Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  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 base 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 carriage 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 roadside. 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 palings; 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 ploughmen’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 farther 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 quickwitted 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 with his green spectacles and his sickly smile in perfect working order, 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 all the arrangements for exploring the Broads devolved, bustled about, giving his orders to the boatmen. 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 point-blank 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, a
nd, 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 colour 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 grey 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 gaily. ‘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 for ever 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 towards 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 clairvoyante – 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 neighbourhood 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,1 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 neighbourhood; 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 standstill 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 centre 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 discorda
nt 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 humour 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.