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 doorbolt 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 towards 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 towards 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, leapt 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 leapt 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 mainland 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 mizen-top, and joined his friend again on deck.
‘We must wait till the ship-breakers come off to their work,’ he said, meeting Midwinter half way 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?’2
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 whiskey 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 backwards and forwards 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 whiskey, 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 mizen-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 gaiety 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 burnt, 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 counselled. 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 cont
rolled 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 practised 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 good-humour got the upper hand again. He took up the whiskey-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 mizen-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 life-time. 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 gipsy’s boy! I’ve sung for halfpence with dancing dogs on the high-road! I’ve worn a footboy’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 neighbours 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 arm’s 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.’3
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 at 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 whiskey-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 meagrims? 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 park4 to that effect,’ said Allan. ‘Are you particular to a shade about size or complexion? What’s your favourite 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 now 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. T
he 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 and 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.
Armadale Page 21
