of them the slightest sacrifice of his own
+pleasure. Midwinter declared that he was too completely worn out
+to care for anything but the two great blessings, unattainable
+at the theater, of quiet and fresh air. Armadale said--with an
+Englishman's exasperating pride in his own stupidity wherever
+a matter of art is concerned--that he couldn't make head or tail
+of the performance. The principal disappointment, he was good
+enough to add, was mine, for I evidently understood foreign
+music, and enjoyed it. Ladies generally did. His darling little
+Neelie--
+
+"I was in no humor to be persecuted with his 'Darling Neelie'
+after what I had gone through at the theater. It might have been
+the irritated state of my nerves, or it might have been the
+eau-de-cologne flying to my head, but the bare mention of the
+girl seemed to set me in a flame. I tried to turn Armadale's
+attention in the direction of the supper-table. He was much
+obliged, but he had no appetite for more. I offered him wine
+next, the wine of the country, which is all that our poverty
+allows us to place on the table. He was much obliged again. The
+foreign wine was very little more to his taste than the foreign
+music; but he would take some because I asked him; and he would
+drink my health in the old-fashioned way, with his best wishes
+for the happy time when we should all meet again at Thorpe
+Ambrose, and when there would be a mistress to welcome me at
+the great house.
+
+"Was he mad to persist in this way? No; his face answered for
+him. He was under the impression that he was making himself
+particularly agreeable to me.
+
+"I looked at Midwinter. He might have seen some reason for
+interfering to change the conversation, if he had looked at me in
+return. But he sat silent in his chair, irritable and overworked,
+with his eyes on the ground, thinking.
+
+"I got up and went to the window. Still impenetrable to a sense
+of his own clumsiness, Armadale followed me. If I had been strong
+enough to toss him out of the window into the sea, I should
+certainly have done it at that moment. Not being strong enough,
+I looked steadily at the view over the bay, and gave him a hint,
+the broadest and rudest I could think of, to go.
+
+"'A lovely night for a walk,' I said, 'if you are tempted to walk
+back to the hotel.'
+
+"I doubt if he heard me. At any rate, I produced no sort of
+effect on him. He stood staring sentimentally at the moonlight;
+and--there is really no other word to express it--_blew_ a sigh.
+I felt a presentiment of what was coming, unless I stopped his
+mouth by speaking first.
+
+"'With all your fondness for England,' I said, 'you must own
+that we have no such moonlight as that at home.'
+
+"He looked at me vacantly, and blew another sigh.
+
+"'I wonder whether it is fine to-night in England as it is here?'
+he said. 'I wonder whether my dear little girl at home is looking
+at the moonlight, and thinking of me?'
+
+"I could endure it no longer. I flew out at him at last.
+
+"'Good heavens, Mr. Armadale!' I exclaimed, 'is there only one
+subject worth mentioning, in the narrow little world you live in?
+I'm sick to death of Miss Milroy. Do pray talk of something
+else?'
+
+"His great, broad, stupid face colored up to the roots of
+his hideous yellow hair. 'I beg your pardon,' he stammered,
+with a kind of sulky surprise. 'I didn't suppose--' He stopped
+confusedly, and looked from me to Midwinter. I understood what
+the look meant. 'I didn't suppose she could be jealous of Miss
+Milroy after marrying _you_!' That is what he would have said
+to Midwinter, if I had left them alone together in the room!
+
+"As it was, Midwinter had heard us. Before I could speak
+again--before Armadale could add another word--he finished
+his friend's uncompleted sentence, in a tone that I now heard,
+and with a look that I now saw, for the first time.
+
+"'You didn't suppose, Allan,' he said, 'that a lady's temper
+could be so easily provoked.'
+
+"The first bitter word of irony, the first hard look of contempt,
+I had ever had from him! And Armadale the cause of it!
+
+"My anger suddenly left me. Something came in its place which
+steadied me in an instant, and took me silently out of the room.
+
+"I sat down alone in the bedroom. I had a few minutes of thought
+with myself, which I don't choose to put into words, even in
+these secret pages. I got up, and unlocked--never mind what.
+I went round to Midwinter's side of the bed, and took--no matter
+what I took. The last thing I did before I left the room was
+to look at my watch. It was half-past ten, Armadale's usual time
+for leaving us. I went back at once and joined the two men again.
+
+"I approached Armadale good-humoredly, and said to him:
+
+
+"No! On second thoughts. I won't put down what I said to him,
+or what I did afterward. I'm sick of Armadale! he turns up at
+every second word I write. I shall pass over what happened in
+the course of the next hour--the hour between half-past ten and
+half-past eleven--and take up my story again at the time when
+Armadale had left us. Can I tell what took place, as soon as our
+visitor's back was turned, between Midwinter and me in our own
+room? Why not pass over what happened, in that case as well as in
+the other? Why agitate myself by writing it down? I don't know!
+Why do I keep a diary at all? Why did the clever thief the other
+day (in the English newspaper) keep the very thing to convict him
+in the shape of a record of everything he stole? Why are we not
+perfectly reasonable in all that we do? Why am I not always on my
+guard and never inconsistent with myself, like a wicked character
+in a novel? Why? why? why?
+
+"I don't care why! I must write down what happened between
+Midwinter and me to-night, _because_ I must. There's a reason
+that nobody can answer--myself included.
+
+* * * * * * *
+
+"It was half-past eleven. Armadale had gone. I had put on
+my dressing-gown, and had just sat down to arrange my hair
+for the night, when I was surprised by a knock at the door,
+and Midwinter came in.
+
+"He was frightfully pale. His eyes looked at me with a terrible
+despair in them. He never answered when I expressed my surprise
+at his coming in so much sooner than usual; he wouldn't even
+tell me, when I asked the question, if he was ill. Pointing
+peremptorily to the chair from which I had risen on his entering
+the room, he told me to sit down again; and then, after a moment,
+added these words: 'I have something serious to say to you.'
+
+"I thought of what I had done--or, no, of what I had tried to
+do--in that interval between half-past ten and half-past eleven,
+which I have left unnoticed in my diary--and the deadly sickness
+of terror, which I never felt at the time, came upon me now.
+I sat down again, as I had been told, without speaking to
+Midwinter, and without looking at him.
+
+"He took a turn up and down the room, and then came and stood
+over me.
+
+"'If Allan comes here to-morrow,' he began, 'and if you see
+him--'
+
+"His voice faltered, and he said no more. There was some dreadful
+grief at his heart that was trying to master him. But there are
+times when his will is a will of iron. He took another turn
+in the room, and crushed it down. He came back, and stood over me
+again.
+
+"'When Allan comes here to-morrow,' he resumed, 'let him come
+into my room, if he wants to see me. I shall tell him that I find
+it impossible to finish the work I now have on hand as soon as
+I had hoped, and that he must, therefore, arrange to find a crew
+for the yacht without any assistance on my part. If he comes,
+in his disappointment, to appeal to you, give him no hope of my
+being free in time to help him if he waits. Encourage him to take
+the best assistance he can get from strangers, and to set about
+manning the yacht without any further delay. The more occupation
+he has to keep him away from this house, and the less you
+encourage him to stay here if he does come, the better I shall be
+pleased. Don't forget that, and don't forget one last direction
+which I have now to give you. When the vessel is ready for sea,
+and when Allan invites us to sail with him, it is my wish that
+you should positively decline to go. He will try to make you
+change your mind; for I shall, of course, decline, on my side,
+to leave you in this strange house, and in this foreign country,
+by yourself. No matter what he says, let nothing persuade you
+to alter your decision. Refuse, positively and finally! Refuse,
+I insist on it, to set your foot on the new yacht!'
+
+"He ended quietly and firmly, with no faltering in his voice,
+and no signs of hesitation or relenting in his face. The sense
+of surprise which I might otherwise have felt at the strange
+words he had addressed to me was lost in the sense of relief
+that they brought to my mind. The dread of _those other words_
+that I had expected to hear from him left me as suddenly as it
+had come. I could look at him, I could speak to him once more.
+
+"'You may depend,' I answered, 'on my doing exactly what you
+order me to do. Must I obey you blindly? Or may I know your
+reason for the extraordinary directions you have just given
+to me?'
+
+"His, face darkened, and he sat down on the other side of
+my dressing-table, with a heavy, hopeless sigh.
+
+"'You may know the reason,' he said, 'if you wish it.' He waited
+a little, and considered. 'You have a right to know the reason,'
+he resumed, 'for you yourself are concerned in it.' He waited a
+little again, and again went on. 'I can only explain the strange
+request I have just made to you in one way,' be said. 'I must ask
+you to recall what happened in the next room, before Allan left
+us to-night.'
+
+"He looked at me with a strange mixture of expressions in his
+face. At one moment I thought he felt pity for me. At another,
+it seemed more like horror of me. I began to feel frightened
+again; I waited for his next words in silence.
+
+"'I know that I have been working too hard lately,' he went on,
+'and that my nerves are sadly shaken. It is possible, in the
+state I am in now, that I may have unconsciously misinterpreted,
+or distorted, the circumstances that really took place. You
+will do me a favor if you will test my recollection of what
+has happened by your own. If my fancy has exaggerated anything,
+if my memory is playing me false anywhere, I entreat you to stop
+me, and tell me of it.'
+
+"I commanded myself sufficiently to ask what the circumstances
+were to which he referred, and in what way I was personally
+concerned in them.
+
+"'You were personally concerned in them in this way,' he
+answered. 'The circumstances to which I refer began with your
+speaking to Allan about Miss Milroy, in what I thought a very
+inconsiderate and very impatient manner. I am afraid I spoke just
+as petulantly on my side, and I beg your pardon for what I said
+to you in the irritation of the moment. You left the room. After
+a short absence, you came back again, and made a perfectly proper
+apology to Allan, which he received with his usual kindness and
+sweetness of temper. While this went on, you and he were both
+standing by the supper-table; and Allan resumed some conversation
+which had already passed between you about the Neapolitan wine.
+He said he thought he should learn to like it in time, and he
+asked leave to take another glass of the wine we had on the
+table. Am I right so far?'
+
+"The words almost died on my lips; but I forced them out, and
+answered him that he was right so far.
+
+"'You took the flask out of Allan's hand,' he proceeded. 'You
+said to him, good-humoredly, "You know you don't really like the
+wine, Mr. Armadale. Let me make you something which may be more
+to your taste. I have a recipe of my own for lemonade. Will you
+favor me by trying it?" In those words, you made your proposal
+to him, and he accepted it. Did he also ask leave to look on,
+and learn how the lemonade was made? and did you tell him that
+he would only confuse you, and that you would give him the recipe
+in writing, if he wanted it?'
+
+"This time the words did really die on my lips. I could only bow
+my head, and answer 'Yes' mutely in that way. Midwinter went on.
+
+"'Allan laughed, and went to the window to look out at the Bay,
+and I went with him. After a while Allan remarked, jocosely,
+that the mere sound of the liquids you were pouring out made him
+thirsty. When he said this, I turned round from the window.
+I approached you, and said the lemonade took a long time to make.
+You touched me, as I was walking away again, and handed me the
+tumbler filled to the brim. At the same time, Allan turned round
+from the window; and I, in my turn, handed the tumbler to _him_.
+--Is there any mistake so far?'
+
+"The quick throbbing of my heart almost choked me. I could just
+shake my head--I could do no more.
+
+"'I saw Allan raise the tumbler to his lips.--Did _you_ see it?
+I saw his face turn white in an instant.--Did _you_? I saw the
+glass fall from his hand on the floor. I saw him stagger, and
+caught him before he fell. Are these things true? For God's sake,
+search your memory, and tell me--are these things true?'
+
+"The throbbing at my heart seemed, for one breathless instant,
+to stop. The next moment something fiery, something maddening,
+flew through me. I started to my feet, with my temper in a flame,
+reckless of all consequences, desperate enough to say anything.
+
+"'Your questions are an insult! Your looks are an insult!'
+I burst out. '_Do you think I tried to poison him_?'
+
+"The words rushed out of my lips in spite of me. They were the
+last words under heaven that any woman, in such a situation as
+mine, ought to have spoken. And yet I spoke them!
+
+"He rose in alarm and gave me my smelling-bottle. 'Hush! hush!'
+he said. 'You, too, are overwrought--you, too, are overexcited
+by all that has happened to-night. You are talking wildly and
+shockingly. Good God! how can you have so utterly misunderstood
+me? Compose yourself--pray, compose yourself.'
+
+"He might as well have told a wild animal to compose herself.
+Having been mad enough to say the words, I was mad enough next to
+return to the subject of the lemonade, in spite of his entreaties
+to me to be silent.
+
+"'I told you what I had put in the glass, the moment Mr.
+Armadale fainted,' I went on; insisting furiously on defending
+myself, when no attack was made on me. 'I told you I had taken
+the flask of brandy which you kept at your bedside, and mixed
+some of it with the lemonade. How could I know that he had a
+nervous horror of the smell and taste of brandy? Didn't he say
+to me himself, when he came to his senses, It's my fault; I ought
+to have warned you to put no brandy in it? Didn't he remind you
+afterward of the time when you and he were in the Isle of Man
+together, and when the doctor there innocently made the same
+mistake with him that I made to-night?'
+
+["I laid a great stress on my innocence--and with some reason
+too. Whatever else I may be, I pride myself on not being a
+hypocrite. I _was_ innocent--so far as the brandy was concerned.
+I had put it into the lemonade, in pure ignorance of Armadale's
+nervous peculiarity, to disguise the taste of--never mind what!
+Another of the things I pride myself on is that I never wander
+from my subject. What Midwinter said next is what I ought to be
+writing about now.]
+
+"He looked at me for a moment, as if he thought I had taken
+leave of my senses. Then he came round to my side of the table
+and stood over me again.
+
+"'If nothing else will satisfy you that you are entirely
+misinterpreting my motives,' he said, 'and that I haven't
+an idea of blaming _you_ in the matter--read this.'
+
+"He took a paper from the breast-pocket of his coat, and spread
+it open under my eyes. It was the Narrative of Armadale's Dream.
+
+"In an instant the whole weight on my mind was lifted off it.
+I felt mistress of myself again--I understood him at last.
+
+"'Do you know what this is?' he asked. 'Do you remember what
+I said to you at Thorpe Ambrose about Allan's Dream? I told you
+then that two out of the three Visions had already come true.
+I tell you now that the third Vision has been fulfilled in this
+house to-night.'
+
+"He turned over the leaves of the manuscript, and pointed to
+the lines that he wished me to read.
+
+"I read these, or nearly read these words, from the Narrative
+of the Dream, as Midwinter had taken it down from Armadale's own
+lips:
+
+
+"'The darkness opened for the third time, and showed me
+the Shadow of the Man and the Shadow of the Woman together.
+The Man-Shade was the nearest; the Woman-Shadow stood back. From
+where she stood, I heard a sound like the pouring out of a liquid
+softly. I saw her touch the Shadow of the Man with one hand, and
+give him a glass with the other. He took the glass and handed it
+to me. At the moment when I put it to my lips, a deadly faintness
+overcame me. When I recovered my senses again, the Shadows had
+vanished, and the Vision was at an end.'
+
+"For the moment, I was as completely staggered by this
+extraordinary coincidence as Midwinter himself.
+
+"He put one hand on the open narrative and laid the other heavily
+on my arm.
+
+"'_Now_ do you understand my motive in coming here?' he asked.
+'_Now_ do you see that the last hope I had to cling to was the
+hope that your memory of the night's events might prove my memory
+to be wrong? _Now_ do you know why I won't help Allan? Why
+I won't sail with him? Why I am plotting and lying, and making
+you plot and lie too, to keep my best and dearest friend out of
+the house?'
+
+"'Have you forgotten Mr. Brock's letter?' I asked.
+
+"He struck his hand passionately on the open manuscript. 'If Mr.
+Brook had lived to see what we have seen to-night he would have
+felt what I feel, he would have said what I say!' His voice sank
+mysteriously, and his great black eyes glittered at me as he made
+that answer. 'Thrice the Shadows of the Vision warned Allan
+in his sleep,' he went on; 'and thrice those Shadows have been
+embodied in the after-time by You and by Me! You, and no other,
+stood in the Woman's place at the pool. I, and no other, stood
+in the Man's place at the window. And you and I together, when
+the last Vision showed the Shadows together, stand in the Man's
+place and the Woman's place still! For _this_, the miserable day
+dawned when you and I first met. For _this_, your influence drew
+me to you, when my better angel warned me to fly the sight of
+your face. There is a curse on our lives! there is a fatality
+in our footsteps! Allan's future depends on his separation from
+us at once and forever. Drive him from the place we live in,
+and the air we breathe. Force him among strangers--the worst and
+wickedest of them will be more harmless, to him than we are! Let
+his yacht sail, though he goes on his knees to ask us, without
+you and without me; and let him know how I loved him in another
+world than this, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the
+weary are at rest!'
+
+"His grief conquered him; his voice broke into a sob when he
+spoke those last words. He took the Narrative of the Dream from
+the table, and left me as abruptly as he had come in.
+
+"As I heard his door locked between us, my mind went back to what
+he had said to me about myself. In remembering 'the miserable
+day' when we first saw each other, and 'the better angel' that
+had warned him to 'fly the sight of my face,' I forgot all else.
+It doesn't matter what I felt--I wouldn't own it, even if I had
+a friend to speak to. Who cares for the misery of such a woman as
+I am? who believes in it? Besides, he spoke under the influence
+of a mad superstition that has got possession of him again. There
+is every excuse for _him_--there is no excuse for _me_. If I
+can't help being fond of him through it all, I must take the
+consequences and suffer. I deserve to suffer; I deserve neither
+love nor pity from anybody.--Good heavens, what a fool I am! And
+how unnatural all this would be, if it was written in a book!
+
+"It has struck one. I can hear Midwinter still, pacing to and fro
+in his room.
+
+"He is thinking, I suppose? Well! I can think too. What am I to
+do next? I shall wait and see. Events take odd turns sometimes;
+and events may justify the fatalism of the amiable man in the
+next room, who curses the day when he first saw my face. He may
+live to curse it for other reasons than he has now. If I am the
+Woman pointed at in the Dream, there will be another temptation
+put in my way before long; and there will be no brandy in
+Armadale's lemonade if I mix it for him a second time.
+
+
+"October 24th.--Barely twelve hours have passed since I wrote
+my yesterday's entry; and that other temptation has come, tried,
+amid conquered me already!
+
+"This time there was no alternative. Instant exposure and ruin
+stared me in the face: I had no choice but to yield in my own
+defense. In plainer words still, it was no accidental resemblance
+that startled me at the theater last night. The chorus-singer
+at the opera was Manuel himself!
+
+"Not ten minutes after Midwinter had left the sitting-room for
+his study, the woman of the house came in with a dirty little
+three-cornered note in her hand. One look at the writing on the
+address was enough. He had recognized me in the box; and the
+ballet between the acts of the opera had given him time to trace
+me home. I drew that plain conclusion in the moment that elapsed
+before I opened the letter. It informed me, in two lines, that he
+was waiting in a by-street leading to the beach; and that, if I
+failed to make my appearance in ten minutes, he should interpret
+my absence as my invitation to him to call at the house.
+
+"What I went through yesterday must have hardened me, I suppose.
+At any rate, after reading the letter, I felt more like the woman
+I once was than I have felt for months past. I put on my bonnet
+and went downstairs, and left the house as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+"He was waiting for me at the entrance to the street.
+
+"In the instant when we stood face to face, all my wretched life
+with him came back to me. I thought of my trust that he had
+betrayed; I thought of the cruel mockery of a marriage that
+he had practiced on me, when he knew that he had a wife living;
+I thought of the time when I had felt despair enough at his
+desertion of me to attempt my own life. When I recalled all this,
+and when the comparison between Midwinter and the mean, miserable
+villain whom I had once believed in forced itself into my mind,
+I knew for the first time what a woman feels when every atom of
+respect for herself has left her. If he had personally insulted
+me at that moment, I believe I should have submitted to it.
+
+"But he had no idea of insulting me, in the more brutal meaning
+of the word. He had me at his mercy, and his way of making me
+feel it was to behave with an elaborate mockery of penitence and
+respect. I let him speak as he pleased, without interrupting him,
+without looking at him a second time, without even allowing my
+dress to touch him, as we walked together toward the quieter part
+of the beach. I had noticed the wretched state of his clothes,
+and the greedy glitter in his eyes, in my first look at him. And
+I knew it would end--as it did end--in a demand on me for money.
+
+"Yes! After taking from me the last farthing I possessed of my
+own, and the last farthing I could extort for him from my old
+mistress, he turned on me as we stood by the margin of the sea,
+and asked if I could reconcile it to my conscience to let him
+be wearing such a coat as he then had on his back, and earning
+his miserable living as a chorus-singer at the opera!
+
+"My disgust, rather than my indignation, roused me into speaking
+to him at last.
+
+"'You want money,' I said. 'Suppose I am too poor to give it
+to you?'
+
+"'In that case,' he replied, 'I shall be forced to remember that
+you are a treasure in yourself. And I shall be under the painful
+necessity of pressing my claim to you on the attention of one
+of those two gentlemen whom I saw with you at the opera--the
+gentleman, of course, who is now honored by your preference,
+and who lives provisionally in the light of your smiles.'
+
+"I made him no answer, for I had no answer to give. Disputing
+his right to claim me from anybody would have been a mere waste
+of words. He knew as well as I did that he had not the shadow
+of a claim on me. But the mere attempt to raise it would, as he
+was well aware, lead necessarily to the exposure of my whole past
+life.
+
+"Still keeping silence, I looked out over the sea. I don't know
+why, except that I instinctively looked anywhere rather than look
+at _him_.
