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 humour. ‘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, paralysed 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 favoured 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 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, or 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 who 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 towards 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 spring time. Now and again, heavy waggons, with blackfaced 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 hill-sides, crested black with firs, shone to the shining heavens in a glory of lustrous green. In and out, where the forest footpaths 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, travelled 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 bazaar that had opened punctually with the opening season, showed all their glittering trinkets, and fluttered in the balmy air their splendour of many-coloured flags. Longingly, here, the children looked at the show; patiently the sun-burnt 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 crippled 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 colour – 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 armour 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 colour 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 colour 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 colours of the rainbow speckled the carpet. In the midst of the finery, and the glitter, and the light, lay the paralysed 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 shrivelled black nurse; and on the counterpane, 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 A
rmadale led the way in, the boy was tossing his plaything – a soldier on horseback – backwards and forwards 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.
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