Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  ‘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 towards 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 your 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 colour 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 colour 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 the 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 neighbourhood. 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 imp
udence with a present of a shilling. ‘Wrong hereabouts,’ said the grocer, touching his forehead. ‘That’s my opinion of Mr Armadale’s friend!’

  The butcher had seen him farther 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 great natures are judged from the grocer and the butcher point of view.

  THE END OF THE THIRD BOOK

  BOOK THE FOURTH

  CHAPTER I

  MRS MILROY

  Two days after Midwinter’s departure from Thorpe-Ambrose, Mrs Milroy, having completed her morning toilette, and having dismissed her nurse, rang the bell again five minutes afterwards, and on the woman’s reappearance, 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 nurse’s 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. ‘Who 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 clenched the hand that had 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 cou
ld 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. On the one hand, he was conscious that scenes took place in the house at which no young girl should be present. On the other, 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.