+
+"A little sailing-boat was approaching the shore. The man
+steering was hidden from me by the sail; but the boat was so near
+that I thought I recognized the flag on the mast. I looked at
+my watch. Yes! It was Armadale coming over from Santa Lucia at
+his usual time, to visit us in his usual way.
+
+"Before I had put my watch back in my belt, the means of
+extricating myself from the frightful position I was placed
+in showed themselves to me as plainly as I see them now.
+
+"I turned and led the way to the higher part of the beach, where
+some fishing-boats were drawn up which completely screened us
+from the view of any one landing on the shore below. Seeing
+probably that I had a purpose of some kind, Manuel followed me
+without uttering a word. As soon as we were safely under the
+shelter of the boats, I forced myself, in my own defense, to look
+at him again.
+
+"'What should you say,' I asked, 'if I was rich instead of poor?
+What should you say if I could afford to give you a hundred
+pounds?'
+
+"He started. I saw plainly that he had not expected so much as
+half the sum I had mentioned. It is needless to add that his
+tongue lied, while his face spoke the truth, and that when he
+replied to me the answer was, 'Nothing like enough.'
+
+"'Suppose,' I went on, without taking any notice of what he had
+said, 'that I could show you a way of helping yourself to twice
+as much--three times as much--five times as much as a hundred
+pounds, are you bold enough to put out your hand and take it?'
+
+"The greedy glitter came into his eyes once more. His voice
+dropped low, in breathless expectation of my next words.
+
+"'Who is the person?' he asked. 'And what is the risk?'
+
+"I answered him at once, in the plainest terms. I threw Armadale
+to him, as I might have thrown a piece of meat to a wild beast
+who was pursuing me.
+
+"'The person is a rich young Englishman,' I said. 'He has just
+hired the yacht called the _Dorothea_, in the harbor here; and
+he stands in need of a sailing-master and a crew. You were once
+an officer in the Spanish navy--you speak English and Italian
+perfectly--you are thoroughly well acquainted with Naples and all
+that belongs to it. The rich young Englishman is ignorant of the
+language, and the interpreter who assists him knows nothing of
+the sea. He is at his wits' end for want of useful help in this
+strange place; he has no more knowledge of the world than that
+child who is digging holes with a stick there in the sand; and
+he carries all his money with him in circular notes. So much for
+the person. As for the risk, estimate it for yourself.'
+
+"The greedy glitter in his eyes grew brighter and brighter with
+every word I said. He was plainly ready to face the risk before
+I had done speaking.
+
+"'When can I see the Englishman?' he asked, eagerly.
+
+"I moved to the seaward end of the fishing-boat, and saw that
+Armadale was at that moment disembarking on the shore.
+
+"'You can see him now,' I answered, and pointed to the place.
+
+"After a long look at Armadale walking carelessly up the slope of
+the beach, Manuel drew back again under the shelter of the boat.
+He waited a moment, considering something carefully with himself,
+and put another question to me, in a whisper this time.
+
+"'When the vessel is manned,' he said, 'and the Englishman sails
+from Naples, how many friends sail with him?'
+
+"'He has but two friends here,' I replied; 'that other gentleman
+whom you saw with me at the opera, and myself. He will invite us
+both to sail with him; and when the time comes, we shall both
+refuse.'
+
+"'Do you answer for that?'
+
+"'I answer for it positively.'
+
+"He walked a few steps away, and stood with his face hidden from
+me, thinking again. All I could see was that he took off his hat
+and passed his handkerchief over his forehead. All I could hear
+was that he talked to himself excitedly in his own language.
+
+"There was a change in him when he came back. His face had turned
+to a livid yellow, and his eyes looked at me with a hideous
+distrust.
+
+"'One last question,' he said, and suddenly came closer to me,
+suddenly spoke with a marked emphasis on his next words: '_What
+is your interest in this_?'
+
+"I started back from him. The question reminded me that I _had_
+an interest in the matter, which was entirely unconnected with
+the interest of keeping Manuel and Midwinter apart. Thus far
+I had only remembered that Midwinter's fatalism had smoothed the
+way for me, by abandoning Armadale beforehand to any stranger who
+might come forward to help him. Thus far the sole object I had
+kept in view was to protect myself, by the sacrifice of Armadale,
+from the exposure that threatened me. I tell no lies to my Diary.
+I don't affect to have felt a moment's consideration for the
+interests of Armadale's purse or the safety of Armadale's life.
+I hated him too savagely to care what pitfalls my tongue might be
+the means of opening under his feet. But I certainly did not see
+(until that last question was put to me) that, in serving his own
+designs, Manuel might--if he dared go all lengths for the
+money--be serving my designs too. The one overpowering anxiety
+to protect myself from exposure before Midwinter had (I suppose)
+filled all my mind, to the exclusion of everything else.
+
+"Finding that I made no reply for the moment, Manuel reiterated
+his question, putting it in a new form.
+
+"'You have cast your Englishman at me,' he said, 'like the sop
+to Cerberus. Would you have been quite so ready to do that if you
+had not had a motive of your own? I repeat my question. You have
+an interest in this--what is it?'
+
+"'I have two interests,' I answered. 'The interest of forcing
+you to respect my position here, and the interest of ridding
+myself of the sight of you at once and forever!' I spoke with
+a boldness he had not yet heard from me. The sense that I was
+making the villain an instrument in my hands, and forcing him
+to help my purpose blindly, while he was helping his own, roused
+my spirits, and made me feel like myself again.
+
+"He laughed. 'Strong language, on certain occasions, is a lady's
+privilege,' he said. 'You may, or may not, rid yourself of the
+sight of me, at once and forever. We will leave that question to
+be settled in the future. But your other interest in this matter
+puzzles me. You have told me all I need know about the Englishman
+and his yacht, and you have made no conditions before you opened
+your lips. Pray, how are you to force me, as you say, to respect
+your position here?'
+
+"'I will tell you how,' I rejoined. 'You shall hear my conditions
+first. I insist on your leaving me in five minutes more. I insist
+on your never again coming near the house where I live; and
+I forbid your attempting to communicate in any way either
+with me or with that other gentleman whom you saw with me at
+the theater--'
+
+"'And suppose I say no?' he interposed. 'In that case, what will
+you do?'
+
+"'In that case,' I answered, 'I shall say two words in private
+to the rich young Englishman, and you will find yourself back
+again among the chorus at the opera.'
+
+"'You are a bold woman to take it for granted that I have
+my designs on the Englishman already, and that I am certain
+to succeed in them. How do you know--?'
+
+"'I know _you_,' I said. 'And that is enough.'
+
+"There was a moment's silence between us. He looked at me, and
+I looked at him. We understood each other.
+
+"He was the first to speak. The villainous smile died out of his
+face, and his voice dropped again distrustfully to its lowest
+tones.
+
+"'I accept your terms,' he said. 'As long as your lips are
+closed, my lips shall be closed too--except in the event of
+my finding that you have deceived me; in which case the bargain
+is at an end, and you will see me again. I shall present myself
+to the Englishman to-morrow, with the necessary credentials to
+establish me in his confidence. Tell me his name?'
+
+"I told it.
+
+"'Give me his address?'
+
+"I gave it, and turned to leave him. Before I had stepped out
+of the shelter of the boats, I heard him behind me again.
+
+"'One last word,' he said. 'Accidents sometimes happen at sea.
+Have you interest enough in the Englishman--if an accident
+happens in his case--to wish to know what has become of him?'
+
+"I stopped, and considered on my side. I had plainly failed to
+persuade him that I had no secret to serve in placing Armadale's
+money and (as a probable consequence) Armadale's life at his
+mercy. And it was now equally clear that he was cunningly
+attempting to associate himself with my private objects (whatever
+they might be) by opening a means of communication between us in
+the future. There could be no hesitation about how to answer him
+under such circumstances as these. If the 'accident' at which
+he hinted did really happen to Armadale, I stood in no need of
+Manuel's intervention to give me the intelligence of it. An easy
+search through the obituary columns of the English papers would
+tell me the news--with the great additional advantage that the
+papers might be relied on, in such a matter as this, to tell
+the truth. I formally thanked Manuel, and declined to accept his
+proposal. 'Having no interest in the Englishman,' I said, 'I have
+no wish whatever to know what becomes of him.'
+
+"He looked at me for a moment with steady attention, and with
+an interest in me which he had not shown yet.
+
+"'What the game you are playing may be,' he rejoined, speaking
+slowly and significantly, 'I don't pretend to know. But I venture
+on a prophecy, nevertheless--_you will win it_! If we ever meet
+again, remember I said that.' He took off his hat, and bowed to
+me gravely. 'Go your way, madam. And leave me to go mine!'
+
+"With those words, he released me from the sight of him. I waited
+a minute alone, to recover myself in the air, and then returned
+to the house.
+
+"The first object that met my eyes, on entering the sitting-room,
+was--Armadale himself!
+
+"He was waiting on the chance of seeing me, to beg that I would
+exert my influence with his friend. I made the needful inquiry as
+to what he meant, and found that Midwinter had spoken as he had
+warned me he would speak when he and Armadale next met. He had
+announced that he was unable to finish his work for the newspaper
+as soon as he had hoped; and he had advised Armadale to find a
+crew for the yacht without waiting for any assistance on his
+part.
+
+"All that it was necessary for me to do, on hearing this, was
+to perform the promise I had made to Midwinter, when he gave me
+my directions how to act in the matter. Armadale's vexation on
+finding me resolved not to interfere expressed itself in the form
+of all others that is most personally offensive to me. He
+declined to believe my reiterated assurances that I possessed no
+influence to exert in his favor. 'If I was married to Neelie,'
+he said, 'she could do anything she liked with me; and I am sure,
+when you choose, you can do anything you like with Midwinter.' If
+the infatuated fool had actually tried to stifle the last faint
+struggles of remorse and pity left stirring in my heart, he could
+have said nothing more fatally to the purpose than this! I gave
+him a look which effectually silenced him, so far as I was
+concerned. He went out of the room grumbling and growling to
+himself. 'It's all very well to talk about manning the yacht.
+I don't speak a word of their gibberish here; and the interpreter
+thinks a fisherman and a sailor means the same thing. Hang me if
+I know what to do with the vessel, now I have got her!'
+
+"He will probably know by to-morrow. And if he only comes here
+as usual, I shall know too!
+
+
+"October 25th.--Ten at night.--Manuel has got him!
+
+"He has just left us, after staying here more than an hour, and
+talking the whole time of nothing but his own wonderful luck in
+finding the very help he wanted, at the time when he needed it
+most.
+
+"At noon to-day he was on the Mole, it seems, with his
+interpreter, trying vainly to make himself understood by the
+vagabond population of the water-side. Just as he was giving it
+up in despair, a stranger standing by (Manuel had followed him,
+I suppose, to the Mole from his hotel) kindly interfered to put
+things right. He said, 'I speak your language and their language,
+sir. I know Naples well; and I have been professionally
+accustomed to the sea. Can I help you?' The inevitable result
+followed. Armadale shifted all his difficulties on to the
+shoulders of the polite stranger, in his usual helpless, headlong
+way. His new friend, however, insisted, in the most honorable
+manner, on complying with the customary formalities before he
+would consent to take the matter into his own hands. He begged
+leave to wait on Mr. Armadale, with his testimonials to character
+and capacity. The same afternoon he had come by appointment
+to the hotel, with all his papers, and with 'the saddest story'
+of his sufferings and privations as 'a political refugee' that
+Armadale had ever heard. The interview was decisive. Manuel left
+the hotel, commissioned to find a crew for the yacht, and to fill
+the post of sailing-master on the trial cruise.
+
+"I watched Midwinter anxiously, while Armadale was telling us
+these particulars, and afterward, when he produced the new
+sailing-master's testimonials, which he had brought with him
+for his friend to see.
+
+"For the moment, Midwinter's superstitious misgivings seemed
+to be all lost in his natural anxiety for his friend. He examined
+the stranger's papers--after having told me that the sooner
+Armadale was in the hands of strangers the better!--with the
+closest scrutiny and the most business-like distrust. It is
+needless to say that the credentials were as perfectly regular
+and satisfactory as credentials could be. When Midwinter handed
+them back, his color rose: he seemed to feel the inconsistency of
+his conduct, and to observe for the first time that I was present
+noticing it. 'There is nothing to object to in the testimonials,
+Allan: I am glad you have got the help you want at last.' That
+was all he said at parting. As soon as Armadale's back was
+turned, I saw no more of him. He has locked himself up again
+for the night, in his own room.
+
+"There is now--so far as I am concerned--but one anxiety left.
+When the yacht is ready for sea, and when I decline to occupy the
+lady's cabin, will Midwinter hold to his resolution, and refuse
+to sail without me?
+
+
+"October 26th.--Warnings already of the coming ordeal. A letter
+from Armadale to Midwinter, which Midwinter has just sent in
+to me. Here it is:
+
+"'DEAR MID--I am too busy to come to-day. Get on with your work,
+for Heaven's sake! The new sailing-master is a man of ten
+thousand. He has got an Englishman whom he knows to serve as mate
+on board already; and he is positively certain of getting the
+crew together in three or four days' time. I am dying for a whiff
+of the sea, and so are you, or you are no sailor. The rigging
+is set up, the stores are coming on board, and we shall bend the
+sails to-morrow or next day. I never was in such spirits in my
+life. Remember me to your wife, and tell her she will be doing me
+a favor if she will come at once, and order everything she wants
+in the lady's cabin. Yours affectionately, A. A.'
+
+"Under this was written, in Midwinter's hand: 'Remember what
+I told you. Write (it will break it to him more gently in that
+way), and beg him to accept your apologies, and to excuse you
+from sailing on the trial cruise.'
+
+"I have written without a moment's loss of time. The sooner
+Manuel knows (which he is certain to do through Armadale) that
+the promise not to sail in the yacht is performed already, so far
+as I am concerned, the safer I shall feel.
+
+
+"October 27th.--A letter from Armadale, in answer to mine. He
+is full of ceremonio us regrets at the loss of my company on
+the cruise; and he politely hopes that Midwinter may yet induce
+me to alter my mind. Wait a little, till he finds that Midwinter
+won't sail with him either!....
+
+"October 30th.--Nothing new to record until to-day. To-day
+the change in our lives here has come at last!
+
+"Armadale presented himself this morning, in his noisiest high
+spirits, to announce that the yacht was ready for sea, and to ask
+when Midwinter would be able to go on board. I told him to make
+the inquiry himself in Midwinter's room. He left me, with a last
+request that I would consider my refusal to sail with him.
+I answered by a last apology for persisting in my resolution,
+and then took a chair alone at the window to wait the event of
+the interview in the next room.
+
+"My whole future depended now on what passed between Midwinter
+and his friend! Everything had gone smoothly up to this time.
+The one danger to dread was the danger of Midwinter's resolution,
+or rather of Midwinter's fatalism, giving way at the last moment.
+If he allowed himself to be persuaded into accompanying Armadale
+on the cruise, Manuel's exasperation against me would hesitate
+at nothing--he would remember that I had answered to him for
+Armadale's sailing from Naples alone; and he would be capable of
+exposing my whole past life to Midwinter before the vessel left
+the port. As I thought of this, and as the slow minutes followed
+each other, and nothing reached my ears but the hum of voices in
+the next room, my suspense became almost unendurable. It was vain
+to try and fix my attention on what was going on in the street.
+I sat looking mechanically out of the window, and seeing nothing.
+
+"Suddenly--I can't say in how long or how short a time--the hum
+of voices ceased; the door opened; and Armadale showed himself
+on the threshold, alone.
+
+"'I wish you good-by,' he said, roughly. 'And I hope, when I am
+married, my wife may never cause Midwinter the disappointment
+that Midwinter's wife has caused _me_!'
+
+"He gave me an angry look, and made me an angry bow, and, turning
+sharply, left the room.
+
+"I saw the people in the street again! I saw the calm sea, and
+the masts of the shipping in the harbor where the yacht lay!
+I could think, I could breathe freely once more! The words that
+saved me from Manuel--the words that might be Armadale's sentence
+of death--had been spoken. The yacht was to sail without
+Midwinter, as well as without me!
+
+"My first feeling of exultation was almost maddening. But it was
+the feeling of a moment only. My heart sank in me again when
+I thought of Midwinter alone in the next room.
+
+"I went out into the passage to listen, and heard nothing.
+I tapped gently at his door, and got no answer. I opened the door
+and looked in. He was sitting at the table, with his face hidden
+in his hands. I looked at him in silence, and saw the glistening
+of the tears as they trickled through his fingers.
+
+"'Leave me,' he said, without moving his hands. 'I must get over
+it by myself.'
+
+"I went back into the sitting-room. Who can understand women?
+we don't even understand ourselves. His sending me away from him
+in that manner cut me to the heart. I don't believe the most
+harmless and most gentle woman living could have felt it more
+acutely than I felt it. And this, after what I have been doing!
+this, after what I was thinking of, the moment before I went
+into his room! Who can account for it? Nobody--I least of all!
+
+"Half an hour later his door opened, and I heard him hurrying
+down the stairs. I ran on without waiting to think, and asked
+if I might go with him. He neither stopped nor answered. I went
+back to the window, and saw him pass, walking rapidly away, with
+his back turned on Naples and the sea.
+
+"I can understand now that he might not have heard me. At the
+time I thought him inexcusably and brutally unkind to me. I put
+on my bonnet, in a frenzy of rage with him; I sent out for a
+carriage, and told the man to take me where he liked. He took me,
+as he took other strangers, to the Museum to see the statues and
+the pictures. I flounced from room to room, with my face in a
+flame, and the people all staring at me. I came to myself again,
+I don't know how. I returned to the carriage, and made the man
+drive me back in a violent hurry, I don't know why. I tossed off
+my cloak and bonnet, and sat down once more at the window. The
+sight of the sea cooled me. I forgot Midwinter, and thought of
+Armadale and his yacht. There wasn't a breath of wind; there
+wasn't a cloud in the sky; the wide waters of the Bay were as
+smooth as the surface of a glass.
+
+"The sun sank; the short twilight came and went. I had some tea,
+and sat at the table thinking and dreaming over it. When I roused
+myself and went back to the window, the moon was up; but the
+quiet sea was as quiet as ever.
+
+"I was still looking out, when I saw Midwinter in the street
+below, coming back. I was composed enough by this time to
+remember his habits, and to guess that he had been trying to
+relieve the oppression on his mind by one of his long solitary
+walks. When I heard him go into his own room, I was too prudent
+to disturb him again: I waited his pleasure where I was.
+
+"Before long I heard his window opened, and I saw him, from my
+window, step into the balcony, and, after a look at the sea, hold
+up his hand to the air. I was too stupid, for the moment, to
+remember that he had once been a sailor, and to know what this
+meant. I waited, and wondered what would happen next.
+
+"He went in again; and, after an interval, came out once more,
+and held up his hand as before to the air. This time he waited,
+leaning on the balcony rail, and looking out steadily, with all
+his attention absorbed by the sea.
+
+"For a long, long time he never moved. Then, on a sudden, I saw
+him start. The next moment he sank on his knees, with his clasped
+hands resting on the balcony rail. 'God Almighty bless and keep
+you, Allan!' he said, fervently. 'Good-by, forever!'
+
+"I looked out to the sea. A soft, steady breeze was blowing,
+and the rippled surface of the water was sparkling in the quiet
+moonlight. I looked again, and there passed slowly, between me
+and the track of the moon, a long black vessel with tall,
+shadowy, ghostlike sails, gliding smooth and noiseless through
+the water, like a snake.
+
+"The wind had come fair with the night; and Armadale's yacht
+had sailed on the trial cruise.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DIARY BROKEN OFF.
+
+"London, November 19th.--I am alone again in the Great City;
+alone, for the first time since our marriage. Nearly a week since
+I started on my homeward journey, leaving Midwinter behind me
+at Turin.
+
+"The days have been so full of events since the month began, and
+I have been so harassed, in mind and body both, for the greater
+part of the time, that my Diary has been wretchedly neglected. A
+few notes, written in such hurry and confusion that I can hardly
+understand them myself, are all that I possess to remind me of
+what has happened since the night when Armadale's yacht left
+Naples. Let me try if I can set this right without more loss or
+time; let me try if I can recall the circumstances in their order
+as they have followed each other from the beginning of the month.
+
+
+"On the 3d of November--being then still at Naples--Midwinter
+received a hurried letter from Armadale, date 'Messina.' 'The
+weather,' he said, 'had been lovely, and the yacht had made one
+of the quickest passages on record. The crew were rather a rough
+set to look at; but Captain Manuel and his English mate' (the
+latter described as 'the best of good fellows') 'managed them
+admirably.' After this prosperous beginning, Armadale had
+arranged, as a matter of course, to prolong the cruise; and,
+at the sailing-master's suggestion, he had decided to visit some
+of the ports in the Adriatic, which the captain had described
+as full of character, and well worth seeing.
+
+"A postscript followed, explaining that Armadale had written in
+a hurry to catch the steamer to Naples, and that he had opened
+his letter again, before sending it off, to add something that he
+had forgotten. On the day before the yacht sailed, he had been
+at the banker's to get 'a few hundreds in gold,' and he believed
+he had left his cigar-case there. It was an old friend of his,
+and he begged that Midwinter would oblige him by endeavoring
+recover it, and keeping it for him till they met again.
+
+"That was the substance of the letter.
