Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  ‘Be my promised wife!’ he whispered eagerly, and tried to raise my head. I kept it down. The horror of those 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 honourably,’ 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 cheek 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.6 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. – He 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. I say, ‘if I can’, for I feel as if his story had taken possession of me, never to leave me again. Will the night pass, and the morning find me still thinking of the Letter that came to him from his father’s death-bed? 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 thinki
ng 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 that 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 afterwards, 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 arm’s 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 to 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 farther 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, in our present situation, his remaining at Thorpe-Ambrose might lead to inquiry into his motives, and that his attempting to see me again (while our positions towards 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 labour. 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 wi
fe’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 favour. There is no spy to follow me, and no lawyer to keep me out, this time. Am I handsome enough, to-day? 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 back-board 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!1

  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 favour 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.