Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  The citizens of Thorpe-Ambrose looked at the closed door, and gravely shook their heads. Mr Mack had disappointed them. No opinion which openly recognizes the frailty of human nature, is ever a popular opinion with mankind. ‘It’s as good as saying that any of us might have married her, if we had been Mr Armadale’s age!’ Such was the general impression on the minds of the conclave, when the meeting had been adjourned, and the members were leaving the station.

  The last of the party to go was a slow old gentleman, with a habit of deliberately looking about him. Pausing at the door, this observant person stared up the platform, and down the platform, and discovered in the latter direction, standing behind an angle of the wall, an elderly man in black, who had escaped the notice of everybody up to that time. ‘Why, bless my soul!’ said the old gentleman, advancing inquisitively by a step at a time, ‘it can’t be Mr Bashwood!’

  It was Mr Bashwood – Mr Bashwood, whose constitutional curiosity had taken him privately to the station, bent on solving the mystery of Allan’s sudden journey to London – Mr Bashwood who had seen and heard, behind his angle in the wall, what everybody else had seen and heard, and who appeared to have been impressed by it in no ordinary way. He stood stiffly against the wall, like a man petrified, with one hand pressed on his bare head, and the other holding his hat – he stood, with a dull flush on his face, and a dull stare in his eyes, looking straight into the black depths of the tunnel outside the station, as if the train to London had disappeared in it but the moment before.

  ‘Is your head bad?’ asked the old gentleman. ‘Take my advice. Go home and lie down.’

  Mr Bashwood listened mechanically, with his usual attention, and answered mechanically, with his usual politeness.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, in a low lost tone, like a man between dreaming and waking; ‘I’ll go home and lie down.’

  ‘That’s right,’ rejoined the old gentleman, making for the door. ‘And take a pill, Mr Bashwood – take a pill.’

  Five minutes later, the porter charged with the business of locking up the station, found Mr Bashwood, still standing bareheaded against the wall, and still looking straight into the black depths of the tunnel, as if the train to London had disappeared in it but a moment since.

  ‘Come, sir!’ said the porter. ‘I must lock up. Are you out of sorts? Anything wrong with your inside? Try a drop of gin-and-bitters.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Bashwood, answering the porter exactly as he had answered the old gentleman; ‘I’ll try a drop of gin-and-bitters.’

  The porter took him by the arm, and led him out. ‘You’ll get it there,’ said the man, pointing confidentially to a public-house; ‘and you’ll get it good.’

  ‘I shall get it there,’ echoed Mr Bashwood, still mechanically repeating what was said to him; ‘and I shall get it good.’

  His will seemed to be paralysed; his actions depended absolutely on what other people told him to do. He took a few steps in the direction of the public-house – hesitated; staggered – and caught at the pillar of one of the station lamps near him.

  The porter followed, and took him by the arm once more.

  ‘Why, you’ve been drinking already!’ exclaimed the man, with a suddenly-quickened interest in Mr Bashwood’s case. ‘What was it? Beer?’

  Mr Bashwood, in his low lost tones, echoed the last word.

  It was close on the porter’s dinner-time. But when the lower orders of the English people believe they have discovered an intoxicated man, their sympathy with him is boundless. The porter let his dinner take its chance, and carefully assisted Mr Bashwood to reach the public-house. ‘Gin-and-bitters will put you on your legs again,’ whispered this Samaritan setter-right of the alcoholic disasters of mankind.

  If Mr Bashwood had really been intoxicated, the effect of the porter’s remedy would have been marvellous indeed. Almost as soon as the glass was emptied, the stimulant did its work. The long-weakened nervous system of the deputy-steward, prostrated for the moment by the shock that had fallen on it, rallied again like a weary horse under the spur. The dull flush on his cheeks, the dull stare in his eyes, disappeared simultaneously. After a momentary effort, he recovered memory enough of what had passed to thank the porter, and to ask whether he would take something himself. The worthy creature instantly accepted a dose of his own remedy – in the capacity of a preventive – and went home to dinner as only those men can go home who are physically warmed by gin-and-bitters, and morally elevated by the performance of a good action.