+
+"I thought over it carefully when Midwinter had left me alone
+again, after reading it. My idea was then (and is still)
+that Manuel had not persuaded Armadale to cruise in a sea
+like the Adriatic, so much less frequented by ships than the
+Mediterranean, for nothing. The terms, too, in which the trifling
+loss of the cigar-case was mentioned struck me as being equally
+suggestive of what was coming. I concluded that Armadale's
+circular notes had not been transformed into those 'few hundreds
+in gold' through any forethought or business knowledge of his
+own. Manuel's influence, I suspected, had been exerted in this
+matter also, and once more not without reason. At intervals
+through the wakeful night these considerations came back again
+and again to me; and time after time they pointed obstinately
+(so far as my next movements were concerned) in one and the same
+way--the way back to England.
+
+"How to get there, and especially how to get there unaccompanied
+by Midwinter, was more than I had wit enough to discover that
+night. I tried and tried to meet the difficulty, and fell asleep
+exhausted toward the morning without having met it.
+
+"Some hours later, as soon as I was dressed, Midwinter came in,
+with news received by that morning's post from his employers in
+London. The proprietors of the newspaper had received from the
+editor so favorable a report of his correspondence from Naples
+that they had determined on advancing him to a place of greater
+responsibility and greater emolument at Turin. His instructions
+were inclosed in the letter, and he was requested to lose no time
+in leaving Naples for his new post.
+
+"On hearing this, I relieved his mind, before he could put the
+question, of all anxiety about my willingness to remove. Turin
+had the great attraction, in my eyes, of being on the road to
+England. I assured him at once that I was ready to travel as soon
+as he pleased.
+
+"He thanked me for suiting myself to his plans, with more of his
+old gentleness and kindness than I had seen in him for some time
+past. The good news from Armadale on the previous day seemed to
+have roused him a little from the dull despair in which he had
+been sunk since the sailing of the yacht. And now the prospect of
+advancement in his profession, and, more than that, the prospect
+of leaving the fatal place in which the Third Vision of the Dream
+had come true, had (as he owned himself) additionally cheered
+and relieved him. He asked, before he went away to make the
+arrangements for our journey, whether I expected to hear from my
+'family' in England, and whether he should give instructions for
+the forwarding of my letters with his own to the _poste restante_
+at Turin. I instantly thanked him, and accepted the offer. His
+proposal had suggested to me, the moment he made it, that my
+fictitious 'family circumstances' might be turned to good account
+once more, as a reason for unexpectedly summoning me from Italy
+to England.
+
+"On the ninth of the month we were installed at Turin.
+
+"On the thirteenth, Midwinter--being then very busy--asked if I
+would save him a loss of time by applying for any letters which
+might have followed us from Naples. I had been waiting for the
+opportunity he now offered me; and I determined to snatch at it
+without allowing myself time to hesitate. There were no letters
+at the _poste restante_ for either of us. But when he put the
+question on my return, I told him that there had been a letter
+for me, with alarming news from 'home.' My 'mother' was
+dangerously ill, and I was entreated to lose no time in hurrying
+back to England to see her.
+
+"It seems quite unaccountable--now that I am away from him--but
+it is none the less true, that I could not, even yet, tell him
+a downright premeditated falsehood, without a sense of shrinking
+and shame, which other people would think, and which I think
+myself, utterly inconsistent with such a character as mine.
+Inconsistent or not, I felt it. And what is stranger--perhaps
+I ought to say madder--still, if he had persisted in his first
+resolution to accompany me himself to England rather than allow
+me to travel alone, I firmly believe I should have turned my back
+on temptation for the second time, and have lulled myself to rest
+once more in the old dream of living out my life happy and
+harmless in my husband's love.
+
+"Am I deceiving myself in this? It doesn't matter--I dare say
+I am. Never mind what _might_ have happened. What _did_ happen
+is the only thing of any importance now.
+
+"It ended in Midwinter's letting me persuade him that I was old
+enough to take care of myself on the journey to England, and
+that he owed it to the newspaper people, who had trusted their
+interests in his hands, not to leave Turin just as he was
+established there. He didn't suffer at taking leave of me as he
+suffered when he saw the last of his friend. I saw that, and set
+down the anxiety he expressed that I should write to him at its
+proper value. I have quite got over my weakness for him at last.
+No man who really loved me would have put what he owed to a peck
+of newspaper people before what he owed to his wife. I hate him
+for letting me convince him! I believe he was glad to get rid
+of me. I believe he has seen some woman whom he likes at Turin.
+Well, let him follow his new fancy, if he pleases! I shall be
+the widow of Mr. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose before long; and
+what will his likes or dislikes matter to me then?
+
+"The events on the journey were not worth mentioning, and my
+arrival in London stands recorded already on the top of the new
+page.
+
+"As for to-day, the one thing of any importance that I have done
+since I got to the cheap and quiet hotel at which I am now
+staying, has been to send for the landlord, and ask him to help
+me to a sight of the back numbers of _The Times_ newspaper. He
+has politely offered to accompany me himself to-morrow morning to
+some place in the City where all the papers are kept, as he calls
+it, in file. Till to-morrow, then, I must control my impatience
+for news of Armadale as well as I can. And so good-night to the
+pretty reflection of myself that appears in these pages!
+
+
+"November 20th.--Not a word of news yet, either in the obituary
+column or in any other part of the paper. I looked carefully
+through each number in succession, dating from the day when
+Armadale's letter was written at Messina to this present 20th
+of the month, and I am certain, whatever may have happened, that
+nothing is known in England as yet. Patience! The newspaper is to
+meet me at the breakfast-table every morning till further notice;
+and any day now may show me what I most want to see.
+
+
+"November 21st.--No news again. I wrote to Midwinter to-day,
+to keep up appearances.
+
+"When the letter was done, I fell into wretchedly low spirits--I
+can't imagine why--and felt such a longing for a little company
+that, in despair of knowing where else to go, I actually went to
+Pimlico, on the chance that Mother Oldershaw might have returned
+to her old quarters.
+
+"There were changes since I had seen the place during my former
+stay in London. Doctor Downward's side of the house was still
+empty. But the shop was being brightened up for the occupation
+of a milliner and dress-maker. The people, when I went in to make
+inquiries, were all strangers to me. They showed, however, no
+hesitation in giving me Mrs. Oldershaw's address when I asked for
+it--from which I infer that the little 'difficulty' which forced
+her to be in hiding in August last is at an end, so far as she
+is concerned. As for the doctor, the people at the shop either
+were, or pretended to be, quite unable to tell me what had become
+of him.
+
+"I don't know whether it was the sight of the place at Pimlico
+that sickened me, or whether it was my own perversity, or what.
+But now that I had got Mrs. Oldershaw's address, I felt as if
+she was the very last person in the world that I wanted to see.
+I took a cab, and told the man to drive to the street she lived
+in, and then told him to drive back to the hotel. I hardly know
+what is the matter with me--unless it is that I am getting more
+impatient every hour for information about Armadale. When will
+the future look a little less dark, I wonder? To-morrow is
+Saturday. Will to-morrow's newspaper lift the veil?
+
+
+"November 22d.--Saturday's newspaper _has_ lifted the veil! Words
+are vain to express the panic of astonishment in which I write.
+I never once anticipated it; I can't believe it or realize it,
+now it has happened. The winds and waves themselves have turned
+my accomplices! The yacht has foundered at sea, and every soul
+on board has perished!
+
+"Here is the account cut out of this morning's newspaper:
+
+"'DISASTER AT SEA.--Intelligence has reached the Royal Yacht
+Squadron and the insurers which leaves no reasonable doubt, we
+regret to say, of the total loss, on the fifth of the present
+month, of the yacht _Dorothea_, with every soul on board. The
+particulars are as follows: At daylight, on the morning of the
+sixth, the Italian brig _Speranza_, bound from Venice to Marsala
+for orders, encountered some floating objects off Cape
+Spartivento (at the southernmost extremity of Italy) which
+attracted the curiosity of the people of the brig. The previous
+day had been marked by one of the most severe of the sudden and
+violent storms, peculiar to these southern seas, which has been
+remembered for years. The _Speranza_ herself having been in
+danger while the gale lasted, the captain and crew concluded that
+they were on the traces of a wreck, and a boat was lowered for
+the purpose of examining the objects in the water. A hen-coop,
+some broken spars, and fragments of shattered plank were the
+first evidences discovered of the terrible disaster that had
+happened. Some of the lighter articles of cabin furniture,
+wrenched and shattered, were found next. And, lastly, a memento
+of melancholy interest turned up, in the shape of a lifebuoy,
+with a corked bottle attached to it. These latter objects,
+with the relics of cabin furniture, were brought on board the
+_Speranza_. On the buoy the name of the vessel was painted, as
+follows: "_Dorothea, R. Y. S._" (meaning Royal Yacht Squadron).
+The bottle, on being uncorked, contained a sheet of note-paper,
+on which the following lines were hurriedly traced in pencil:
+"Off Cape Spartivento; two days out from Messina. Nov. 5th,
+4 P.M." (being the hour at which the log of the Italian brig
+showed the storm to have been at its height). "Both our boats
+are stove in by the sea. The rudder is gone, and we have sprung
+a leak astern which is more than we can stop. The Lord help us
+all--we are sinking. (Signed) John Mitchenden, Mate." On reaching
+Marsala, the captain of the brig made his report to the British
+consul, and left the objects discovered in that gentleman's
+charge. Inquiry at Messina showed that the ill-fated vessel had
+arrived there from Naples. At the latter port it was ascertained
+that the _Dorothea_ had been hired from the owner's agent by
+an English gentleman, Mr. Armadale, of Thorpe Ambrose, Norfolk.
+Whether Mr. Armadale had any friends on board with him has not
+been clearly discovered. But there is unhappily no doubt that the
+ill-fated gentleman himself sailed in the yacht from Naples, and
+that he was also on board of the vessel when she left Messina.'
+
+
+"Such is the story of the wreck, as the newspaper tells it in the
+plainest and fewest words. My head is in a whirl; my confusion
+is so great that I think of fifty different things in trying
+to think of one. I must wait--a day more or less is of no
+consequence now--I must wait till I can face my new position,
+without feeling bewildered by it.
+
+
+"November 23d.--Eight in the morning.--I rose an hour ago, and
+saw my way clearly to the first step that I must take under
+present circumstances.
+
+"It is of the utmost importance to me to know what is doing
+at Thorpe Ambrose; and it would be the height of rashness, while
+I am quite in the dark in this matter, to venture there myself.
+The only other alternative is to write to somebody on the spot
+for news; and the only person I can write to is--Bashwood.
+
+"I have just finished the letter. It is headed 'private and
+confidential,' and signed 'Lydia Armadale.' There is nothing in
+it to compromise me, if the old fool is mortally offended by my
+treatment of him, and if he spitefully shows my letter to other
+people. But I don't believe he will do this. A man at his age
+forgives a woman anything, if the woman only encourages him.
+I have requested him, as a personal favor, to keep our
+correspondence for the present strictly private. I have hinted
+that my married life with my deceased husband has not been a
+happy one; and that I feel the injudiciousness of having married
+a _young_ man. In the postscript I go further still, and venture
+boldly on these comforting words: 'I can explain, dear Mr.
+Bashwood, what may have seemed fake and deceitful in my conduct
+toward you when you give me a personal opportunity.' If he was
+on the right side of sixty, I should feel doubtful of results.
+But he is on the wrong side of sixty, and I believe he will give
+me my personal opportunity.
+
+
+"Ten o'clock.--I have been looking over the copy of my marriage
+certificate, with which I took care to provide myself on the
+wedding-day; and I have discovered, to my inexpressible dismay,
+an obstacle to my appearance in the character of Armadale's widow
+which I now see for the first time.
+
+"The description of Midwinter (under his own name) which the
+certificate presents answers in every important particular to
+what would have been the description of Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose, if I had really married him. 'Name and Surname'--Allan
+Armadale. 'Age'--twenty-one, instead of twenty-two, which might
+easily pass for a mistake. 'Condition'--Bachelor. 'Rank or
+profession'--Gentleman. 'Residence at the time of Marriage'--
+Frant's Hotel, Darley Street. 'Father's Name and Surname'--
+Allan Armadale. 'Rank or Profession of Father'--Gentleman. Every
+particular (except the year's difference in their two ages) which
+answers for the one answers for the other. But suppose, when
+I produce my copy of the certificate, that some meddlesome lawyer
+insists on looking at the original register? Midwinter's writing
+is as different as possible from the writing of his dead friend.
+The hand in which he has written 'Allan Armadale' in the book has
+not a chance of passing for the hand in which Armadale of Thorpe
+Ambrose was accustomed to sign his name.
+
+"Can I move safely in the matter, with such a pitfall as I see
+here open under my feet? How can I tell? Where can I find an
+experienced person to inform me? I must shut up my diary and
+think.
+
+
+"Seven o'clock.--My prospects have changed again since I made my
+last entry. I have received a warning to be careful in the future
+which I shall not neglect; and I have (I believe) succeeded in
+providing myself with the advice and assistance of which I stand
+in need.
+
+"After vainly trying to think of some better person to apply to
+in the difficulty which embarrassed me, I made a virtue of
+necessity, and set forth to surprise Mrs. Oldershaw by a visit
+from her darling Lydia! It is almost needless to add that
+I determined to sound her carefully, and not to let any secret
+of importance out of my own possession.
+
+"A sour and solemn old maid-servant admitted me into the house.
+When I asked for her mistress, I was reminded with the bitterest
+emphasis that I had committed the impropriety of calling on
+a Sunday. Mrs. Oldershaw was at home, solely in consequence of
+being too unwell to go to church! The servant thought it very
+unlikely that she would see me. I thought it highly probable,
+on the contrary, that she would honor me with an interview in
+her own interests, if I sent in my name as 'Miss Gwilt'--and
+the event proved that I was right. After being kept waiting some
+minutes I was shown into the drawing-room.
+
+"There sat Mother Jezebel, with the air of a woman resting on
+the high-road to heaven, dressed in a slate-colored gown, with
+gray mittens on her hands, a severely simple cap on her head,
+and a volume of sermons on her lap. She turned up the whites of
+her eyes dev outly at the sight of me, and the first words she
+said were--'Oh, Lydia! Lydia! why are you not at church?'
+
+"If I had been less anxious, the sudden presentation of Mrs.
+Oldershaw in an entirely new character might have amused me. But
+I was in no humor for laughing, and (my notes of hand being all
+paid) I was under no obligation to restrain my natural freedom
+of speech. 'Stuff and nonsense!' I said. 'Put your Sunday face
+in your pocket. I have got some news for you, since I last wrote
+from Thorpe Ambrose.'
+
+"The instant I mentioned 'Thorpe Ambrose,' the whites of the old
+hypocrite's eyes showed themselves again, and she flatly refused
+to hear a word more from me on the subject of my proceedings in
+Norfolk. I insisted; but it was quite useless. Mother Oldershaw
+only shook her head and groaned, and informed me that her
+connection with the pomps and vanities of the world was at an end
+forever. 'I have been born again, Lydia,' said the brazen old
+wretch, wiping her eyes. 'Nothing will induce me to return to
+the subject of that wicked speculation of yours on the folly of
+a rich young man.'
+
+"After hearing this, I should have left her on the spot, but for
+one consideration which delayed me a moment longer.
+
+"It was easy to see, by this time, that the circumstances
+(whatever they might have been) which had obliged Mother
+Oldershaw to keep in hiding, on the occasion of my former visit
+to London, had been sufficiently serious to force her into giving
+up, or appearing to give up, her old business. And it was hardly
+less plain that she had found it to her advantage--everybody
+in England finds it to their advantage in some way to cover the
+outer side of her character carefully with a smooth varnish of
+Cant. This was, however, no business of mine; and I should have
+made these reflections outside instead of inside the house, if
+my interests had not been involved in putting the sincerity of
+Mother Oldershaw's reformation to the test--so far as it affected
+her past connection with myself. At the time when she had fitted
+me out for our enterprise, I remembered signing a certain
+business document which gave her a handsome pecuniary interest
+in my success, if I became Mrs. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose.
+The chance of turning this mischievous morsel of paper to good
+account, in the capacity of a touchstone, was too tempting to be
+resisted. I asked my devout friend's permission to say one last
+word before I left the house.
+
+"'As you have no further interest in my wicked speculation
+at Thorpe Ambrose,' I said, 'perhaps you will give me back
+the written paper that I signed, when you were not quite such
+an exemplary person as you are now?'
+
+"The shameless old hypocrite instantly shut her eyes and
+shuddered.
+
+"'Does that mean Yes, or No'?' I asked.
+
+"'On moral and religious grounds, Lydia,' said Mrs. Oldershaw,
+'it means No.'
+
+"'On wicked and worldly grounds,' I rejoined, 'I beg to thank
+you for showing me your hand.'
+
+"There could, indeed, be no doubt now about the object she really
+had in view. She would run no more risks and lend no more money;
+she would leave me to win or lose single-handed. If I lost, she
+would not be compromised. If I won, she would produce the paper
+I had signed, and profit by it without remorse. In my present
+situation, it was mere waste of time and words to prolong the
+matter by any useless recrimination on my side. I put the warning
+away privately in my memory for future use, and got up to go.
+
+"At the moment when I left my chair there was a sharp double
+knock at the street door. Mrs. Oldershaw evidently recognized it.
+She rose in a violent hurry, and rang the bell. 'I am too unwell
+to see anybody,' she said, when the servant appeared. 'Wait a
+moment, if you please,' she added, turning sharply on me, when
+the woman had left us to answer the door.
+
+"It was small, very small, spitefulness on my part, I know; but
+the satisfaction of thwarting Mother Jezebel, even in a trifle,
+was not to be resisted. 'I can't wait,' I said; 'you reminded me
+just now that I ought to be at church.' Before she could answer
+I was out of the room.
+
+"As I put my foot on the first stair the street door was opened,
+and a man's voice inquired whether Mrs. Oldershaw was at home.
+
+"I instantly recognized the voice. Doctor Downward!
+
+"The doctor repeated the servant's message in a tone which
+betrayed unmistakable irritation at finding himself admitted
+no further than the door.
+
+"'Your mistress is not well enough to see visitors? Give her
+that card,' said the doctor, 'and say I expect her, the next time
+I call, to be well enough to see _me_.'
+
+"If his voice had not told me plainly that he felt in no friendly
+mood toward Mrs. Oldershaw, I dare say I should have let him go
+without claiming his acquaintance; but, as things were, I felt
+an impulse to speak to him or to anybody who had a grudge against
+Mother Jezebel. There was more of my small spitefulness in this,
+I suppose. Anyway, I slipped downstairs; and, following the
+doctor out quietly, overtook him in the street.
+
+"I had recognized his voice, and I recognized his back as
+I walked behind him. But when I called him by his name, and
+when he turned round with a start and confronted me, I followed
+his example, and started on my side. The doctor's face was
+transformed into the face of a perfect stranger! His baldness
+had hidden itself under an artfully grizzled wig. He had allowed
+his whiskers to grow, and had dyed them to match his new head
+of hair. Hideous circular spectacles bestrode his nose in place
+of the neat double eyeglass that he used to carry in his hand;
+and a black neckerchief, surmounted by immense shirt-collars,
+appeared as the unworthy successor of the clerical white cravat
+of former times. Nothing remained of the man I once knew but
+the comfortable plumpness of his figure, and the confidential
+courtesy and smoothness of his manner and his voice.
+
+"'Charmed to see you again,' said the doctor, looking about him
+a little anxiously, and producing his card-case in a very
+precipitate manner. 'But, my dear Miss Gwilt, permit me to
+rectify a slight mistake on your part. Doctor Downward of Pimlico
+is dead and buried; and you will infinitely oblige me if you will
+never, on any consideration, mention him again!'
+
+"I took the card he offered me, and discovered that I was now
+supposed to be speaking to 'Doctor Le Doux, of the Sanitarium,
+Fairweather Vale, Hampstead!'
+
+"'You seem to have found it necessary,' I said, 'to change
+a great many things since I last saw you? Your name, your
+residence, your personal appearance--?'
+
+"'And my branch of practice,' interposed the doctor. 'I have
+purchased of the original possessor (a person of feeble
+enterprise and no resources) a name, a diploma, and a partially
+completed sanitarium for the reception of nervous invalids.
+We are open already to the inspection of a few privileged
+friends--come and see us. Are you walking my way? Pray take
+my arm, and tell me to what happy chance I am indebted for
+the pleasure of seeing you again?'
+
+"I told him the circumstances exactly as they had happened, and
+I added (with a view to making sure of his relations with his
+former ally at Pimlico) that I had been greatly surprised to hear
+Mrs. Oldershaw's door shut on such an old friend as himself.
+Cautious as he was, the doctor's manner of receiving my remark
+satisfied me at once that my suspicions of an estrangement were
+well founded. His smile vanished, and he settled his hideous
+spectacles irritably on the bridge of his nose.
+
+"'Pardon me if I leave you to draw your own conclusions,' he
+said. 'The subject of Mrs. Oldershaw is, I regret to say, far
+from agreeable to me under existing circumstances--a business
+difficulty connected with our late partnership at Pimlico,
+entirely without interest for a young and brilliant woman like
+yourself. Tell me your news! Have you left your situation at
+Thorpe Ambrose? Are you residing in London? Is there anything,
+professional or otherwise, that I can do for you?'
+
+"That last question was a more important one than he supposed.
+Before I answered it, I felt the necessity of parting company
+with him and of getting a little time to think.
+
+"'You have kindly asked me, doctor, to pay you a visit,' I said.
+'In your quiet house at Hampstead, I may possibly have something
+to say to you which I can't say in this noisy street. When are
+you at home at the Sanitarium? Should I find you there later in
+the day?'
+
+"The doctor assured me that he was then on his way back, and
+begged that I would name my own hour. I said, 'Toward the
+afternoon;' and, pleading an engagement, hailed the first omnibus
+that passed us. 'Don't forget the address,' said the doctor, as
+he handed me in. 'I have got your card,' I answered, and so we
+parted.
+
+"I returned to the hotel, and went up into my room, and thought
+over it very anxiously.
+
+"The serious obstacle of the signature on the marriage register
+still stood in my way as unmanageably as ever. All hope of
+getting assistance from Mrs. Oldershaw was at an end. I could
+only regard her henceforth as an enemy hidden in the dark--the
+enemy, beyond all doubt now, who had had me followed and watched
+when I was last in London. To what other counselor could I turn
+for the advice which my unlucky ignorance of law and business
+obliged me to seek from some one more experienced than myself?
+Could I go to the lawyer whom I consulted when I was about to
+marry Midwinter in my maiden name? Impossible! To say nothing
+of his cold reception of me when I had last seen him, the advice
+I wanted this time related (disguise the facts as I might) to
+commission of a Fraud--a fraud of the sort that no prosperous
+lawyer would consent to assist if he had a character to lose.
+Was there any other competent person I could think of? There was
+one, and one only--the doctor who had died at Pimlico, and had
+revived again at Hampstead.
+
+"I knew him to be entirely without scruples; to have the business
+experience that I wanted myself; and to be as cunning, as clever,
+and as far-seeing a man as could be found in all London. Beyond
+this, I had made two important discoveries in connection with him
+that morning. In the first place, he was on bad terms with Mrs.
+Oldershaw, which would protect me from all danger of the two
+leaguing together against me if I trusted him. In the second
+place, circumstances still obliged him to keep his identity
+carefully disguised, which gave me a hold over him in no respect
+inferior to any hold that _I_ might give him over _me_. In every
+way he was the right man, the only man, for my purpose; and yet
+I hesitated at going to him--hesitated for a full hour and more,
+without knowing why!
+
+"It was two o'clock before I finally decided on paying the doctor
+a visit. Having, after this, occupied nearly another hour in
+determining to a hair-breadth how far I should take him into my
+confidence, I sent for a cab at last, and set off toward three
+in the afternoon for Hampstead.
+
+
+"I found the Sanitarium with some little difficulty.
+
+"Fairweather Vale proved to be a new neighborhood, situated below
+the high ground of Hampstead, on the southern side. The day was
+overcast, and the place looked very dreary. We approached it
+by a new road running between trees, which might once have been
+the park avenue of a country house. At the end we came upon
+a wilderness of open ground, with half-finished villas dotted
+about, and a hideous litter of boards, wheelbarrows, and building
+materials of all sorts scattered in every direction. At one
+corner of this scene of desolation, stood a great overgrown
+dismal house, plastered with drab-colored stucco, and surrounded
+by a naked, unfinished garden, without a shrub or a flower in it,
+frightful to behold. On the open iron gate that led into this
+inclosure was a new brass plate, with 'Sanitarium' inscribed
+on it in great black letters. The bell, when the cabman rang it,
+pealed through the empty house like a knell; and the pallid,
+withered old man-servant in black who answered the door looked as
+if he had stepped up out of his grave to perform that service. He
+let out on me a smell of damp plaster and new varnish; and he let
+in with me a chilling draft of the damp November air. I didn't
+notice it at the time, but, writing of it now, I remember that
+I shivered as I crossed the threshold.
+
+"I gave my name to the servant as 'Mrs. Armadale,' and was shown
+into the waiting-room. The very fire itself was dying of damp in
+the grate. The only books on the table were the doctor's Works,
+in sober drab covers; and the only object that ornamented the
+walls was the foreign Diploma (handsomely framed and glazed),
+of which the doctor had possessed himself by purchase, along with
+the foreign name.
+
+"After a moment or two, the proprietor of the Sanitarium came in,
+and held up his hands in cheerful astonishment at the sight of
+me.
+
+"'I hadn't an idea who "Mrs. Armadale" was!' he said. 'My dear
+lady, have _you_ changed your name too? How sly of you not
+to tell me when we met this morning! Come into my private
+snuggery--I can't think of keeping an old and dear friend
+like you in the patients' waiting-room.'
+
+"The doctor's private snuggery was at the back of the house,
+looking out on fields and trees, doomed but not yet destroyed
+by the builder. Horrible objects in brass and leather and glass,
+twisted and turned as if they were sentient things writhing in
+agonies of pain, filled up one end of the room. A great book-case
+with glass doors extended over the whole of the opposite wall,
+and exhibited on its shelves long rows of glass jars, in which
+shapeless dead creatures of a dull white color floated in yellow
+liquid. Above the fireplace hung a collection of photographic
+portraits of men and women, inclosed in two large frames hanging
+side by side with a space between them. The left-hand frame
+illustrated the effects of nervous suffering as seen in the face;
+the right-hand frame exhibited the ravages of insanity from
+the same point of view; while the space between was occupied by
+an elegantly illuminated scroll, bearing inscribed on it the
+time-honored motto, 'Prevention is better than Cure.'
+
+"'Here I am, with my galvanic apparatus, and my preserved
+specimens, and all the rest of it,' said the doctor, placing
+me in a chair by the fireside. 'And there is my System mutely
+addressing you just above your head, under a form of exposition
+which I venture to describe as frankness itself. This is no
+mad-house, my dear lady. Let other men treat insanity, if they
+like--_I_ stop it! No patients in the house as yet. But we
+live in an age when nervous derangement (parent of insanity)
+is steadily on the increase; and in due time the sufferers will
+come. I can wait as Harvey waited, as Jenner waited. And now do
+put your feet up on the fender, and tell me about yourself. You
+are married, of course? And what a pretty name! Accept my best
+and most heart-felt congratulations. You have the two greatest
+blessings that can fall to a woman's lot; the two capital H's,
+as I call them--Husband and Home.'
+
+"I interrupted the genial flow of the doctor's congratulations
+at the first opportunity.
+
+"'I am married; but the circumstances are by no means of the
+ordinary kind,' I said, seriously. My present position includes
+none of the blessings that are usually supposed to fall to
+a woman's lot. I am already in a situation of very serious
+difficulty; and before long I may be in a situation of very
+serious danger as well.'
+
+"The doctor drew his chair a little nearer to me, and fell at
+once into his old professional manner and his old confidential
+tone.
+
+"'If you wish to consult me,' he said, softly, 'you know that
+I have kept some dangerous secrets in my time, and you also know
+that I possess two valuable qualities as an adviser. I am not
+easily shocked; and I can be implicitly trusted.'
+
+"I hesitated even now, at the eleventh hour, sitting alone with
+him in his own room. It was so strange to me to be trusting to
+anybody but myself! And yet, how could I help trusting another
+person in a difficulty which turned on a matter of law?
+
+"'Just as you please, you know,' added the doctor. 'I never
+invite confidences. I merely receive them.'
+
+"There was no help for it; I had come there not to hesitate,
+but to speak. I risked it, and spoke.
+
+"'The matter on which I wish to consult you,' I said, 'is not
+(as you seem to think) within your experience as a professional
+man. But I believe you may be of assistance to me, if I trust
+myself to your larger experience as a man of the world. I warn
+you beforehand that I shall certainly surprise, and possibly
+alarm, you before I have done.'
+
+"With that preface I entered on my story, telling him what
+I had settled to tell him, and no more.
+
+"I made no secret, at the outset, of my intention to personate
+Armadale's widow; and I mentioned without reserve (knowing
+that the doctor could go to the office and examine the will
+for himself) the handsome income that would be settled on me in
+the event of my success. Some of the circumstances that followed
+next in succession I thought it desirable to alter or conceal. I
+showed him the newspaper account of the loss of the yacht, but I
+said nothing about events at Naples. I informed him of the exact
+similarity of the two names; leaving him to imagine that it was
+accidental. I told him, as an important element in the matter,
+that my husband had kept his real name a profound secret from
+everybody but myself; but (to prevent any communication between
+them) I carefully concealed from the doctor what the assumed
+name under which Midwinter had lived all his life really was.
+I acknowledged that I had left my husband behind me on the
+Continent; but when the doctor put the question, I allowed
+him to conclude--I couldn't, with all my resolution, tell him
+positively!--that Midwinter knew of the contemplated Fraud, and
+that he was staying away purposely, so as not to compromise me
+by his presence. This difficulty smoothed over--or, as I feel it
+now, this baseness committed--I reverted to myself, and came
+back again to the truth. One after another I mentioned all the
+circumstances connected with my private marriage, and with the
+movements of Armadale and Midwinter, which rendered any discovery
+of the false personation (through the evidence of other people)
+a downright impossibility. 'So much,' I said, in conclusion,
+'for the object in view. The next thing is to tell you plainly
+of a very serious obstacle that stands in my way.'
+
+"The doctor, who had listened thus far without interrupting me,
+begged permission here to say a few words on his side before
+I went on.
+
+"The 'few words' proved to be all questions--clever, searching,
+suspicious questions--which I was, however, able to answer with
+little or no reserve, for they related, in almost every instance,
+to the circumstances under which I had been married, and to the
+chances for and against my lawful husband if he chose to assert
+his claim to me at any future time.
+
+"My replies informed the doctor, in the first place, that I had
+so managed matters at Thorpe Ambrose as to produce a general
+impression that Armadale intended to marry me; in the second
+place, that my husband's early life had not been of a kind to
+exhibit him favorably in the eyes of the world; in the third
+place, that we had been married, without any witnesses present
+who knew us, at a large parish church in which two other couples
+had been married the same morning, to say nothing of the dozens
+on dozens of other couples (confusing all remembrance of us in
+the minds of the officiating people) who had been married since.
+When I had put the doctor in possession of these facts--and when
+he had further ascertained that Midwinter and I had gone abroad
+among strangers immediately after leaving the church; and that
+the men employed on board the yacht in which Armadale had sailed
+from Somersetshire (before my marriage) were now away in ships
+voyaging to the other end of the world--his confidence in my
+prospects showed itself plainly in his face. 'So far as I can
+see,' he said, 'your husband's claim to you (after you have
+stepped into the place of the dead Mr. Armadale's widow) would
+rest on nothing but his own bare assertion. And _that_ I think
+you may safely set at defiance. Excuse my apparent distrust of
+the gentleman. But there might be a misunderstanding between you
+in the future, and it is highly desirable to ascertain beforehand
+exactly what he could or could not do under those circumstances.
+And now that we have done with the main obstacle that _I_ see in
+the way of your success, let us by all means come to the obstacle
+that _you_ see next!'
+
+"I was willing enough to come to it. The tone in which he spoke
+of Midwinter, though I myself was responsible for it, jarred on
+me horribly, and roused for the moment some of the old folly of
+feeling which I fancied I had laid asleep forever. I rushed at
+the chance of changing the subject, and mentioned the discrepancy
+in the register between the hand in which Midwinter had signed
+the name of Allan Armadale, and the hand in which Armadale of
+Thorpe Ambrose had been accustomed to write his name, with an
+eagerness which it quite diverted the doctor to see.
+
+"'Is _that_ all?' he asked, to my infinite surprise and relief,
+when I had done. 'My dear lady, pray set your mind at ease!
+If the late Mr. Armadale's lawyers want a proof of your marriage,
+they won't go to the church-register for it, I can promise you!'
+
+"'What!' I exclaimed, in astonishment. 'Do you mean to say that
+the entry in the register is not a proof of my marriage?'
+
+"'It is a proof,' said the doctor, 'that you have been married
+to somebody. But it is no proof that you have been married to Mr.
+Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose. Jack Nokes or Tom Styles (excuse the
+homeliness of the illustration!) might have got the license, and
+gone to the church to be married to you under Mr. Armadale's
+name; and the register (how could it do otherwise?) must in that
+case have innocently assisted the deception. I see I surprise
+you. My dear madam, when you opened this interesting business you
+surprised _me_--I may own it now--by laying so much stress on the
+curious similarity between the two names. You might have entered
+on the very daring and romantic enterprise in which you are now
+engaged, without necessarily marrying your present husband. Any
+other man would have done just as well, provided he was willing
+to take Mr. Armadale's name for the purpose.'
+
+"I felt my temper going at this. 'Any other man would _not_
+have done just as well,' I rejoined, instantly. 'But for the
+similarity of the names, I should never have thought of the
+enterprise at all.'
+
+"The doctor admitted that he had spoken too hastily. 'That
+personal view of the subject had, I confess, escaped me,' he
+said. 'However, let us get back to the matter in hand. In the
+course of what I may term an adventurous medical life, I have
+been brought more than once into contact with the gentlemen
+of the law, and have had opportunities of observing their
+proceedings in cases of, let us say, Domestic Jurisprudence. I
+am quite sure I am correct in informing you that the proof which
+will be required by Mr. Armadale's representatives will be the
+evidence of a witness present at the marriage who can speak to
+the identity of the bride and bridegroom from his own personal
+knowledge.'
+
+"'But I have already told you,' I said, 'that there was no such
+person present.'
+
+"'Precisely,' rejoined the doctor. 'In that case, what you now
+want, before you can safely stir a step in the matter, is--if you
+will pardon me the expression--a ready-made witness, possessed of
+rare moral and personal resources, who can be trusted to assume
+the necessary character, and to make the necessary Declaration
+before a magistrate. Do you know of any such person?' asked the
+doctor, throwing himself back in his chair, and looking at me
+with the utmost innocence.
+
+"'I only know you,' I said.
+
+"The doctor laughed softly. 'So like a woman!' he remarked,
+with the most exasperating good humor. 'The moment she sees
+her object, she dashes at it headlong the nearest way. Oh,
+the sex! the sex!'
+
+"'Never mind the sex!' I broke out, impatiently. 'I want
+a serious answer--Yes or No?'
+
+"The doctor rose, and waved his hand with great gravity and
+dignity all round the room. 'You see this vast establishment,'
+he began; 'you can possibly estimate to some extent the immense
+stake I have in its prosperity and success. Your excellent
+natural sense will tell you that the Principal of this Sanitarium
+must be a man of the most unblemished character--'
+
+"'Why waste so many words,' I said, 'when one word will do?
+You mean No!'
+
+"The Principal of the Sanitarium suddenly relapsed into the
+character of my confidential friend.
+
+"'My dear lady,' he said, 'it isn't Yes, and it isn't No, at a
+moment's notice. Give me till to-morrow afternoon. By that time
+I engage to be ready to do one of two things--either to withdraw
+myself from this business at once, or to go into it with you
+heart and soul. Do you agree to that? Very good; we may drop
+the subject, then, till to-morrow. Where can I call on you when
+I have decided what to do?'
+
+"There was no objection to my trusting him with my address
+at the hotel. I had taken care to present myself there as
+'Mrs. Armadale'; and I had given Midwinter an address at the
+neighboring post-office to write to when he answered my letters.
+We settled the hour at which the doctor was to call on me;
+and, that matter arranged, I rose to go, resisting all offers
+of refreshment, and all proposals to show me over the house.
+His smooth persistence in keeping up appearances after we had
+thoroughly understood each other disgusted me. I got away from
+him as soon as I could, and came back to my diary and my own
+room.
+
+"We shall see how it ends to-morrow. My own idea is that my
+confidential friend will say Yes.
+
+
+"November 24th.--The doctor has said Yes, as I supposed; but on
+terms which I never anticipated. The condition on which I have
+secured his services amounts to nothing less than the payment to
+him, on my stepping into the place of Armadale's widow, of half
+my first year's income--in other words, six hundred pounds!
+
+"I protested against this extortionate demand in every way
+I could think of. All to no purpose. The doctor met me with
+the most engaging frankness. Nothing, he said, but the accidental
+embarrassment of his position at the present time would have
+induced him to mix himself up in the matter at all. He would
+honestly confess that he had exhausted his own resources, and
+the resources of other persons whom he described as his 'backers,'
+in the purchase and completion of the Sanitarium. Under those
+circumstances, six hundred pounds in prospect was an object
+to him. For that sum he would run the serious risk of advising
+and assisting me. Not a farthing less would tempt him; and there
+he left it, with his best and friendliest wishes, in my hands!
+
+"It ended in the only way in which it could end. I had no choice
+but to accept the terms, and to let the doctor settle things
+on the spot as he pleased. The arrangement once made between us,
+I must do him the justice to say that he showed no disposition
+to let the grass grow under his feet. He called briskly for pen,
+ink and paper, and suggested opening the campaign at Thorpe
+Ambrose by to-night's post.
+
+"We agreed on a form of letter which I wrote, and which he copied
+on the spot. I entered into no particulars at starting. I simply
+asserted that I was the widow of the deceased Mr. Armadale;
+that I had been privately married to him; that I had returned
+to England on his sailing in the yacht from Naples; and that I
+begged to inclose a copy of my marriage certificate, as a matter
+of form with which I presumed it was customary to comply. The
+letter was addressed to 'The Representatives of the late Allan
+Armadale, Esq., Thorpe Ambrose, Norfolk.' And the doctor himself
+carried it away, and put it in the post.
+
+"I am not so excited and so impatient for results as I expected
+to be, now that the first step is taken. The thought of Midwinter
+haunts me like a ghost. I have been writing to him again--as
+before, to keep up appearances. It will be my last letter,
+I think. My courage feels shaken, my spirits get depressed,
+when my thoughts go back to Turin. I am no more capable of facing
+the consideration of Midwinter at this moment than I was in
+the by-gone time, The day of reckoning with him, once distant
+and doubtful, is a day that may come to me now, I know not how
+soon. And here I am, trusting myself blindly to the chapter
+of Accidents still!
+
+
+"November 25th.--At two o'clock to-day the doctor called again
+by appointment. He has been to his lawyers (of course without
+taking them into our confidence) to put the case simply of
+proving my marriage. The result confirms what he has already
+told me. The pivot on which the whole matter will turn, if
+my claim is disputed, will be the question of identity; and
+it may be necessary for the witness to make his Declaration
+in the magistrate's presence before the week is out.
+
+"In this position of affairs, the doctor thinks it important
+that we should be within easy reach of each other, and proposes
+to find a quiet lodging for me in his neighborhood. I am quite
+willing to go anywhere; for, among the other strange fancies that
+have got possession of me, I have an idea that I shall feel more
+completely lost to Midwinter if I move out of the neighborhood in
+which his letters are addressed to me. I was awake and thinking
+of him again last night This morning I have finally decided to
+write to him no more.
+
+"After staying half an hour, the doctor left me, having first
+inquired whether I would like to accompany him to Hampstead to
+look for lodgings. I informed him that I had some business of my
+own which would keep me in London. He inquired what the business
+was. 'You will see,' I said, 'to-morrow or next day.'
+
+"I had a moment's nervous trembling when I was by myself again.
+My business in London, besides being a serious business in
+a woman's eyes, took my mind back to Midwinter in spite of me.
+The prospect of removing to my new lodging had reminded me of
+the necessity of dressing in my new character. The time had come
+now for getting _my widow's weeds_.
+
+"My first proceeding, after putting my bonnet on, was to provide
+myself with money. I got what I wanted to fit me out for
+the character of Armadale's widow by nothing less than the sale
+of Armadale's own present to me on my marriage--the ruby ring!
+It proved to be a more valuable jewel than I had supposed. I am
+likely to be spared all money anxieties for some time to come.
+
+"On leaving the jeweler's, I went to the great mourning shop
+in Regent Street. In four-and-twenty hours (if I can give them
+no more) they have engaged to dress me in my widow's costume from
+head to foot. I had another feverish moment when I left the shop;
+and, by way of further excitement on this agitating day, I found
+a surprise in store for me on my return to the hotel. An elderly
+gentleman was announced to be waiting to see me. I opened my
+sitting-room door, and there was old Bashwood!
+
+"He had got my letter that morning, and had started for London
+by the next train to answer it in person. I had expected a great
+deal from him, but I had certainly not expected _that_. It
+flattered me. For the moment, I declare it flattered me!
+
+"I pass over the wretched old creature's raptures and reproaches,
+and groans and tears, and weary long prosings about the lonely
+months he had passed at Thorpe Ambrose, brooding over my
+desertion of him. He was quite eloquent at times; but I don't
+want his eloquence here. It is needless to say that I put myself
+right with him, and consulted his feelings before I asked him
+for his news. What a blessing a woman's vanity is sometimes!
+I almost forgot my risks and responsibilities in my anxieties
+to be charming. For a minute or two I felt a warm little flutter
+of triumph. And it was a triumph--even with an old man! In
+a quarter of an hour I had him smirking and smiling, hanging on
+my lightest words in an ecstasy, and answering all the questions
+I put to him like a good little child.
+
+"Here is his account of affairs at Thorpe Ambrose, as I gently
+extracted it from him bit by bit:
+
+"In the first place, the news of Armadale's death has reached
+Miss Milroy. It has so completely overwhelmed her that her father
+has been compelled to remove her from the school. She is back
+at the cottage, and the doctor is in daily attendance. Do I pity
+her? Yes! I pity her exactly as much as she once pitied me!
+
+"In the next place, the state of affairs at the great house,
+which I expected to find some difficulty in comprehending, turns
+out to be quite intelligible, and certainly not discouraging
+so far. Only yesterday, the lawyers on both sides came to an
+understanding. Mr. Darch (the family solicitor of the Blanchards,
+and Armadale's bitter enemy in past times) represents the
+interests of Miss Blanchard, who (in the absence of any male
+heir) is next heir to the estate, and who has, it appears, been
+in London for some time past. Mr. Smart, of Norwich (originally
+employed to overlook Bashwood), represents the deceased Armadale.
+And this is what the two lawyers have settled between them.
+
+"Mr. Darch, acting for Miss Blanchard, has claimed the possession
+of the estate, and the right of receiving the rents at the
+Christmas audit, in her name. Mr. Smart, on his side, has
+admitted that there is great weight in the family solicitor's
+application. He cannot see his way, as things are now, to
+contesting the question of Armadale's death, and he will consent
+to offer no resistance to the application, if Mr. Darch will
+consent, on his side, to assume the responsibility of taking
+possession in Miss Blanchard's name. This Mr. Darch has already
+done; and the estate is now virtually in Miss Blanchard's
+possession.