  Still strangely abstracted (but conscious now of the way by which he went), Mr Bashwood left the public-house a few minutes later, in his turn. He walked on mechanically, in his dreary black garments, moving like a blot on the white surface of the sun-brightened road, as Midwinter had seen him move in the early days at Thorpe-Ambrose when they had first met. Arrived at the point where he had to choose between the way that led into the town, and the way that led to the great house, he stopped, incapable of deciding, and careless, apparently, even of making the attempt. ‘I’ll be revenged on her!’ he whispered to himself, still absorbed in his jealous frenzy of rage against the woman who had deceived him. ‘I’ll be revenged on her,’ he repeated in louder tones, ‘if I spend every halfpenny I’ve got!’

  Some women of the disorderly sort, passing on their way to the town, heard him. ‘Ah, you old brute,’ they called out, with the measureless licence of their class; ‘whatever she did, she served you right!’

  The coarseness of the voices startled him, whether he comprehended the words or not. He shrank away from more interruption and more insult, into the quieter road that led to the great house.

  At a solitary place by the wayside, he stopped and sat down. He took off his hat, and lifted his youthful wig a little from his bald old head, and tried desperately to get beyond the one immovable conviction which lay on his mind like lead – the conviction that Miss Gwilt had been purposely deceiving him from the first. It was useless. No effort would free him from that one dominant impression, and from the one answering idea that it had evoked – the idea of revenge. He got up again, and put on his hat, and walked rapidly forward a little way – then turned without knowing why, and slowly walked back again. ‘If I had only dressed a little smarter!’ said the poor wretch, helplessly. ‘If I had only been a little bolder with her, she might have overlooked my being an old man!’ The angry fit returned on him. He clenched his clammy trembling hands, and shook them fiercely in the empty air. ‘I’ll be revenged on her,’ he reiterated. ‘I’ll be revenged on her, if I spend every halfpenny I’ve got!’ It was terribly suggestive of the hold she had taken on him, that his vindictive sense of injury could not get far enough away from her to reach the man whom he believed to be his rival, even yet. In his rage, as in his love, he was absorbed, body and soul, by Miss Gwilt.

  In a moment more, the noise of running wheels approaching from behind startled him. He turned, and looked round. There was Mr Pedgift the elder, rapidly overtaking him in the gig, just as Mr Pedgift had overtaken him once already, on that former occasion when he had listened under the window at the great house, and when the lawyer had bluntly charged him with feeling a curiosity about Miss Gwilt!

  In an instant, the inevitable association of ideas burst on his mind. The opinion of Miss Gwilt, which he had heard the lawyer express to Allan, at parting, flashed back into his memory, side by side with Mr Pedgift’s sarcastic approval of anything in the way of inquiry which his own curiosity might attempt. ‘I may be even with her yet,’ he thought, ‘if Mr Pedgift will help me! – Stop, sir!’ he called out desperately as the gig came up with him. ‘If please, sir, I want to speak to you.’

  Pedgift Senior slackened the pace of his fast-trotting mare, without pulling up. ‘Come to the office in half-an-hour,’ he said. ‘I’m busy now.’ Without waiting for an answer, without noticing Mr Bashwood’s bow, he gave the mare the rein again, and was out of sight in another minute.

  Mr Bashwood sat down once more in a shad
y place by the roadside. He appeared to be incapable of feeling any slight but the one unpardonable slight put upon him by Miss Gwilt. He not only declined to resent, he even made the best of Mr Pedgift’s unceremonious treatment of him. ‘Half-an-hour,’ he said, resignedly. ‘Time enough to compose myself; and I want time. Very kind of Mr Pedgift, though he mightn’t have meant it.’

  The sense of oppression on his head forced him once again to remove his hat. He sat with it on his lap, deep in thought; his face bent low, and the wavering fingers of one hand drumming absently on the crown of the hat. If Mr Pedgift the elder, seeing him as he sat now, could only have looked a little beyond him into the future, the monotonously-drumming hand of the deputy-steward might have been strong enough, feeble as it was, to stop the lawyer by the roadside. It was the worn, weary, miserable old hand of a worn, weary, miserable old man – but it was, for all that (to use the language of Mr Pedgift’s own parting prediction to Allan), the hand that was now destined to ‘let the light in on Miss Gwilt’.