+
+"One result of this course of proceeding will be (as Bashwood
+thinks) to put Mr. Darch in the position of the person who really
+decides on my claim to the widow's place and the widow's money.
+The income being charged on the estate, it must come out of Miss
+Blanchard's pocket; and the question of paying it would appear,
+therefore, to be a question for Miss Blanchard's lawyer.
+To-morrow will probably decide whether this view is the right
+one, for my letter to Armadale's representatives will have been
+delivered at the great house this morning.
+
+"So much for what old Bashwood had to tell me. Having recovered
+my influence over him, and possessed myself of all his
+information so far, the next thing to consider was the right use
+to turn him to in the future. He was entirely at my disposal, for
+his place at the steward's office has been already taken by Miss
+Blanchard's man of business, and he pleaded hard to be allowed to
+stay and serve my interests in London. There would not have been
+the least danger in letting him stay, for I had, as a matter of
+course, left him undisturbed in his conviction that I really am
+the widow of Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose. But with the doctor's
+resources at my command, I wanted no assistance of any sort in
+London; and it occurred to me that I might make Bashwood more
+useful by sending him back to Norfolk to watch events there in
+my interests.
+
+"He looked sorely disappointed (having had an eye evidently to
+paying his court to me in my widowed condition!) when I told him
+of the conclusion at which I had arrived. But a few words of
+persuasion, and a modest hint that he might cherish hopes in the
+future if he served me obediently in the present, did wonders in
+reconciling him to the necessity of meeting my wishes. He asked
+helplessly for 'instructions' when it was time for him to leave
+me and travel back by the evening train. I could give him none,
+for I had no idea as yet of what the legal people might or might
+not do. 'But suppose something happens,' he persisted, 'that I
+don't understand, what am I to do, so far away from you?' I could
+only give him one answer. 'Do nothing,' I said. 'Whatever it is,
+hold your tongue about it, and write, or come up to London
+immediately to consult me.' With those parting directions,
+and with an understanding that we were to correspond regularly,
+I let him kiss my hand, and sent him off to the train.
+
+"Now that I am alone again, and able to think calmly of the
+interview between me and my elderly admirer, I find myself
+recalling a certain change in old Bashwood's manner which
+puzzled me at the time, and which puzzles me still.
+
+"Even in his first moments of agitation at seeing me, I thought
+that his eyes rested on my face with a new kind of interest while
+I was speaking to him. Besides this, he dropped a word or two
+afterward, in telling me of his lonely life at Thorpe Ambrose,
+which seemed to imply that he had been sustained in his solitude
+by a feeling of confidence about his future relations with me
+when we next met. If he had been a younger and a bolder man (and
+if any such discovery had been possible), I should almost have
+suspected him of having found out something about my past life
+which had made him privately confident of controlling me, if
+I showed any disposition to deceive and desert him again. But
+such an idea as this in connection with old Bashwood is simply
+absurd. Perhaps I am overexcited by the suspense and anxiety of
+my present position? Perhaps the merest fancies and suspicions
+are leading me astray? Let this be as it may, I have, at any
+rate, more serious subjects than the subject of old Bashwood
+to occupy me now. Tomorrow's post may tell me what Armadale's
+representatives think of the claim of Armadale's widow.
+
+
+"November 26th.--The answer has arrived this morning, in the form
+(as Bashwood supposed) of a letter from Mr. Darch. The crabbed
+old lawyer acknowledges my letter in three lines. Before he takes
+any steps, or expresses any opinion on the subject, he wants
+evidence of identity as well as the evidence of the certificate;
+and he ventures to suggest that it may be desirable, before we
+go any further, to refer him to my legal advisers.
+
+"Two o'clock.--The doctor called shortly after twelve to say
+that he had found a lodging for me within twenty minutes' walk
+of the Sanitarium. In return for his news, I showed him Mr.
+Darch's letter. He took it away at once to his lawyers, and came
+back with the necessary information for my guidance. I have
+answered Mr. Darch by sending him the address of my legal
+advisers--otherwise, the doctor's lawyers--without making any
+comment on the desire that he has expressed for additional
+evidence of the marriage. This is all that can be done to-day.
+To-morrow will bring with it events of greater interest, for
+to-morrow the doctor is to make his Declaration before the
+magistrate, and to-morrow I am to move to my new lodging in
+my widow's weeds.
+
+
+"November 27th.--Fairweather Vale Villas.--The Declaration has
+been made, with all the necessary formalities. And I have taken
+possession, in my widow's costume, of my new rooms.
+
+"I ought to be excited by the opening of this new act in the
+drama, and by the venturesome part that I am playing in it
+myself. Strange to say, I am quiet and depressed. The thought of
+Midwinter has followed me to my new abode, and is pressing on me
+heavily at this moment. I have no fear of any accident happening,
+in the interval that must still pass before I step publicly into
+the place of Armadale's widow. But when that time comes, and when
+Midwinter finds me (as sooner or later find me he must!) figuring
+in my false character, and settled in the position that I have
+usurped--_then_, I ask myself, What will happen? The answer still
+comes as it first came to me this morning, when I put on my
+widow's dress. Now, as then, the presentiment is fixed in my mind
+that he will kill me. If it was not too late to draw back--
+Absurd! I shall shut up my journal.
+
+
+"November 28th.--The lawyers have heard from Mr. Darch, and have
+sent him the Declaration by return of post.
+
+"When the doctor brought me this news, I asked him whether
+his lawyers were aware of my present address; and, finding that
+he had not yet mentioned it to them, I begged that he would
+continue to keep it a secret for the future. The doctor laughed.
+'Are you afraid of Mr. Darch's stealing a march on us, and coming
+to attack you personally?' he asked. I accepted the imputation,
+as the easiest way of making him comply with my request. 'Yes,'
+I said, 'I am afraid of Mr. Darch.'
+
+"My spirits have risen since the doctor left me. There is a
+pleasant sensation of security in feeling that no strangers are
+in possession of my address. I am easy enough in my mind to-day
+to notice how wonderfully well I look in my widow's weeds, and
+to make myself agreeable to the people of the house.
+
+"Midwinter disturbed me a little again last night; but I have got
+over the ghastly delusion which possessed me yesterday. I know
+better now than to dread violence from him when he discovers what
+I have done. And there is still less fear of his stooping to
+assert his claim to a woman who has practiced on him such
+a deception as mine. The one serious trial that I shall be
+put to when the day of reckoning comes will be the trial of
+preserving my false character in his presence. I shall be safe
+in his loathing and contempt for me, after that. On the day when
+I have denied him to his face, I shall have seen the last of him
+forever.
+
+"Shall I be able to deny him to his face? Shall I be able to look
+at him and speak to him as if he had never been more to me than
+a friend? How do I know till the time comes? Was there ever such
+an infatuated fool as I am, to be writing of him at all, when
+writing only encourages me to think of him? I will make a new
+resolution. From this time forth, his name shall appear no more
+in these pages.
+
+
+"Monday, December 1st.--The last month of the worn-out old year
+1851! If I allowed myself to look back, what a miserable year
+I should see added to all the other miserable years that are
+gone! But I have made my resolution to look forward only, and
+I mean to keep it.
+
+"I have nothing to record of the last two days, except that
+on the twenty-ninth I remembered Bashwood, and wrote to tell him
+of my new address. This morning the lawyers heard again from
+Mr. Darch. He acknowledges the receipt of the Declaration, but
+postpones stating the decision at which he has arrived until he
+has communicated with the trustees under the late Mr. Blanchard's
+will, and has received his final instructions from his client,
+Miss Blanchard. The doctor's lawyers declare that this last
+letter is a mere device for gaining time--with what object they
+are, of course, not in a position to guess. The doctor himself
+says, facetiously, it is the usual lawyer's object of making
+a long bill. My own idea is that Mr. Darch has his suspicions of
+something wrong, and that his purpose in trying to gain time--
+
+* * * * * * *
+
+"Ten, at night.--I had written as far as that last unfinished
+sentence (toward four in the afternoon) when I was startled by
+hearing a cab drive up to the door. I went to the window, and
+got there just in time to see old Bashwood getting out with
+an activity of which I should never have supposed him capable.
+So little did I anticipate the tremendous discovery that was
+going to burst on me in another minute, that I turned to
+the glass, and wondered what the susceptible old gentleman
+would say to me in my widow's cap.
+
+"The instant he entered the room, I saw that some serious
+disaster had happened. His eyes were wild, his wig was awry.
+He approached me with a strange mixture of eagerness and dismay.
+'I've done as you told me,' he whispered, breathlessly. 'I've
+held my tongue about it, and come straight to _you_!' He caught
+me by the hand before I could speak, with a boldness quite new
+in my experience of him. 'Oh how can I break it to you!' he burst
+out. 'I'm beside myself when I think of it!'
+
+"'When you _can_ speak,' I said, putting him into a chair,
+'speak out. I see in your face that you bring me news I don't
+look for from Thorpe Ambrose.'
+
+"He put his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and drew out
+a letter. He looked at the letter, and looked at me. 'New--new--
+news you don't look for,' he stammered; 'but not from Thorpe
+Ambrose!'
+
+"'Not from Thorpe Ambrose!'
+
+"'No. From the sea!'
+
+"The first dawning of the truth broke on me at those words.
+I couldn't speak--I could only hold out my hand to him for
+the letter.
+
+"He still shrank from giving it to me. 'I daren't! I daren't!'
+he said to himself, vacantly. 'The shock of it might be the death
+of her.'
+
+"I snatched the letter from him. One glance at the writing on
+the address was enough. My hands fell on my lap, with the letter
+fast held in them. I sat petrified, without moving, without
+speaking, without hearing a word of what Bashwood was saying
+to me, and slowly realized the terrible truth. The man whose
+widow I had claimed to be was a living man to confront me!
+In vain I had mixed the drink at Naples--in vain I had betrayed
+him into Manuel's hands. Twice I had set the deadly snare for
+him, and twice Armadale had escaped me! "I came to my sense of
+outward things again, and found Bashwood on his knees at my feet,
+crying.
+
+"'You look angry,' he murmured, helplessly. 'Are you angry with
+_me_? Oh, if you only knew what hopes I had when we last saw
+each other, and how cruelly that letter has dashed them all to
+the ground!'
+
+"I put the miserable old creature back from me, but very gently.
+'Hush!' I said. 'Don't distress me now. I want composure; I want
+to read the letter.'
+
+"He went away submissively to the other end of the room. As soon
+as my eye was off him, I heard him say to himself, with impotent
+malignity, 'If the sea had been of my mind, the sea would have
+drowned him!'
+
+"One by one I slowly opened the folds of the letter; feeling,
+while I did so, the strangest incapability of fixing my attention
+on the very lines that I was burning to read. But why dwell any
+longer on sensations which I can't describe? It will be more to
+the purpose if I place the letter itself, for future reference,
+on this page of my journal.
+
+'Fiume, Illyria, November 21, 1851.
+
+"MR. BASHWOOD--The address I date from will surprise you; and
+you will be more surprised still when you hear how it is that
+I come to write to you from a port on the Adriatic Sea.
+
+"I have been the victim of a rascally attempt at robbery and
+murder. The robbery has succeeded; and it is only through the
+mercy of God that the murder did not succeed too.
+
+"I hired a yacht rather more than a month ago at Naples; and
+sailed (I am glad to think now) without any friend with me, for
+Messina. From Messina I went for a cruise in the Adriatic. Two
+days out we were caught in a storm. Storms get up in a hurry,
+and go down in a hurry, in those parts. The vessel behaved nobly:
+I declare I feel the tears in my eyes now, when I think of her
+at the bottom of the sea! Toward sunset it began to moderate; and
+by midnight, except for a long, smooth swell, the sea was as
+quiet as need be. I went below, a little tired (having helped in
+working the yacht while the gale lasted), and fell asleep in five
+minutes. About two hours after, I was woke by something falling
+into my cabin through a chink of the ventilator in the upper part
+of the door. I jumped up, and found a bit of paper with a key
+wrapped in it, and with writing on the inner side, in a hand
+which it was not very easy to read.
+
+"Up to this time I had not had the ghost of a suspicion that
+I was alone at sea with a gang of murderous vagabonds (excepting
+one only) who would stick at nothing. I had got on very well with
+my sailing-master (the worst scoundrel of the lot), and better
+still with his English mate. The sailors, being all foreigners,
+I had very little to say to. They did their work, and no quarrels
+and nothing unpleasant happened. If anybody had told me, before I
+went to bed on the night after the storm, that the sailing-master
+and the crew and the mate (who had been no better than the rest
+of them at starting) were all in a conspiracy to rob me of
+the money I had on board, and then to drown me in my own vessel
+afterward, I should have laughed in his face. Just remember that;
+and then fancy for yourself (for I'm sure I can't tell you) what
+I must have thought when I opened the paper round the key, and
+read what I now copy (from the mate's writing), as follows:
+
+
+"'SIR--Stay in your bed till you hear a boat shove off from the
+starboard side, or you are a dead man. Your money is stolen; and
+in five minutes' time the yacht will be scuttled, and the cabin
+hatch will be nailed down on you. Dead men tell no tales; and the
+sailing-master's notion is to leave proofs afloat that the vessel
+has foundered with all on board. It was his doing, to begin with,
+and we were all in it. I can't find it in my heart not to give
+you a chance for your life. It's a bad chance, but I can do no
+more. I should be murdered myself if I didn't seem to go with the
+rest. The key of your cabin door is thrown back to you, inside
+this. Don't be alarmed when you hear the hammer above. I shall do
+it, and I shall have short nails in my hand as well as long, and
+use the short ones only. Wait till you hear the boat with all of
+us shove off, and then pry up the cabin hatch with your back. The
+vessel will float a quarter of an hour after the holes are bored
+in her. Slip into the sea on the port side, and keep the vessel
+between you and the boat. You will find plenty of loose lumber,
+wrenched away on purpose, drifting about to hold on by. It's
+a fine night and a smooth sea, and there's a chance that a ship
+may pick you up while there's life left in you. I can do no
+more.--Yours truly, J. M.'
+
+
+"As I came to those last words, I heard the hammering down of
+the hatch over my head. I don't suppose I'm more of a coward than
+most people, but there was a moment when the sweat poured down me
+like rain. I got to be my own man again before the hammering was
+done, and found myself thinking of somebody very dear to me in
+England. I said to myself: 'I'll have a try for my life, for her
+sake, though the chances are dead against me.'
+
+"I put a letter from that person I have mentioned into one of
+the stoppered bottles of my dressing-case, along with the mate's
+warning, in case I lived to see him again. I hung this, and
+a flask of whisky, in a sling round my neck; and, after first
+dressing myself in my confusion, thought better of it, and
+stripped, again, for swimming, to my shirt and drawers. By the
+time I had done that the hammering was over and there was such
+a silence that I could hear the water bubbling into the scuttled
+vessel amidships. The next noise was the noise of the boat
+and the villains in her (always excepting my friend, the mate)
+shoving off from the starboard side. I waited for the splash
+of the oars in the water, and then got my back under the hatch.
+The mate had kept his promise. I lifted it easily--crept across
+the deck, under cover of the bulwarks, on all fours--and slipped
+into the sea on the port side. Lots of things were floating
+about. I took the first thing I came to--a hen-coop--and swam
+away with it about a couple of hundred yards, keeping the yacht
+between me and the boat. Having got that distance, I was seized
+with a shivering fit, and I stopped (fearing the cramp next)
+to take a pull at my flask. When I had closed the flask again,
+I turned for a moment to look back, and saw the yacht in the act
+of sinking. In a minute more there was nothing between me and
+the boat but the pieces of wreck that had been purposely thrown
+out to float. The moon was shining; and, if they had had a glass
+in the boat, I believe they might have seen my head, though
+I carefully kept the hen-coop between me and them.
+
+"As it was, they laid on their oars; and I heard loud voices
+among them disputing. After what seemed an age to me,
+I discovered what the dispute was about. The boat's head was
+suddenly turned my way. Some cleverer scoundrel than the rest
+(the sailing-master, I dare say) had evidently persuaded them
+to row back over the place where the yacht had gone down, and
+make quite sure that I had gone down with her.
+
+"They were more than half-way across the distance that separated
+us, and I had given myself up for lost, when I heard a cry from
+one of them, and saw the boat's progress suddenly checked. In
+a minute or two more the boat's head was turned again; and they
+rowed straight away from me like men rowing for their lives.
+
+"I looked on one side toward the land, and saw nothing. I looked
+on the other toward the sea, and discovered what the boat's
+crew had discovered before me--a sail in the distance, growing
+steadily brighter and bigger in the moonlight the longer I looked
+at it. In a quarter of an hour more the vessel was within hail
+of me, and the crew had got me on board.
+
+"They were all foreigners, and they quite deafened me by their
+jabber. I tried signs, but before I could make them understand me
+I was seized with another shivering fit, and was carried below.
+The vessel held on her course, I have no doubt, but I was in no
+condition to know anything about it. Before morning I was in a
+fever; and from that time I can remember nothing clearly till I
+came to my senses at this place, and found myself under the care
+of a Hungarian merchant, the consignee (as they call it) of the
+coasting vessel that had picked me up. He speaks English as well
+or better than I do; and he has treated me with a kindness which
+I can find no words to praise. When he was a young man he was
+in England himself, learning business, and he says he has
+remembrances of our country which make his heart warm toward
+an Englishman. He has fitted me out with clothes, and has lent me
+the money to travel with, as soon as the doctor allows me to
+start for home. Supposing I don't get a relapse, I shall be fit
+to travel in a week's time from this. If I can catch the mail at
+Trieste, and stand the fatigue, I shall be back again at Thorpe
+Ambrose in a week or ten days at most after you get my letter.
+You will agree with me that it is a terribly long letter. But
+I can't help that. I seem to have lost my old knack at putting
+things short, and finishing on the first page. However, I am near
+the end now; for I have nothing left to mention but the reason
+why I write about what has happened to me, instead of waiting
+till I get home, and telling it all by word of mouth.
+
+"I fancy my head is still muddled by my illness. At any rate,
+it only struck me this morning that there is barely a chance
+of some vessel having passed the place where the yacht foundered,
+and having picked up the furniture, and other things wrenched out
+of her and left to float. Some false report of my being drowned
+may, in that case, have reached England. If this has happened
+(which I hope to God may be an unfounded fear on my part), go
+directly to Major Milroy at the cottage. Show him this letter
+--I have written it quite as much for his eye as for yours--and
+then give him the inclosed note, and ask him if he doesn't think
+the circumstances justify me in hoping he will send it to Miss
+Milroy. I can't explain why I don't write directly to the major,
+or to Miss Milroy, instead of to you. I can only say there are
+considerations I am bound in honor to respect, which oblige me
+to act in this roundabout way.
+
+"I don't ask you to answer this, for I shall be on my way home,
+I hope, long before your letter could reach me in this
+out-of-the-way place. Whatever you do, don't lose a moment
+in going to Major Milroy. Go, on second thoughts, whether
+the loss of the yacht is known in England or not.
+
+"Yours truly,	ALLAN ARMADALE."
+
+
+"I looked up when I had come to the end of the letter, and saw,
+for the first time, that Bashwood had left his chair and had
+placed himself opposite to me. He was intently studying my face,
+with the inquiring expression of a man who was trying to read
+my thoughts. His eyes fell guiltily when they met mine, and he
+shrank away to his chair. Believing, as he did, that I was really
+married to Armadale, was he trying to discover whether the news
+of Armadale's rescue from the sea was good news or bad news in
+my estimation? It was no time then for entering into explanations
+with him. The first thing to be done was to communicate instantly
+with the doctor. I called Bashwood back to me and gave him my
+hand.
+
+"'You have done me a service,' I said, 'which makes us closer
+friends than ever. I shall say more about this, and about other
+matters of some interest to both of us, later in the day. I want
+you now to lend me Mr. Armadale's letter (which I promise to
+bring back) and to wait here till I return. Will you do that
+for me, Mr. Bashwood?'
+
+"He would do anything I asked him, he said. I went into the
+bedroom and put on my bonnet and shawl.
+
+"'Let me be quite sure of the facts before I leave you,'
+I resumed, when I was ready to go out. 'You have not shown
+this letter to anybody but me?'
+
+"'Not a living soul has seen it but our two selves.'
+
+"'What have you done with the note inclosed to Miss Milroy?'
+
+"He produced it from his pocket. I ran it over rapidly--saw that
+there was nothing in it of the slightest importance--and put it
+in the fire on the spot. That done, I left Bashwood in the
+sitting-room, and went to the Sanitarium, with Armadale's letter
+in my hand.
+
+"The doctor had gone out, and the servant was unable to say
+positively at what time he would be back. I went into his study,
+and wrote a line preparing him for the news I had brought with
+me, which I sealed up, with Armadale's letter, in an envelope,
+to await his return. Having told the servant I would call again
+in an hour, I left the place.
+
+"It was useless to go back to my lodgings and speak to Bashwood,
+until I knew first what the doctor meant to do. I walked about
+the neighborhood, up and down new streets and crescents and
+squares, with a kind of dull, numbed feeling in me, which
+prevented, not only all voluntary exercise of thought, but
+all sensation of bodily fatigue. I remembered the same feeling
+overpowering me, years ago, on the morning when the people of
+the prison came to take me into court to be tried for my life.
+All that frightful scene came back again to my mind in the
+strangest manner, as if it had been a scene in which some other
+person had figured. Once or twice I wondered, in a heavy,
+senseless way, why they had not hanged me!
+
+"When I went back to the Sanitarium, I was informed that
+the doctor had returned half an hour since, and that he was
+in his own room anxiously waiting to see me.
+
+"I went into the study, and found him sitting close by the fire
+with his head down and his hands on his knees. On the table near
+him, beside Armadale's letter and my note, I saw, in the little
+circle of light thrown by the reading-lamp, an open railway
+guide. Was he meditating flight? It was impossible to tell from
+his face, when he looked up at me, what he was meditating, or how
+the shock had struck him when he first discovered that Armadale
+was a living man.
+
+"'Take a seat near the fire,' he said. 'It's very raw and cold
+to-day.'
+
+"I took a chair in silence. In silence, on his side, the doctor
+sat rubbing his knees before the fire.
+
+"'Have you nothing to say to me?' I asked.
+
+"He rose, and suddenly removed the shade from the reading-lamp,
+so that the light fell on my face.
+
+"'You are not looking well,' he said. 'What's the matter?'
+
+"'My head feels dull, and my eyes are heavy and hot,' I replied.
+'The weather, I suppose.'
+
+"It was strange how we both got further and further from the one
+vitally important subject which we had both come together to
+discuss!
+
+"'I think a cup of tea would do you good,' remarked the doctor.
+
+"I accepted his suggestion; and he ordered the tea. While it was
+coming, he walked up and down the room, and I sat by the fire,
+and not a word passed between us on either side.
+
+"The tea revived me; and the doctor noticed a change for
+the better in my face. He sat down opposite to me at the table,
+and spoke out at last.
+
+"'If I had ten thousand pounds at this moment,' he began,
+'I would give the whole of it never to have compromised myself
+in your desperate speculation on Mr. Armadale's death!'
+
+"He said those words with an abruptness, almost with a violence,
+which was strangely uncharacteristic of his ordinary manner.
+Was he frightened himself, or was he trying to frighten me?
+I determined to make him explain himself at the outset, so far as
+I was concerned. 'Wait a moment, doctor,' I said. 'Do you hold me
+responsible for what has happened?'
+
+"'Certainly not,' he replied, stiffly. 'Neither you nor anybody
+could have foreseen what has happened. When I say I would give
+ten thousand pounds to be out of this business, I am blaming
+nobody but myself. And when I tell you next that I, for one,
+won't allow Mr. Armadale's resurrection from the sea to be the
+ruin of me without a fight for it, I tell you, my dear madam, one
+of the plainest truths I ever told to man or woman in the whole
+course of my life. Don't suppose I am invidiously separating my
+interests from yours in the common danger that now threatens us
+both. I simply indicate the difference in the risk that we have
+respectively run. _You_ have not sunk the whole of your resources
+in establishing a Sanitarium; and _you_ have not made a false
+declaration before a magistrate, which is punishable as perjury
+by the law.'
+
+"I interrupted him again. His selfishness did me more good than
+his tea: it roused my temper effectually. 'Suppose we let your
+risk and my risk alone, and come to the point,' I said. 'What do
+you mean by making a fight for it? I see a railway guide on your
+table. Does making a fight for it mean--running away?'
+
+"'Running away?' repeated the doctor. 'You appear to forget
+that every farthing I have in the world is embarked in this
+establishment.'
+
+"'You stop here, then?' I said.
+
+"'Unquestionably!'
+
+"'And what do you mean to do when Mr. Armadale comes
+to England?'
+
+"A solitary fly, the last of his race whom the winter had spared,
+was buzzing feebly about the doctor's face. He caught it before
+he answered me, and held it out across the table in his closed
+hand.
+
+"'If this fly's name was Armadale,' he said, 'and if you had got
+him as I have got him now, what would _you_ do?'
+
+"His eyes, fixed on my face up to this time, turned
+significantly, as he ended this question, to my widow's dress.
+I, too, looked at it when he looked. A thrill of the old deadly
+hatred and the old deadly determination ran through me again.
+
+"'I should kill him,' I said.
+
+"The doctor started to his feet (with the fly still in his hand),
+and looked at me--a little too theatrically--with an expression
+of the utmost horror.
+
+"'Kill him!' repeated the doctor, in a paroxysm of virtuous
+alarm. 'Violence--murderous violence--in My Sanitarium! You
+take my breath away!'
+
+"I caught his eye while he was expressing himself in this
+elaborately indignant manner, scrutinizing me with a searching
+curiosity which was, to say the least of it, a little at variance
+with the vehemence of his language and the warmth of his tone.
+He laughed uneasily when our eyes met, and recovered his smoothly
+confidential manner in the instant that elapsed before he spoke
+again.
+
+"'I beg a thousand pardons,' he said. 'I ought to have known
+better than to take a lady too literally at her word. Permit me
+to remind you, however, that the circumstances are too serious
+for anything in the nature of--let us say, an exaggeration or a
+joke. You shall hear what I propose, without further preface.' He
+paused, and resumed his figurative use of the fly imprisoned in
+his hand. 'Here is Mr. Armadale. I can let him out, or keep him
+in, just as I please--and he knows it. I say to him,' continued
+the doctor, facetiously addressing the fly, 'Give me proper
+security, Mr. Armadale, that no proceedings of any sort shall be
+taken against either this lady or myself, and I will let you out
+of the hollow of my hand. Refuse--and, be the risk what it may,
+I will keep you in." Can you doubt, my dear madam, what Mr.
+Armadale's answer is, sooner or later, certain to be? Can you
+doubt,' said the doctor, suiting the action to the word, and
+letting the fly go, 'that it will end to the entire satisfaction
+of all parties, in this way?'
+
+"'I won't say at present,' I answered, 'whether I doubt or not.
+Let me make sure that I understand you first. You propose, if I
+am not mistaken, to shut the doors of this place on Mr. Armadale,
+and not to let him out again until he has agreed to the terms
+which it is our interest to impose on him? May I ask, in that
+case, how you mean to make him walk into the trap that you have
+set for him here?'
+
+"'I propose,' said the doctor, with his hand on the railway
+guide, 'ascertaining first at what time during every evening of
+this month the tidal trains from Dover and Folkestone reach the
+London Bridge terminus. And I propose, next, posting a person
+whom Mr. Armadale knows, and whom you and I can trust, to wait
+the arrival of the trains, and to meet our man at the moment
+when he steps out of the railway carriage.'
+
+"'Have you thought,' I inquired, 'of who the person is to be?'
+
+"'I have thought,' said the doctor, taking up Armadale's letter
+'of the person to whom this letter is addressed.'
+
+"The answer startled me. Was it possible that he and Bashwood
+knew one another? I put the question immediately.
+
+"'Until to-day I never so much as heard of the gentleman's
+name,' said the doctor. 'I have simply pursued the inductive
+process of reasoning, for which we are indebted to the immortal
+Bacon. How does this very important letter come into your
+possession? I can't insult you by supposing it to have been
+stolen. Consequently, it has come to you with the leave and
+license of the person to whom it is addressed. Consequently,
+that person is in your confidence. Consequently, he is the first
+person I think of. You see the process? Very good. Permit me
+a question or two, on the subject of Mr. Bashwood, before we
+go on any further.'
+
+"The doctor's questions went as straight to the point as usual.
+My answers informed him that Mr. Bashwood stood toward Armadale
+in the relation of steward; that he had received the letter
+at Thorpe Ambrose that morning, and had brought it straight to
+me by the first train; that he had not shown it, or spoken of it
+before leaving, to Major Milroy or to any one else; that I had
+not obtained this service at his hands by trusting him with
+my secret; that I had communicated with him in the character of
+Armadale's widow; that he had suppressed the letter, under those
+circumstances, solely in obedience to a general caution I had
+given him to keep his own counsel, if anything strange happened
+at Thorpe Ambrose, until he had first consulted me; and, lastly,
+that the reason why he had done as I told him in this matter, was
+that in this matter, and in all others, Mr. Bashwood was blindly
+devoted to my interests.
+
+"At that point in the interrogatory, the doctor's eyes began
+to look at me distrustfully behind the doctor's spectacles.
+
+"'What is the secret of this blind devotion of Mr. Bashwood's
+to your interests?' he asked.
+
+"I hesitated for a moment--in pity to Bashwood, not in pity
+to myself. 'If you must know,' I answered, 'Mr. Bashwood is
+in love with me.'
+
+"'Ay! ay!' exclaimed the doctor, with an air of relief. 'I begin
+to understand now. Is he a young man?'
+
+"'He is an old man.'
+
+"The doctor laid himself back in his chair, and chuckled softly.
+'Better and better!' he said. 'Here is the very man we want.
+Who so fit as Mr. Armadale's steward to meet Mr. Armadale on his
+return to London? And who so capable of influencing Mr. Bashwood
+in the proper way as the charming object of Mr. Bashwood's
+admiration?'
+
+"There could be no doubt that Bashwood was the man to serve the
+doctor's purpose, and that my influence was to be trusted to make
+him serve it. The difficulty was not here: the difficulty was
+in the unanswered question that I had put to the doctor a minute
+since. I put it to him again.
+
+"'Suppose Mr. Armadale's steward meets his employer at the
+terminus,' I said. 'May I ask once more how Mr. Armadale is
+to be persuaded to come here?'
+
+"'Don't think me ungallant,' rejoined the doctor in his gentlest
+manner, 'if I ask, on my side, how are men persuaded to do
+nine-tenths of the foolish acts of their lives? They are
+persuaded by your charming sex. The weak side of every man is the
+woman's side of him. We have only to discover the woman's side of
+Mr. Armadale--to tickle him on it gently--and to lead him our way
+with a silken string. I observe here,' pursued the doctor,
+opening Armadale's letter, 'a reference to a certain young lady,
+which looks promising. Where is the note that Mr. Armadale speaks
+of as addressed to Miss Milroy?'
+
+"Instead of answering him, I started, in a sudden burst of
+excitement, to my feet. The instant he mentioned Miss Milroy's
+name all that I had heard from Bashwood of her illness, and
+of the cause of it, rushed back into my memory. I saw the means
+of decoying Armadale into the Sanitarium as plainly as I saw
+the doctor on the other side of the table, wondering at the
+extraordinary change in me. What a luxury it was to make Miss
+Milroy serve my interests at last!
+
+"'Never mind the note,' I said. 'It's burned, for fear of
+accidents. I can tell you all (and more) than the note could
+have told you. Miss Milroy cuts the knot! Miss Milroy ends
+the difficulty! She is privately engaged to him. She has heard
+the false report of his death; and she has been seriously ill
+at Thorpe Ambrose ever since. When Bashwood meets him at the
+station, the very first question he is certain to ask--'
+
+"'I see!' exclaimed the doctor, anticipating me. 'Mr. Bashwood
+has nothing to do but to help the truth with a touch of fiction.
+When he tells his master that the false report has reached Miss
+Milroy, he has only to add that the shock has affected her head,
+and that she is here under medical care. Perfect! perfect! We
+shall have him at the Sanitarium as fast as the fastest cab-horse
+in London can bring him to us. And mind! no risk--no necessity
+for trusting other people. This is not a mad-house; this is not
+a licensed establishment; no doctors' certificates are necessary
+here! My dear lady, I congratulate you; I congratulate myself.
+Permit me to hand you the railway guide, with my best compliments
+to Mr. Bashwood, and with the page turned down for him, as an
+additional attention, at the right place.'
+
+"Remembering how long I had kept Bashwood waiting for me, I took
+the book at once, and wished the doctor good-evening without
+further ceremony. As he politely opened the door for me, he
+reverted, without the slightest necessity for doing so, and
+without a word from me to lead to it, to the outburst of virtuous
+alarm which had escaped him at the earlier part of our interview.
+
+"'I do hope,' he said, 'that you will kindly forget and forgive
+my extraordinary want of tact and perception when--in short,
+when I caught the fly. I positively blush at my own stupidity
+in putting a literal interpretation on a lady's little joke!
+Violence in My Sanitarium!' exclaimed the doctor, with his eyes
+once more fixed attentively on my face--'violence in this
+enlightened nineteenth century! Was there ever anything so
+ridiculous? Do fasten your cloak before you go out, it is so
+cold and raw! Shall I escort you? Shall I send my servant? Ah,
+you were always independent! always, if I may say so, a host
+in yourself! May I call to-morrow morning, and hear what you
+have settled with Mr. Bashwood?'
+
+"I said yes, and got away from him at last. In a quarter of
+an hour more I was back at my lodgings, and was informed by
+the servant that 'the elderly gentleman' was still waiting
+for me.
+
+"I have not got the heart or the patience--I hardly know
+which--to waste many words on what passed between me and
+Bashwood. It was so easy, so degradingly easy, to pull the
+strings of the poor old puppet in any way I pleased! I met none
+of the difficulties which I should have been obliged to meet
+in the case of a younger man, or of a man less infatuated
+with admiration for me. I left the allusions to Miss Milroy
+in Armadale's letter, which had naturally puzzled him, to be
+explained at a future time. I never even troubled myself to
+invent a plausible reason for wishing him to meet Armadale at
+the terminus, and to entrap him by a stratagem into the doctor's
+Sanitarium. All that I found it necessary to do was to refer
+to what I had written to Mr. Bashwood, on my arrival in London,
+and to what I had afterward said to him, when he came to answer
+my letter personally at the hotel.
+
+"'You know already,' I said, 'that my marriage has not been a
+happy one. Draw your own conclusions from that; and don't press
+me to tell you whether the news of Mr. Armadale's rescue from the
+sea is, or is not, the welcome news that it ought to be to his
+wife!' That was enough to put his withered old face in a glow,
+and to set his withered old hopes growing again. I had only
+to add, 'If you will do what I ask you to do, no matter how
+incomprehensible and how mysterious my request may seem to be;
+and if you will accept my assurances that you shall run no risk
+yourself, and that you shall receive the proper explanations at
+the proper time, you will have such a claim on my gratitude and
+my regard as no man living has ever had yet!' I had only to say
+those words, and to point them by a look and a stolen pressure
+of his hand, and I had him at my feet, blindly eager to obey me.
+If he could have seen what I thought of myself; but that doesn't
+matter: he saw nothing.
+
+"Hours have passed since I sent him away (pledged to secrecy,
+possessed of his instructions, and provided with his time-table)
+to the hotel near the terminus, at which he is to stay till
+Armadale appears on the railway platform. The excitement of
+the earlier part of the evening has all worn off; and the dull,
+numbed sensation has got me again. Are my energies wearing out,
+I wonder, just at the time when I most want them? Or is some
+foreshadowing of disaster creeping over me which I don't yet
+understand?
+
+"I might be in a humor to sit here for some time longer, thinking
+thoughts like these, and letting them find their way into words
+at their own will and pleasure, if my Diary would only let me.
+But my idle pen has been busy enough to make its way to the end
+of the volume. I have reached the last morsel of space left on
+the last page; and whether I like it or not, I must close the
+book this time for good and all, when I close it to-night.
+
+"Good-by, my old friend and companion of many a miserable day!
+Having nothing else to be fond of, I half suspect myself of
+having been unreasonably fond of _you_.
+
+"What a fool I am!"
+
+THE END OF THE FOURTH BOOK.
+
+BOOK THE LAST.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AT THE TERMINUS.
+
+
+On the night of the 2d of December, Mr. Bashwood took up his post
+of observation at the terminus of the South-eastern Railway for
+the first time. It was an earlier date, by six days, than the
+date which Allan had himself fixed for his return. But the
+doctor, taking counsel of his medical experience, had considered
+it just probable that "Mr. Armadale might be perverse enough,
+at his enviable age, to recover sooner than his medical advisers
+might have anticipated." For caution's sake, therefore, Mr.
+Bashwood was instructed to begin watching the arrival of the
+tidal trains on the day after he had received his employer's
+letter.
+
+From the 2d to the 7th of December, the steward waited punctually
+on the platform, saw the trains come in, and satisfied himself,
+evening after evening, that the travelers were all strangers to
+him. From the 2d to the 7th of December, Miss Gwilt (to return to
+the name under which she is best known in these pages) received
+his daily report, sometimes delivered personally, sometimes sent
+by letter. The doctor, to whom the reports were communicated,
+received them in his turn with unabated confidence in the
+precautions that had been adopted up to the morning of the 8th.
+On that date the irritation of continued suspense had produced a
+change for the worse in Miss Gwilt's variable temper, which was
+perceptible to every one about her, and which, strangely enough,
+was reflected by an equally marked change in the doctor's
+manner when he came to pay his usual visit. By a coincidence
+so extraordinary that his enemies might have suspected it of not
+being a coincidence at all, the morning on which Miss Gwilt lost
+her patience proved to be also the morning on which the doctor
+lost his confidence for the first time.
+
+"No news, of course," he said, sitting down with a heavy sigh.
+"Well! well!"
+
+Miss Gwilt looked up at him irritably from her work.
+
+"You seem strangely depressed this morning," she said. "What are
+you afraid of now?"
+
+"The imputation of being afraid, madam," answered the doctor,
+solemnly, "is not an imputation to cast rashly on any man--even
+when he belongs to such an essentially peaceful profession as
+mine. I am not afraid. I am (as you more correctly put it in
+the first instance) strangely depressed. My nature is, as you
+know, naturally sanguine, and I only see to-day what but for
+my habitual hopefulness I might have seen, and ought to have
+seen, a week since."
+
+Miss Gwilt impatiently threw down her work. "If words cost
+money," she said, "the luxury of talking would be rather an
+expensive luxury in your case!"
+
+"Which I might have seen, and ought to have seen," reiterated the
+doctor, without taking the slightest notice of the interruption,
+"a week since. To put it plainly, I feel by no means so certain
+as I did that Mr. Armadale will consent, without a struggle, to
+the terms which it is my interest (and in a minor degree yours)
+to impose on him. Observe! I don't question our entrapping him
+successfully into the Sanitarium: I only doubt whether he will
+prove quite as manageable as I originally anticipated when we
+have got him there. Say," remarked the doctor, raising his eyes
+for the first time, and fixing them in steady inquiry on Miss
+Gwilt--"say that he is bold, obstinate, what you please; and that
+he holds out--holds out for weeks together, for months together,
+as men in similar situations to his have held out before him.
+What follows? The risk of keeping him forcibly in concealment--of
+suppressing him, if I may so express myself--increases at
+compound interest, and becomes Enormous! My house is at this
+moment virtually ready for patients. Patients may present
+themselves in a week's time. Patients may communicate with Mr.
+Armadale, or Mr. Armadale may communicate with patients. A note
+may be smuggled out of the house, and may reach the Commissioners
+in Lunacy. Even in the case of an unlicensed establishment like
+mine, those gentlemen--no! those chartered despots in a land of
+liberty--have only to apply to the Lord Chancellor for an order,
+and to enter (by heavens, to enter My Sanitarium!) and search the
+house from top to bottom at a moment's notice! I don't wish to
+despond; I don't wish to alarm you; I don't pretend to say that
+the means we are taking to secure your own safety are any other
+than the best means at our disposal. All I ask you to do is to
+imagine the Commissioners in the house--and then to conceive the
+consequences. The consequences!" repeated the doctor, getting
+sternly on his feet, and taking up his hat as if he meant to
+leave the room.
+
+"Have you anything more to say?" asked Miss Gwilt.
+
+"Have you any remarks," rejoined the doctor, "to offer on your
+side?"
+
+He stood, hat in hand, waiting. For a full minute the two looked
+at each other in silence.
+
+Miss Gwilt spoke first.
+
+"I think I understand you," she said, suddenly recovering her
+composure.
+
+"I beg your pardon," returned the doctor, with his hand to
+his ear. "What did you say?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"If you happened to catch another fly this morning," said Miss
+Gwilt, with a bitterly sarcastic emphasis on the words, "I might
+be capable of shocking you by another 'little joke.'"
+
+The doctor held up both hands, in polite deprecation, and looked
+as if he was beginning to recover his good humor again.
+
+"Hard," he murmured, gently, "not to have forgiven me that
+unlucky blunder of mine, even yet!"
+
+"What else have you to say? I am waiting for you," said Miss
+Gwilt. She turned her chair to the window scornfully, and took up
+her work again, as she spoke.
+
+The doctor came behind her, and put his hand on the back of
+her chair.
+
+"I have a question to ask, in the first place," he said; "and
+a measure of necessary precaution to suggest, in the second. If
+you will honor me with your attention, I will put the question
+first."
+
+"I am listening."
+
+"You know that Mr. Armadale is alive," pursued the doctor, "and
+you know that he is coming back to England. Why do you continue
+to wear your widow's dress?"
+
+She answered him without an instant's hesitation, steadily going
+on with her work.
+
+"Because I am of a sanguine disposition, like you. I mean to
+trust to the chapter of accidents to the very last. Mr. Armadale
+may die yet, on his way home."
+
+"And suppose he gets home alive--what then?"
+
+"Then there is another chance still left."
+
+"What is it, pray?"
+
+"He may die in your Sanitarium."
+
+"Madam!" remonstrated the doctor, in the deep bass which he
+reserved for his outbursts of virtuous indignation. "Wait! you
+spoke of the chapter of accidents," he resumed, gliding back
+into his softer conversational tones. "Yes! yes! of course.
+I understand you this time. Even the healing art is at the mercy
+of accidents; even such a Sanitarium as mine is liable to be
+surprised by Death. Just so! just so!" said the doctor, conceding
+the question with the utmost impartiality. "There _is_ the
+chapter of accidents, I admit--if you choose to trust to it.
+Mind! I say emphatically, _if_ you choose to trust to it."
+
+There was another moment of silence--silence so profound that
+nothing was audible in the room but the rapid _click_ of Miss
+Gwilt's needle through her work.