  CHAPTER XIII

  AN OLD MAN’S HEART

  Punctual to the moment, when the half hour’s interval had expired, Mr Bashwood was announced at the office, as waiting to see Mr Pedgift by special appointment.

  The lawyer looked up from his papers with an air of annoyance: he had totally forgotten the meeting by the roadside. ‘See what he wants,’ said Pedgift Senior to Pedgift Junior, working in the same room with him. ‘And, if it’s nothing of importance, put it off to some other time.’

  Pedgift Junior swiftly disappeared, and swiftly returned.

  ‘Well?’ asked the father.

  ‘Well,’ answered the son, ‘he is rather more shaky and unintelligible than usual. I can make nothing out of him, except that he persists in wanting to see you. My own idea,’ pursued Pedgift Junior, with his usual sardonic gravity, ‘is, that he is going to have a fit, and that he wishes to acknowledge your uniform kindness to him, by obliging you with a private view of the whole proceeding.’

  Pedgift Senior habitually matched everybody – his son included – with their own weapons. ‘Be good enough to remember, Augustus,’ he rejoined, ‘that My Room is not a Court of Law. A bad joke is not invariably followed by “roars of laughter” here. Let Mr Bashwood come in.’

  Mr Bashwood was introduced, and Pedgift Junior withdrew. ‘You mustn’t bleed him, sir,’1 whispered the incorrigible joker, as he passed the back of his father’s chair. ‘Hot-water bottles to the soles of his feet, and a mustard plaster on the pit of his stomach – that’s the modern treatment.’

  ‘Sit down, Bashwood,’ said Pedgift Senior, when they were alone. ‘And don’t forget that time’s money. Out with it, whatever it is, at the quickest possible rate, and in the fewest possible words.’

  These preliminary directions, bluntly but not at all unkindly spoken, rather increased than diminished the painful agitation under which Mr Bashwood was suffering. He stammered more helplessly, he trembled more continuously than usual, as he made his little speech of thanks, and added his apologies at the end for intruding on his patron in business hours.

  ‘Everybody in the place, Mr Pedgift, sir, knows your time is valuable. Oh, dear, yes! oh, dear, yes! most valuable, most valuable! Excuse me, sir, I’m coming out with it. Your goodness – or rather your business – no, your goodness gave me half-an-hour to wait – and I have thought of what I had to say, and prepared it, and put it short.’ Having got as far as that, he stopped with a pained, bewildered look. He had put it away in his memory, and now, when the time came, he was too confused to find it. And there was Mr Pedgift mutely waiting; his face and manner alike expressive of that silent sense of the value of his own time, which every patient who has visited a great doctor, every client who has consulted a lawyer in large practice, knows so well. ‘Have you heard the news, sir?’ stammered Mr Bashwood, shifting his ground in despair, and letting the uppermost idea in his mind escape him, simply because it was the one idea in him that was ready to come out.

  ‘Does it concern me?’ asked Pedgift Senior, mercilessly brief, and mercilessly straight in coming to the point.

  ‘It concerns a lady, sir, – no, not a lady – a young man I ought to say, in whom you used to feel some interest. Oh, Mr Pedgift, sir, what do you think! Mr Armadale and Miss Gwilt have gone up to London together to-day – alone, sir – alone in a carriage reserved for their two selves. Do you think he’s going to marry her? Do you really think, like the rest of them, he’s going to marry her?’

  He put the question with a sudden flush in his face, and a sudden energy in his manner. His sense of the value of the lawyer’s time, his conviction of the greatness of the lawyer’s condescension, his constitutional shyness and timidity – all yielded together to his one overwhelming interest in hearing Mr Pedgift’s answer. He was loud for the first time in his life, in putting the question.