+
+"Go on," she said; "you haven't done yet."
+
+"True!" said the doctor. "Having put my question, I have my
+measure of precaution to impress on you next. You will see,
+my dear madam, that I am not disposed to trust to the chapter
+of accidents on my side. Reflection has convinced me that you
+and I are not (logically speaking) so conveniently situated
+as we might be in case of emergency. Cabs are, as yet, rare in
+this rapidly improving neighborhood. I am twenty minutes' walk
+from you; you are twenty minutes' walk from me. I know nothing
+of Mr. Armadale's character; you know it well. It might be
+necessary--vitally necessary--to appeal to your superior
+knowledge of him at a moment's notice. And how am I to do that
+unless we are within easy reach of each other, under the same
+roof? In both our interests, I beg to invite you, my dear madam,
+to become for a limited period an inmate of My Sanitarium."
+
+Miss Gwilt's rapid needle suddenly stopped. "I understand you,"
+she said again, as quietly as before.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the doctor, with another attack
+of deafness, and with his hand once more at his ear.
+
+She laughed to herself--a low, terrible laugh, which startled
+even the doctor into taking his hand off the back of her chair.
+
+"An inmate of your Sanitarium?" she repeated. "You consult
+appearances in everything else; do you propose to consult
+appearances in receiving me into your house?"
+
+"Most assuredly!" replied the doctor, with enthusiasm. "I am
+surprised at your asking me the question! Did you ever know
+a man of any eminence in my profession who set appearances
+at defiance? If you honor me by accepting my invitation, you
+enter My Sanitarium in the most unimpeachable of all possible
+characters--in the character of a Patient."
+
+"When do you want my answer?"
+
+"Can you decide to-day?"
+
+"To-morrow?"
+
+"Yes. Have you anything more to say?"
+
+"Nothing more."
+
+"Leave me, then. _I_ don't keep up appearances. I wish to be
+alone, and I say so. Good-morning."
+
+"Oh, the sex! the sex!" said the doctor, with his excellent
+temper in perfect working order again. "So delightfully
+impulsive! so charmingly reckless of what they say or how they
+say it! 'Oh, woman, in our hours of ease, uncertain, coy, and
+hard to please!' There! there! there! Good-morning!"
+
+Miss Gwilt rose and looked after him contemptuously from
+the window, when the street door had closed, and he had left
+the house.
+
+"Armadale himself drove me to it the first time," she said.
+"Manuel drove me to it the second time.--You cowardly scoundrel!
+shall I let _you_ drive me to it for the third time, and the
+last?"
+
+She turned from the window, and looked thoughtfully at her
+widow's dress in the glass.
+
+The hours of the day passed--and she decided nothing. The night
+came--and she hesitated still. The new morning dawned--and the
+terrible question was still unanswered.
+
+By the early post there came a letter for her. It was Mr.
+Bashwood's usual report. Again he had watched for Allan's
+arrival, and again in vain.
+
+"I'll have more time!" she determined, passionately. "No man
+alive shall hurry me faster than I like!"
+
+At breakfast that morning (the morning of the 9th) the doctor
+was surprised in his study by a visit from Miss Gwilt.
+
+"I want another day," she said, the moment the servant had closed
+the door on her.
+
+The doctor looked at her before he answered, and saw the danger
+of driving her to extremities plainly expressed in her face.
+
+"The time is getting on," he remonstrated, in his most persuasive
+manner. "For all we know to the contrary, Mr. Armadale may be
+here to-night."
+
+"I want another day!" she repeated, loudly and passionately.
+
+"Granted!" said the doctor, looking nervously toward the door.
+"Don't be too loud--the servants may hear you. Mind!" he added,
+"I depend on your honor not to press me for any further delay."
+
+"You had better depend on my despair," she said, and left him.
+
+The doctor chipped the shell of his egg, and laughed softly.
+
+"Quite right, my dear!" he thought. "I remember where your
+despair led you in past times; and I think I may trust it
+to lead you the same way now." 
+
+At a quarter to eight o'clock that night Mr. Bashwood took up his
+post of observation, as usual, on the platform of the terminus at
+London Bridge. He was in the highest good spirits; he smiled and
+smirked in irrepressible exultation. The sense that he held in
+reserve a means of influence over Miss Gwilt, in virtue of his
+knowledge of her past career, had had no share in effecting
+the transformation that now appeared in him. It had upheld his
+courage in his forlorn life at Thorpe Ambrose, and it had given
+him that increased confidence of manner which Miss Gwilt herself
+had noticed; but, from the moment when he had regained his old
+place in her favor, it had vanished as a motive power in him,
+annihilated by the electric shock of her touch and her look.
+His vanity--the vanity which in men at his age is only despair
+in disguise--had now lifted him to the seventh heaven of fatuous
+happiness once more. He believed in her again as he believed in
+the smart new winter overcoat that he wore--as he believed in
+the dainty little cane (appropriate to the dawning dandyism of
+lads in their teens) that he flourished in his hand. He hummed!
+The worn-out old creature, who had not sung since his childhood,
+hummed, as he paced the platform, the few fragments he could
+remember of a worn-out old song.
+
+The train was due as early as eight o'clock that night. At five
+minutes past the hour the whistle sounded. In less than five
+minutes more the passengers were getting out on the platform.
+
+Following the instructions that had been given to him, Mr.
+Bashwood made his way, as well as the crowd would let him, along
+the line of carriages, and, discovering no familiar face on that
+first investigation, joined the passengers for a second search
+among them in the custom-house waiting-room next.
+
+He had looked round the room, and had satisfied himself that the
+persons occupying it were all strangers, when he heard a voice
+behind him, exclaiming: "Can that be Mr. Bashwood!" He turned in
+eager expectation, and found himself face to face with the last
+man under heaven whom he had expected to see.
+
+The man was MIDWINTER.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+IN THE HOUSE.
+
+
+Noticing Mr. Bashwood's confusion (after a moment's glance at
+the change in his personal appearance), Midwinter spoke first.
+
+"I see I have surprised you," he said. "You are looking,
+I suppose, for somebody else? Have you heard from Allan? Is he
+on his way home again already?"
+
+The inquiry about Allan, though it would naturally have suggested
+itself to any one in Midwinter's position at that moment, added
+to Mr. Bashwood's confusion. Not knowing how else to extricate
+himself from the critical position in which he was placed, he
+took refuge in simple denial.
+
+"I know nothing about Mr. Armadale--oh dear, no, sir, I know
+nothing about Mr. Armadale," he answered, with needless eagerness
+and hurry. "Welcome back to England, sir," he went on, changing
+the subject in his nervously talkative manner. "I didn't know
+you had been abroad. It's so long since we have had the
+pleasure--since I have had the pleasure. Have you enjoyed
+yourself, sir, in foreign parts? Such different manners from
+ours--yes, yes, yes--such different manners from ours! Do you
+make a long stay in England, now you have come back?"
+
+"I hardly know," said Midwinter. "I have been obliged to alter
+my plans, and to come to England unexpectedly." He hesitated
+a little; his manner changed, and he added, in lower tones:
+"A serious anxiety has brought me back. I can't say what my plans
+will be until that anxiety is set at rest."
+
+The light of a lamp fell on his face while he spoke, and Mr.
+Bashwood observed, for the first time, that he looked sadly worn
+and changed.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir--I'm sure I'm very sorry. If I could be of any
+use--" suggested Mr. Bashwood, speaking under the influence in
+some degree of his nervous politeness, and in some degree of his
+remembrance of what Midwinter had done for him at Thorpe Ambrose
+in the by-gone time.
+
+Midwinter thanked him and turned away sadly. "I am afraid you
+can be of no use, Mr. Bashwood--but I am obliged to you for
+your offer, all the same." He stopped, and considered a little,
+"Suppose she should _not_ be ill? Suppose some misfortune should
+have happened?" he resumed, speaking to himself, and turning
+again toward the steward. "If she has left her mother, some trace
+of her _might_ be found by inquiring at Thorpe Ambrose."
+
+Mr. Bashwood's curiosity was instantly aroused. The whole sex
+was interesting to him now, for the sake of Miss Gwilt.
+
+"A lady, sir?" he inquired. "Are you looking for a lady?"
+
+"I am looking," said Midwinter, simply, "for my wife."
+
+"Married, sir!" exclaimed Mr. Bashwood. "Married since I last
+had the pleasure of seeing you! Might I take the liberty of
+asking--?"
+
+Midwinter's eyes dropped uneasily to the ground.
+
+"You knew the lady in former times," he said. "I have married
+Miss Gwilt."
+
+The steward started back as he might have started back from
+a loaded pistol leveled at his head. His eyes glared as if he
+had suddenly lost his senses, and the nervous trembling to which
+he was subject shook him from head to foot.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Midwinter. There was no answer. "What
+is there so very startling," he went on, a little impatiently,
+"in Miss Gwilt's being my wife?"
+
+"_Your_ wife?" repeated Mr. Bashwood, helplessly. "Mrs.
+Armadale--!" He checked himself by a desperate effort, and
+said no more.
+
+The stupor of astonishment which possessed the steward was
+instantly reflected in Midwinter's face. The name in which he
+had secretly married his wife had passed the lips of the last
+man in the world whom he would have dreamed of admitting into
+his confidence! He took Mr. Bashwood by the arm, and led him away
+to a quieter part of the terminus than the part of it in which
+they had hitherto spoken to each other.
+
+"You referred to my wife just now," he said; "and you spoke of
+_Mrs. Armadale_ in the same breath. What do you mean by that?"
+
+Again there was no answer. Utterly incapable of understanding
+more than that he had involved himself in some serious
+complication which was a complete mystery to him, Mr. Bashwood
+struggled to extricate himself from the grasp that was laid
+on him, and struggled in vain.
+
+Midwinter sternly repeated the question. "I ask you again,"
+he said, "what do you mean by it?"
+
+"Nothing, sir! I give you my word of honor, I meant nothing!"
+He felt the hand on his arm tightening its grasp; he saw, even
+in the obscurity of the remote corner in which they stood, that
+Midwinter's fiery temper was rising, and was not to be trifled
+with. The extremity of his danger inspired him with the one ready
+capacity that a timid man possesses when he is compelled by main
+force to face an emergency--the capacity to lie. "I only meant
+to say, sir," he burst out, with a desperate effort to look and
+speak confidently, "that Mr. Armadale would be surprised--"
+
+"You said _Mrs._ Armadale!"
+
+"No, sir--on my word of honor, on my sacred word of honor, you
+are mistaken--you are, indeed! I said _Mr._ Armadale--how could
+I say anything else? Please to let me go, sir--I'm pressed for
+time. I do assure you I'm dreadfully pressed for time!"
+
+For a moment longer Midwinter maintained his hold, and in
+that moment he decided what to do.
+
+He had accurately stated his motive for returning to England as
+proceeding from anxiety about his wife--anxiety naturally caused
+(after the regular receipt of a letter from her every other, or
+every third day) by the sudden cessation of the correspondence
+between them on her side for a whole week. The first vaguely
+terrible suspicion of some other reason for her silence than
+the reason of accident or of illness, to which he had hitherto
+attributed it, had struck through him like a sudden chill
+the instant he heard the steward associate the name of "Mrs.
+Armadale" with the idea of his wife. Little irregularities in
+her correspondence with him, which he had thus far only thought
+strange, now came back on his mind, and proclaimed themselves
+to be suspicions as well. He had hitherto believed the reasons
+she had given for referring him, when he answered her letters,
+to no more definite address than an address at a post-office.
+_Now_ he suspected her reasons of being excuses, for the first
+time. He had hitherto resolved, on reaching London, to inquire
+at the only place he knew of at which a clew to her could be
+found--the address she had given him as the address at which
+"her mother" lived. _Now_ (with a motive which he was afraid to
+define even to himself, but which was strong enough to overbear
+every other consideration in his mind) he determined, before all
+things, to solve the mystery of Mr. Bashwood's familiarity with
+a secret, which was a marriage secret between himself and his
+wife. Any direct appeal to a man of the steward's disposition,
+in the steward's present state of mind, would be evidently
+useless. The weapon of deception was, in this case, a weapon
+literally forced into Midwinter's hands. He let go of Mr.
+Bashwood's arm, and accepted Mr. Bashwood's explanation.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said; "I have no doubt you are right.
+Pray attribute my rudeness to over-anxiety and over-fatigue.
+I wish you good-evening."
+
+The station was by this time almost a solitude, the passengers
+by the train being assembled at the examination of their luggage
+in the custom-house waiting-room. It was no easy matter,
+ostensibly to take leave of Mr. Bashwood, and really to keep him
+in view. But Midwinter's early life with the gypsy master had
+been of a nature to practice him in such stratagems as he was
+now compelled to adopt. He walked away toward the waiting-room
+by the line of empty carriages; opened the door of one of them,
+as if to look after something that he had left behind, and
+detected Mr. Bashwood making for the cab-rank on the opposite
+side of the platform. In an instant Midwinter had crossed, and
+had passed through the long row of vehicles, so as to skirt it
+on the side furthest from the platform. He entered the second cab
+by the left-hand door the moment after Mr. Bashwood had entered
+the first cab by the right-hand door. "Double your fare, whatever
+it is," he said to the driver, "if you keep the cab before you
+in view, and follow it wherever it goes." In a minute more both
+vehicles were on their way out of the station.
+
+The clerk sat in the sentry-box at the gate, taking down
+the destinations of the cabs as they passed. Midwinter heard
+the man who was driving him call out "Hampstead!" as he went
+by the clerk's window.
+
+"Why did you say 'Hampstead'?" he asked, when they had left
+the station.
+
+"Because the man before me said 'Hampstead,' sir," answered
+the driver.
+
+Over and over again, on the wearisome journey to the northwestern
+suburb, Midwinter asked if the cab was still in sight. Over and
+over again, the man answered, "Right in front of us."
+
+It was between nine and ten o'clock when the driver pulled up
+his horse at last. Midwinter got out, and saw the cab before them
+waiting at a house door. As soon as he had satisfied himself
+that the driver was the man whom Mr. Bashwood had hired, he paid
+the promised reward, and dismissed his own cab.
+
+He took a turn backward and forward before the door. The vaguely
+terrible suspicion which had risen in his mind at the terminus
+had forced itself by this time into a definite form which was
+abhorrent to him. Without the shadow of an assignable reason for
+it, he found himself blindly distrusting his wife's fidelity, and
+blindly suspecting Mr. Bashwood of serving her in the capacity
+of go-between. In sheer horror of his own morbid fancy, he
+determined to take down the number of the house, and the name
+of the street in which it stood; and then, in justice to his
+wife, to return at once to the address which she had given him
+as the address at which her mother lived. He had taken out his
+pocket-book, and was on his way to the corner of the street,
+when he observed the man who had driven Mr. Bashwood looking
+at him with an expression of inquisitive surprise. The idea
+of questioning the cab-driver, while he had the opportunity,
+instantly occurred to him. He took a half-crown from his pocket
+and put it into the man's ready hand.
+
+"Has the gentleman whom you drove from the station gone into
+that house?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Did you hear him inquire for anybody when the door was opened?"
+
+"He asked for a lady, sir. Mrs.--" The man hesitated. "It wasn't
+a common name, sir; I should know it again if I heard it."
+
+"Was it 'Midwinter'?"
+
+"No, sir.
+
+"Armadale?"
+
+"That's it, sir. Mrs. Armadale."
+
+"Are you sure it was 'Mrs.' and not 'Mr.'?"
+
+"I'm as sure as a man can be who hasn't taken any particular
+notice, sir.
+
+The doubt implied in that last answer decided Midwinter to
+investigate the matter on the spot. He ascended the house steps.
+As he raised his hand to the bell at the side of the door, the
+violence of his agitation mastered him physically for the moment.
+A strange sensation, as of something leaping up from his heart
+to his brain, turned his head wildly giddy. He held by the house
+railings and kept his face to the air, and resolutely waited till
+he was steady again. Then he rang the bell.
+
+"Is?"--he tried to ask for "Mrs. Armadale," when the maid-servant
+had opened the door, but not even his resolution could force
+the name to pass his lips--"is your mistress at home?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The girl showed him into a back parlor, and presented him to
+a little old lady, with an obliging manner and a bright pair
+of eyes.
+
+"There is some mistake," said Midwinter. "I wished to see--"
+Once more he tried to utter the name, and once more he failed
+to force it to his lips.
+
+"Mrs. Armadale?" suggested the little old lady, with a smile.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Show the gentleman upstairs, Jenny."
+
+The girl led the way to the drawing-room floor.
+
+"Any name, sir?"
+
+"No name."
+
+
+Mr. Bashwood had barely completed his report of what had happened
+at the terminus; Mr. Bashwood's imperious mistress was still
+sitting speechless under the shock of the discovery that had
+burst on her--when the door of the room opened; and, without
+a word of warning to proceed him, Midwinter appeared on the
+threshold. He took one step into the room, and mechanically
+pushed the door to behind him. He stood in dead silence, and
+confronted his wife, with a scrutiny that was terrible in its
+unnatural self-possession, and that enveloped her steadily in
+one comprehensive look from head to foot.
+
+In dead silence on her side, she rose from her chair, In dead
+silence she stood erect on the hearth-rug, and faced her husband
+in widow's weeds. He took one step nearer to her, and stopped
+again. He lifted his hand, and pointed with his lean brown finger
+at her dress.
+
+"What does that mean?" he asked, without losing his terrible
+self-possession, and without moving his outstretched hand.
+
+At the sound of his voice, the quick rise and fall of her
+bosom--which had been the one outward betrayal thus far of
+the inner agony that tortured her--suddenly stopped. She stood
+impenetrably silent, breathlessly still--as if his question had
+struck her dead, and his pointing hand had petrified her.
+
+He advanced one step nearer, and reiterated his words in a voice
+even lower and quieter than the voice in which he had spoken
+first.
+
+One moment more of silence, one moment more of inaction, might
+have been the salvation of her. But the fatal force of her
+character triumphed at the crisis of her destiny, and his. White
+and still, and haggard and old, she met the dreadful emergency
+with a dreadful courage, and spoke the irrevocable words which
+renounced him to his face.
+
+"Mr. Midwinter," she said, in tones unnaturally hard and
+unnaturally clear, "our acquaintance hardly entitles you to speak
+to me in that manner." Those were her words. She never lifted
+her eyes from the ground while she spoke them. When she had done,
+the last faint vestige of color in her cheeks faded out.
+
+There was a pause. Still steadily looking at her, he set himself
+to fix the language she had used to him in his mind. "She calls
+me 'Mr. Midwinter,'" he said, slowly, in a whisper. "She speaks
+of 'our acquaintance.'" He waited a little and looked round the
+room. His wandering eyes encountered Mr. Bashwood for the first
+time. He saw the steward standing near the fireplace, trembling,
+and watching him.
+
+"I once did you a service," he said; "and you once told me you
+were not an ungrateful man. Are you grateful enough to answer me
+if I ask you something?"
+
+He waited a little again. Mr. Bashwood still stood trembling
+at the fireplace, silently watching him.
+
+"I see you looking at me," he went on. "Is there some change in
+me that I am not conscious of myself? Am I seeing things that you
+don't see? Am I hearing words that you don't hear? Am I looking
+or speaking like a man out of his senses?"
+
+Again he waited, and again the silence was unbroken. His eyes
+began to glitter; and the savage blood that he had inherited
+from his mother rose dark and slow in his ashy cheeks.
+
+"Is that woman," he asked, "the woman whom you once knew,
+whose name was Miss Gwilt?"
+
+Once more his wife collected her fatal courage. Once more
+his wife spoke her fatal words.
+
+"You compel me to repeat," she said, "that you are presuming
+on our acquaintance, and that you are forgetting what is due
+to me."
+
+He turned upon her, with a savage suddenness which forced a cry
+of alarm from Mr. Bashwood's lips.
+
+"Are you, or are you not, My Wife?" he asked, through his set
+teeth.
+
+She raised her eyes to his for the first time. Her lost spirit
+looked at him, steadily defiant, out of the hell of its own
+despair.
+
+"I am _not_ your wife," she said.
+
+He staggered back, with his hands groping for something to hold
+by, like the hands of a man in the dark. He leaned heavily
+against the wall of the room, and looked at the woman who had
+slept on his bosom, and who had denied him to his face.
+
+Mr. Bashwood stole panic-stricken to her side. "Go in there!" he
+whispered, trying to draw her toward the folding-doors which led
+into the next room. "For God's sake, be quick! He'll kill you!"
+
+She put the old man back with her hand. She looked at him with
+a sudden irradiation of her blank face. She answered him with
+lips that struggled slowly into a frightful smile.
+
+"_Let_ him kill me," she said.
+
+As the words passed her lips, he sprang forward from the wall,
+with a cry that rang through the house. The frenzy of a maddened
+man flashed at her from his glassy eyes, and clutched at her in
+his threatening hands. He came on till he was within arms-length
+of her--and suddenly stood still. The black flush died out
+of his face in the instant when he stopped. His eyelids fell,
+his outstretched hands wavered and sank helpless. He dropped,
+as the dead drop. He lay as the dead lie, in the arms of the wife
+who had denied him.
+
+She knelt on the floor, and rested his head on her knee. She
+caught the arm of the steward hurrying to help her, with a hand
+that closed round it like a vise. "Go for a doctor," she said,
+"and keep the people of the house away till he comes." There was
+that in her eye, there was that in her voice, which would have
+warned any man living to obey her in silence. In silence Mr.
+Bashwood submitted, and hurried out of the room.