  ‘After my experience of Mr Armadale,’ said the lawyer, instantly hardening in look and manner, ‘I believe him to be infatuated enough to marry Miss Gwilt a dozen times over, if Miss Gwilt chose to ask him. Your news doesn’t surprise me in the least, Bashwood. I’m sorry for him. I can honestly say that, though he has set my advice at defiance. And I’m more sorry still,’ he continued, softening again as his mind reverted to his interview with Neelie under the trees of the park; ‘I’m more sorry still for another person who shall be nameless. But what have I to do with all this? and what on earth is the matter with you?’ he resumed, noticing for the first time the abject misery in Mr Bashwood’s manner, the blank despair in Mr Bashwood’s face, which his answer had produced. ‘Are you ill? Is there something behind the curtain that you’re afraid to bring out? I don’t understand it. Have you come here – here in my private room, in business hours – with nothing to tell me but that young Armadale has been fool enough to ruin his prospects for life? Why, I foresaw it all weeks since, and what is more, I as good as told him so at the last conversation I had with him in the great house.’

  At those last words, Mr Bashwood suddenly rallied. The lawyer’s passing reference to the great house had led him back in a moment to the purpose that he had in view.

  ‘That’s it, sir!’ he said eagerly; ‘that’s what I wanted to speak to you about; that’s what I’ve been preparing in my mind. Mr Pedgift, sir, the last time you were at the great house, when you came away in your gig, you – you overtook me on the drive.’

  ‘I daresay I did,’ remarked Pedgift, resignedly. ‘My mare happens to be a trifle quicker on her legs than you are on yours, Bashwood. Go on, go on. We shall come in time, I suppose, to what you are driving at.’

  ‘You stopped, and spoke to me, sir,’ proceeded Mr Bashwood, advancing more and more eagerly to his end. ‘You said you suspected me of feeling some curiosity about Miss Gwilt, and you told me (I remember the exact words, sir) – you told me to gratify my curiosity by all means, for you didn’t object to it.’

  Pedgift Senior began for the first time to look interested in hearing more.

  ‘I remember something of the sort,’ he replied; ‘and I also remember thinking it rather remarkable that you should happen – we won’t put it in any more offensive way – to be exactly under Mr Armadale’s open window while I was talking to him. It might have been accident of course; but it looked rather more like curiosity. I could only judge by appearances,’ concluded Pedgift, pointing his sarcasm with a pinch of snuff; ‘and appearances, Bashwood, were decidedly against you.’

  ‘I don’t deny it, sir. I only mentioned the circumstance because I wished to acknowledge that I was curious, and am curious about Miss Gwilt.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Pedgift Senior, seeing something under the surface in Mr Bashwood’s face and manner, but utterly in the dark thus far as to what that something might be.

  There was silence for a moment. The moment passed, Mr Bashwood took the refuge usually taken by nervous unready men, placed in his circumstances, when they are at a loss for an answer. He simply reiterated the assertion that he
had just made. ‘I feel some curiosity, sir,’ he said, with a strange mixture of doggedness and timidity, ‘about Miss Gwilt.’

  There was another moment of silence. In spite of his practised acuteness and knowledge of the world, the lawyer was more puzzled than ever. The case of Mr Bashwood presented the one human riddle of all others, which he was least qualified to solve. Though year after year witnesses, in thousands and thousands of cases, the remorseless disinheriting of nearest and dearest relations, the unnatural breaking-up of sacred family ties, the deplorable severance of old and firm friendships, due entirely to the intense self-absorption which the sexual passion can produce when it enters the heart of an old man, the association of love with infirmity and grey hairs arouses, nevertheless, all the world over, no other idea than the idea of extravagant improbability or extravagant absurdity in the general mind. If the interview now taking place in Mr Pedgift’s consulting-room had taken place at his dinner-table instead, when wine had opened his mind to humorous influences, it is possible that he might, by this time, have suspected the truth. But, in his business hours, Pedgift Senior was in the habit of investigating men’s motives seriously from the business point of view; and he was on that very account simply incapable of conceiving any improbability so startling, any absurdity so enormous, as the absurdity and improbability of Mr Bashwood’s being in love.

  Some men in the lawyer’s position would have tried to force their way to enlightenment by obstinately repeating the unanswered question. Pedgift Senior wisely postponed the question until he had moved the conversation on another step. ‘Well,’ he resumed, ‘let us say you feel a curiosity about Miss Gwilt. What next?’

  The palms of Mr Bashwood’s hands began to moisten under the influence of his agitation, as they had moistened in the past days when he had told the story of his domestic sorrows to Midwinter at the great house. Once more he rolled his handkerchief into a ball, and dabbed it softly to and fro from one hand to the other.