+
+The instant she was alone she raised him from her knee. With both
+arms clasped round him, the miserable woman lifted his lifeless
+face to hers and rocked him on her bosom in an agony of
+tenderness beyond all relief in tears, in a passion of remorse
+beyond all expression in words. In silence she held him to her
+breast, in silence she devoured his forehead, his cheeks,
+his lips, with kisses. Not a sound escaped her till she heard
+the trampling footsteps outside, hurrying up the stairs. Then
+a low moan burst from her lips, as she looked her last at him,
+and lowered his head again to her knee, before the strangers
+came in.
+
+The landlady and the steward were the first persons whom she saw
+when the door was opened. The medical man (a surgeon living in
+the street) followed. The horror and the beauty of her face as
+she looked up at him absorbed the surgeon's attention for the
+moment, to the exclusion of everything else. She had to beckon
+to him, she had to point to the senseless man, before she could
+claim his attention for his patient and divert it from herself.
+
+"Is he dead?" she asked.
+
+The surgeon carried Midwinter to the sofa, and ordered
+the windows to be opened. "It is a fainting fit," he said;
+"nothing more."
+
+At that answer her strength failed her for the first time. She
+drew a deep breath of relief, and leaned on the chimney-piece
+for support. Mr. Bashwood was the only person present who noticed
+that she was overcome. He led her to the opposite end of the
+room, where there was an easy-chair, leaving the landlady to hand
+the restoratives to the surgeon as they were wanted.
+
+"Are you going to wait here till he recovers?" whispered the
+steward, looking toward the sofa, and trembling as he looked.
+
+The question forced her to a sense of her position--to a
+knowledge of the merciless necessities which that position now
+forced her to confront. With a heavy sigh she looked toward
+the sofa, considered with herself for a moment, and answered Mr.
+Bashwood's inquiry by a question on her side.
+
+"Is the cab that brought you here from the railway still at
+the door?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Drive at once to the gates of the Sanitarium, and wait there
+till I join you."
+
+Mr. Bashwood hesitated. She lifted her eyes to his, and, with
+a look, sent him out of the room.
+
+"The gentleman is coming to, ma'am," said the landlady, as
+the steward closed the door. "He has just breathed again."
+
+She bowed in mute reply, rose, and considered with herself once
+more--looked toward the sofa for the second time--then passed
+through the folding-doors into her own room.
+
+After a short lapse of time the surgeon drew back from the sofa
+and motioned to the landlady to stand aside. The bodily recovery
+of the patient was assured. There was nothing to be done now but
+to wait, and let his mind slowly recall its sense of what had
+happened.
+
+"Where is she?" were the first words he said to the surgeon,
+and the landlady anxiously watching him.
+
+The landlady knocked at the folding-doors, and received no
+answer. She went in, and found the room empty. A sheet of
+note-paper was on the dressing-table, with the doctor's fee
+placed on it. The paper contained these lines, evidently written
+in great agitation or in great haste: "It is impossible for me
+to remain here to-night, after what has happened. I will return
+to-morrow to take away my luggage, and to pay what I owe you."
+
+"Where is she?" Midwinter asked again, when the landlady returned
+alone to the drawing-room.
+
+"Gone, sir."
+
+"I don't believe it!"
+
+The old lady's color rose. "If you know her handwriting, sir,"
+she answered, handing him the sheet of note-paper, "perhaps you
+may believe _that_?"
+
+He looked at the paper. "I beg your pardon, ma'am," he said,
+as he handed it back--"I beg your pardon, with all my heart."
+
+There was something in his face as he spoke those words which
+more than soothed the old lady's irritation: it touched her
+with a sudden pity for the man who had offended her. "I am afraid
+there is some dreadful trouble, sir, at the bottom of all this,"
+she said, simply. "Do you wish me to give any message to the lady
+when she comes back?"
+
+Midwinter rose and steadied himself for a moment against
+the sofa. "I will bring my own message to-morrow," he said.
+"I must see her before she leaves your house."
+
+The surgeon accompanied his patient into the street. "Can I see
+you home?" he said, kindly. "You had better not walk, if it is
+far. You mustn't overexert yourself; you mustn't catch a chill
+this cold night."
+
+Midwinter took his hand and thanked him. "I have been used to
+hard walking and cold nights, sir," he said; "and I am not easily
+worn out, even when I look so broken as I do now. If you will
+tell me the nearest way out of these streets, I think the quiet
+of the country and the quiet of the night will help me. I have
+something serious to do to-morrow," he added, in a lower tone;
+"and I can't rest or sleep till I have thought over it to-night."
+
+The surgeon understood that he had no common man to deal with.
+He gave the necessary directions without any further remark,
+and parted with his patient at his own door.
+
+Left by himself, Midwinter paused, and looked up at the heavens
+in silence. The night had cleared, and the stars were out--the
+stars which he had first learned to know from his gypsy master on
+the hillside. For the first time his mind went back regretfully
+to his boyish days. "Oh, for the old life!" he thought,
+longingly. "I never knew till now how happy the old life was!"
+
+He roused himself, and went on toward the open country. His face
+darkened as he left the streets behind him and advanced into the
+solitude and obscurity that lay beyond.
+
+"She has denied her husband to-night," he said. "She shall know
+her master to-morrow."
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE PURPLE FLASK.
+
+
+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 tonight? 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 we ary 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
+windowsill 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.
+
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+NEWS FROM NORFOLK.
+
+_From Mr. Pedgift, Senior (Thorpe Ambrose), to Mr. Pedgift,
+Junior (Paris)_.
+
+"High Street, December 20th.
+
+"MY DEAR AUGUSTUS--Your letter reached me yesterday. You seem
+to be making the most of your youth (as you call it) with a
+vengeance. Well! enjoy your holiday. I made the most of my youth
+when I was your age; and, wonderful to relate, I haven't
+forgotten it yet!
+
+"You ask me for a good budget of news, and especially for more
+information about that mysterious business at the Sanitarium.
+
+"Curiosity, my dear boy, is a quality which (in our profession
+especially) sometimes leads to great results. I doubt, however,
+if you will find it leading to much on this occasion. All I know
+of the mystery of the Sanitarium, I know from Mr. Armadale: and
+he is entirely in the dark on more than one point of importance.
+I have already told you how they were entrapped into the house,
+and how they passed the night there. To this I can now add that
+something did certainly happen to Mr. Midwinter, which deprived
+him of consciousness; and that the doctor, who appears to have
+been mixed up in the matter, carried things with a high hand, and
+insisted on taking his own course in his own Sanitarium. There is
+not the least doubt that the miserable woman (however she might
+have come by her death) was found dead--that a coroner's inquest
+inquired into the circumstances--that the evidence showed her
+to have entered the house as a patient--and that the medical
+investigation ended in discovering that she had died of apoplexy.
+My idea is that Mr. Midwinter had a motive of his own for not
+coming forward with the evidence that he might have given. I have
+also reason to suspect that Mr. Armadale, out of regard for him,
+followed his lead, and that the verdict at the inquest (attaching
+no blame to anybody) proceeded, like many other verdicts of the
+same kind, from an entirely superficial investigation of the
+circumstances.
+
+"The key to the whole mystery is to be found, I firmly believe,
+in that wretched woman's attempt to personate the character of
+Mr. Armadale's widow when the news of his death appeared in the
+papers. But what first set her on this, and by what inconceivable
+process of deception she can have induced Mr. Midwinter to marry
+her (as the certificate proves) under Mr. Armadale's name, is
+more than Mr. Armadale himself knows. The point was not touched
+at the inquest, for the simple reason that the inquest only
+concerned itself with the circumstances attending her death.
+Mr. Armadale, at his friend's request, saw Miss Blanchard, and
+induced her to silence old Darch on the subject of the claim that
+had been made relating to the widow's income. As the claim had
+never been admitted, even our stiff-necked brother practitioner
+consented for once to do as he was asked. The doctor's statement
+that his patient was the widow of a gentleman named Armadale was
+accordingly left unchallenged, and so the matter has been hushed
+up. She is buried in the great cemetery, near the place where
+she died. Nobody but Mr. Midwinter and Mr. Armadale (who insisted
+on going with him) followed her to the grave; and nothing has
+been inscribed on the tombstone but the initial letter of her
+Christian name and the date of her death. So, after all the harm
+she has done, she rests at last; and so the two men whom she has
+injured have forgiven her.
+
+"Is there more to say on this subject before we leave it? On
+referring to your letter, I find you have raised one other point,
+which may be worth a moment's notice.
+
+"You ask if there is reason to suppose that the doctor comes out
+of the matter with hands which are really as clean as they look?
+My dear Augustus, I believe the doctor to have been at the bottom
+of more of this mischief than we shall ever find out; and to have
+profited by the self-imposed silence of Mr. Midwinter and Mr.
+Armadale, as rogues perpetually profit by the misfortunes and
+necessities of honest men. It is an ascertained fact that he
+connived at the false statement about Miss Milroy, which
+entrapped the two gentlemen into his house; and that one
+circumstance (after my Old Bailey experience) is enough for _me_.
+As to evidence against him, there is not a jot; and as to
+Retribution overtaking him, I can only say I heartily hope
+Retribution may prove, in the long run, to be the more cunning
+customer of the two. There is not much prospect of it at present.
+The doctor's friends and admirers are, I understand, about to
+present him with a Testimonial, 'expressive of their sympathy
+under the sad occurrence which has thrown a cloud over the
+opening of his Sanitarium, and of their undiminished confidence
+in his integrity and ability as a medical man.' We live,
+Augustus, in an age eminently favorable to the growth of all
+roguery which is careful enough to keep up appearances. In this
+enlightened nineteenth century, I look upon the doctor as one of
+our rising men.
+
+"To turn now to pleasanter subjects than Sanitariums, I may tell
+you that Miss Neelie is as good as well again, and is, in my
+humble opinion, prettier than ever. She is staying in London
+under the care of a female relative; and Mr. Armadale satisfies
+her of the fact of his existence (in case she should forget it)
+regularly every day. They are to be married in the spring,
+unless Mrs. Milroy's death causes the ceremony to be postponed.
+The medical men are of opinion that the poor lady is sinking
+at last. It may be a question of weeks or a question of months,
+they can say no more. She is greatly altered--quiet and gentle,
+and anxiously affectionate with her husband and her child. But
+in her case this happy change is, it seems, a sign of approaching
+dissolution, from the medical point of view. There is a
+difficulty in making the poor old, major understand this. He only
+sees that she has gone back to the likeness of her better self
+when he first married her; and he sits for hours by her bedside
+now, and tells her about his wonderful clock.
+
+"Mr. Midwinter, of whom you will next expect me to say something,
+is improving rapidly. After causing some anxiety at first to the
+medical men (who declared that he was suffering from a serious
+nervous shock, produced by circumstances about which their
+patient's obstinate silence kept them quite in the dark), he
+has rallied, as only men of his sensitive temperament (to quote
+the doctors again) can rally. He and Mr. Armadale are together
+in a quiet lodging. I saw him last week when I was in London.
+His face showed signs of wear and tear, very sad to see in so
+young a man. But he spoke of himself and his future with
+a courage and hopefulness which men of twice his years (if he has
+suffered as I suspect him to have suffered) might have envied.
+If I know anything of humanity, this is no common man; and we
+shall hear of him yet in no common way.
+
+"You will wonder how I came to be in London. I went up, with
+a return ticket (from Saturday to Monday), about that matter
+in dispute at our agent's. We had a tough fight; but, curiously
+enough, a point occurred to me just as I got up to go; and I went
+back to my chair, and settled the question in no time. Of course
+I stayed at Our Hotel in Covent Garden. William, the waiter,
+asked after you with the affection of a father; and Matilda,
+the chamber-maid, said you almost persuaded her that last time
+to have the hollow tooth taken out of her lower jaw. I had
+the agent's second son (the young chap you nicknamed Mustapha,
+when he made that dreadful mess about the Turkish Securities)
+to dine with me on Sunday. A little incident happened in the
+evening which may be worth recording, as it connected itself
+with a certain old lady who was not 'at home' when you and Mr.
+Armadale blundered on that house in Pimlico in the bygone time.
+
+"Mustapha was like all the rest of you young men of the present
+day--he got restless after dinner. 'Let's go to a public
+amusement, Mr. Pedgift,' says he. 'Public amusement? Why,
+it's Sunday evening!' says I. 'All right, sir,' says Mustapha.
+'They stop acting on the stage, I grant you, on Sunday evening
+--but they don't stop acting in the pulpit. Come and see the last
+new Sunday performer of our time.' As he wouldn't have any more
+wine, there was nothing else for it but to go.
+
+"We went to a street at the West End, and found it blocked up
+with carriages. If it hadn't been Sunday night, I should have
+thought we were going to the opera. 'What did I tell you?' says
+Mustapha, taking me up to an open door with a gas star outside
+and a bill of the performance. I had just time to notice that
+I was going to one of a series of 'Sunday Evening Discourses on
+the Pomps and Vanities of the World, by A Sinner Who Has Served
+Them,' when Mustapha jogged my elbow, and whispered, 'Half a
+crown is the fashionable tip.' I found myself between two demure
+and silent gentlemen, with plates in their hands, uncommonly well
+filled already with the fashionable tip. Mustapha patronized one
+plate, and I the other. We passed through two doors into a long
+room, crammed with people. And there, on a platform at the
+further end, holding forth to the audience, was--not a man, as I
+had expected-- but a Woman, and that woman, MOTHER OLDERSHAW! You
+never listened to anything more eloquent in your life. As long as
+I heard her she was never once at a loss for a word anywhere.
+I shall think less of oratory as a human accomplishment, for the
+rest of my days, after that Sunday evening. As for the matter of
+the sermon, I may describe it as a narrative of Mrs. Oldershaw's
+experience among dilapidated women, profusely illustrated in the
+pious and penitential style. You will ask what sort of audience
+it was. Principally Women, Augustus--and, as I hope to be saved,
+all the old harridans of the world of fashion whom Mother
+Oldershaw had enameled in her time, sitting boldly in the front
+places, with their cheeks ruddled with paint, in a state of
+devout enjoyment wonderful to see! I left Mustapha to hear
+the end of it. And I thought to myself, as I went out, of what
+Shakespeare says somewhere, 'Lord, what fools we mortals be!'
+
+"Have I anything more to tell you before I leave off? Only one
+thing that I can remember.
+
+"That wretched old Bashwood has confirmed the fears I told you I
+had about him when he was brought back here from London. There is
+no kind of doubt that he has really lost all the little reason he
+ever had. He is perfectly harmless, and perfectly happy. And he
+would do very well if we could only prevent him from going out in
+his last new suit of clothes, smirking and smiling and inviting
+everybody to his approaching marriage with the handsomest woman
+in England. It ends of course in the boys pelting him, and
+in his coming here crying to me, covered with mud. The moment
+his clothes are cleaned again he falls back into his favorite
+delusion, and struts about before the church gates, in the
+character of a bridegroom, waiting for Miss Gwilt. We must get
+the poor wretch taken care of somewhere for the rest of the
+little time he has to live. Who would ever have thought of a man
+at his age falling in love? And who would ever have believed that
+the mischief that woman's beauty has done could have reached as
+far in the downward direction as our superannuated old clerk?
+
+"Good-by, for the present, my dear boy. If you see a particularly
+handsome snuff-box in Paris, remember--though your father scorns
+Testimonials--he doesn't object to receive a present from his
+son.
+
+"Yours affectionately,
+
+A. PEDGIFT, Sen.
+
+"POSTSCRIPT.--I think it likely that the account you mention in
+the French papers, of a fatal quarrel among some foreign sailors
+in one of the Lipari Islands, and of the death of their captain,
+among others, may really have been a quarrel among the scoundrels
+who robbed Mr. Armadale and scuttled his yacht. _Those_ fellows,
+luckily for society, can't always keep up appearances; and,
+in their case, Rogues and Retribution do occasionally come into
+collision with each other."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+MIDWINTER.
+
+The spring had advanced to the end of April. It was the eve of
+Allan's wedding-day. Midwinter and he had sat talking together at
+the great house till far into the night--till so far that it had
+struck twelve long since, and the wedding day was already some
+hours old.
+
+For the most part the conversation had turned on the bridegroom's
+plans and projects. It was not till the two friends rose to go to
+rest that Allan insisted on making Midwinter speak of himself.
+
+"We have had enough, and more than enough, of _my_ future," he
+began, in his bluntly straightforward way. "Let's say something
+now, Midwinter, about yours. You have promised me, I know, that,
+if you take to literature, it shan't part us, and that, if you go
+on a sea-voyage, you will remember, when you come back, that my
+house is your home. But this is the last chance we have of being
+together in our old way; and I own I should like to know--" His
+voice faltered, and his eyes moistened a little. He left the
+sentence unfinished.
+
+Midwinter took his hand and helped him, as he had often helped
+him to the words that he wanted in the by-gone time.
+
+"You would like to know, Allan," he said, "that I shall not bring
+an aching heart with me to your wedding day? If you will let me
+go back for a moment to the past, I think I can satisfy you."
+
+They took their chairs again. Allan saw that Midwinter was moved.
+"Why distress yourself?" he asked, kindly--"why go back to the
+past?"
+
+"For two reasons, Allan. I ought to have thanked you long since
+for the silence you have observed, for my sake, on a matter that
+must have seemed very strange to you. You know what the name is
+which appears on the register of my marriage, and yet you have
+forborne to speak of it, from the fear of distressing me. Before
+you enter on your new life, let us come to a first and last
+understanding about this. I ask you--as one more kindness to
+me--to accept my assurance (strange as the thing may seem to you)
+that I am blameless in this matter; and I entreat you to believe
+that the reasons I have for leaving it unexplained are reasons
+which, if Mr. Brock was living, Mr. Brock himself would approve."
+In those words he kept the secret of the two names; and left the
+memory of Allan's mother, what he had found it, a sacred memory
+in the heart of her son.
+
+"One word more," he went on--"a word which will take us, this
+time, from past to future. It has been said, and truly said,
+that out of Evil may come Good. Out of the horror and the misery
+of that night you know of has come the silencing of a doubt which
+once made my life miserable with groundless anxiety about you
+and about myself. No clouds raised by my superstition will ever
+come between us again. I can't honestly tell you that I am more
+willing now than I was when we were in the Isle of Man to take
+what is called the rational view of your Dream. Though I know
+what extraordinary coincidences are perpetually happening in
+the experience of all of us, still I cannot accept coincidences
+as explaining the fulfillment of the Visions which our own eyes
+have seen. All I can sincerely say for myself is, what I think it
+will satisfy you to know, that I have learned to view the purpose
+of the Dream with a new mind. I once believed that it was sent
+to rouse your distrust of the friendless man whom you had taken
+as a brother to your heart. I now _know_ that it came to you
+as a timely warning to take him closer still. Does this help
+to satisfy you that I, too, am standing hopefully on the brink of
+a new life, and that while we live, brother, your love and mine
+will never be divided again?"
+
+They shook hands in silence. Allan was the first to recover
+himself. He answered in the few words of kindly assurance which
+were the best words that he could address to his friend.
+
+"I have heard all I ever want to hear about the past," he said;
+"and I know what I most wanted to know about the future.
+Everybody says, Midwinter, you have a career before you, and
+I believe that everybody is right. Who knows what great things
+may happen before you and I are many years older?"
+
+"Who _need_ know?" said Midwinter, calmly. "Happen what may, God
+is all-merciful, God is all-wise. In those words your dear old
+friend once wrote to me. In that faith I can look back without
+murmuring at the years that are past, and can look on without
+doubting to the years that are to come."
+
+He rose, and walked to the window. While they had been speaking
+together the darkness had passed. The first light of the new day
+met him as he looked out, and rested tenderly on his face.
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+NOTE--My readers will perceive that I have purposely left them,
+with reference to the Dream in this story, in the position which
+they would occupy in the case of a dream in real life: they are
+free to interpret it by the natural or the supernatural theory,
+as the bent of their own minds may incline them. Persons disposed
+to take the rational view may, under these circumstances, be
+interested in hearing of a coincidence relating to the present
+story, which actually happened, and which in the matter of
+"extravagant improbability" sets anything of the same kind that
+a novelist could imagine at flat defiance.
+
+In November, 1865, that is to say, when thirteen monthly parts
+of "Armadale" had been published, and, I may add, when more than
+a year and a half had elapsed since the end of the story, as it
+now appears, was first sketched in my notebook--a vessel lay in
+the Huskisson Dock at Liverpool which was looked after by one man,
+who slept on board, in the capacity of shipkeeper. On a certain
+day in the week this man was found dead in the deck-house. On the
+next day a second man, who had taken his place, was carried dying
+to the Northern Hospital. On the third day a third ship-keeper
+was appointed, and was found dead in the deck-house which had
+already proved fatal to the other two. _The name of that ship was
+"The Armadale."_ And the proceedings at the Inquest proved that
+the three men had been all suffocated _by sleeping in poisoned
+air_!
+
+I am indebted for these particulars to the kindness of the
+reporters at Liverpool, who sent me their statement of the facts.
+The case found its way into most of the newspapers. It was
+noticed--to give two instances in which I can cite the dates--in
+the _Times_ of November 30th, 1865, and was more fully described
+in the _Daily News_ of November 28th, in the same year.
+
+Before taking leave of "Armadale," I may perhaps be allowed
+to mention, for the benefit of any readers who may be curious
+on such points, that the "Norfolk Broads" are here described
+after personal investigation of them. In this, as in other cases,
+I have spared no pains to instruct myself on matters of fact.
+Wherever the story touches on questions connected with Law,
+Medicine, or Chemistry, it has been submitted before publication
+to the experience of professional men. The kindness of a friend
+supplied me with a plan of the doctor's apparatus, and I saw
+the chemical ingredients at work before I ventured on describing
+the action of them in the closing scenes of this book.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Armadale, by Wilkie Collins
+
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