Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  When Midwinter came here last from the railway, he came at half-past eight. How am I to get through the weary, weary hours between this and the evening? I think I shall darken my bedroom, and drink the blessing of oblivion from my bottle of Drops.

  Eleven o’clock. – We have parted for the last time before the day comes that makes us man and wife.

  He has left me, as he left me before, with an absorbing subject of interest to think of in his absence. I noticed a change in him the moment he entered the room. When he told me of the funeral, and of his parting with Armadale on board the yacht, though he spoke with feelings deeply moved, he spoke with a mastery over himself which is new to me in my experience of him. It was the same when our talk turned next on our own hopes and prospects. He was plainly disappointed when he found that my family embarrassments would prevent our meeting to-morrow, and plainly uneasy at the prospect of leaving me to find my way by myself on Monday to the church. But there was a certain hopefulness and composure of manner underlying it all, which produced so strong an impression on me that I was obliged to notice it. ‘You know what odd fancies take possession of me sometimes,’ I said. ’shall I tell you the fancy that has taken possession of me now? I can’t help thinking that something has happened since we last saw each other, which you have not told me yet.’

  ’something has happened,’ he answered. ‘And it is something which you ought to know.’

  With those words he took out his pocket-book, and produced two written papers from it. One he looked at and put back. The other he placed on the table before me. Keeping his hand on it for a moment, he spoke again.

  ‘Before I tell you what this is, and how it came into my possession,’ he said, ‘I must own something that I have concealed from you. It is no more serious confession than the confession of my own weakness.’

  He then acknowledged to me, that the renewal of his friendship with Armadale had been clouded, through the whole period of their intercourse in London, by his own superstitious misgivings. On every occasion when they were alone together, the terrible words of his father’s deathbed letter, and the terrible confirmation of them in the warnings of the Dream, were present to his mind. Day after day, the conviction that fatal consequences to Armadale would come of the renewal of their friendship, and of my share in accomplishing it, had grown stronger and stronger in its influence over him. He had obeyed the summons which called him to the rector’s bedside, with the firm intention of confiding his previsions of coming trouble to Mr Brock; and he had been doubly confirmed in his superstition, when he found that Death had entered the house before him, and had parted them, in this world, for ever. He had travelled back to be present at the funeral, with a secret sense of relief at the prospect of being parted from Armadale, and with a secret resolution to make the after-meeting agreed on between us three at Naples, a meeting that should never take place. With that purpose in his heart, he had gone up alone to the room prepared for him, on his arrival at the rectory, and had opened a letter which he found waiting for him on the table. The letter had only that day been discovered – dropped and lost – under the bed on which Mr Brock had died. It was in the rector’s handwriting throughout; and the person to whom it was addressed, was Midwinter himself.

  Having told me this, nearly in the words in which I have written it, he lifted his hand from the written paper that lay on the table between us.

  ‘Read it,’ he said; ‘and you will not need to be told that my mind is at peace again, and that I took Allan’s hand at parting, with a heart that was worthier of Allan’s love.’

  I read the letter. There was no superstition to be conquered in my mind; there were no old feelings of gratitude towards Armadale, to be roused in my heart – and yet, the effect which the letter had had on Midwinter, was, I firmly believe, more than matched by the effect that the letter now produced on Me.

  It was vain to ask him to leave it, and to let me read it again (as I wished) when I was left by myself. He is determined not to let it out of his own possession; he is determined to keep it side by side with that other paper which I had seen him take out of his pocket-book, and which contains the written narrative of Armadale’s Dream. All I could do was to ask his leave to copy it; and this he granted readily. I wrote the copy in his presence; and I now place it here in my diary, to mark a day which is one of the memorable days of my life.

  Boscombe Rectory, August 2nd.

  MY DEAR MIDWINTER, – For the first time since the beginning of my illness, I found strength enough yesterday to look over my letters. One among them is a letter from Allan, which has been lying unopened on my table for ten days past. He writes to me in great distress, to say that there has been dissension between you, and that you have left him. If you still remember what passed between us, when you first opened your heart to me in the Isle of Man, you will be at no loss to understand how I have thought over this miserable news, through the night that has now passed, and you will not be surprised to hear that I have roused myself this morning to make the effort of writing to you. Although I am far from despairing of myself, I dare not, at my age, trust too confidently to my prospects of recovery. While the time is still my own, I must employ it for Allan’s sake and for yours.

  I want no explanation of the circumstances which have parted you from your friend. If my estimate of your character is not founded on an entire delusion, the one influence which can have led to your estrangement from Allan, is the influence of that evil spirit of Superstition, which I have once already cast out of your heart – which I will once again conquer, please God, if I have strength enough to make my pen speak my mind to you in this letter.

  It is no part of my design to combat the belief which I know you to hold, that mortal creatures may be the objects of supernatural intervention in their pilgrimage through this world. Speaking as a reasonable man, I own that I cannot prove you to be wrong. Speaking as a believer in the Bible, I am bound to go farther, and to admit that you possess a higher than any human warrant for the faith that is in you. The one object which I have it at heart to attain, is to induce you to free yourself from the paralysing fatalism of the heathen and the savage, and to look at the mysteries that perplex, and the portents that daunt you, from the Christian’s point of view. If I can succeed in this, I shall clear your mind of the ghastly doubts that now oppress it, and I shall re-unite you to your friend, never to be parted from him again.

  I have no means of seeing and questioning you. I can only send this letter to Allan to be forwarded, if he knows, or can discover, your present address. Placed in this position towards you, I am bound to assume all that can be assumed in your favour. I will take it for granted that something has happened to you or to Allan, which to your mind has not only confirmed the fatalist conviction in which your father died, but has added a new and terrible meaning to the warning which he sent you in his deathbed letter.

  On this common ground I meet you. On this common ground I appeal to your higher nature and your better sense.

  Preserve your present conviction that the events which have happened (be they what they may) are not to be reconciled with ordinary mortal coincidences and ordinary mortal laws; and view your own position by the best and clearest light that your superstition can throw on it. What are you? You are a helpless instrument in the hands of Fate. You are doomed, beyond all human capacity of resistance, to bring misery and destruction blindfold on a man to whom you have harmlessly and gratefully united yourself in the bonds of a brother’s love. All that is morally firmest in your will and morally purest in your aspirations, avails nothing against the hereditary impulsion of you towards evil, caused by a crime which your father committed before you were born. In what does that belief end? It ends in the darkness in which you are now lost; in the self-contradictions in which you are now bewildered – in the stubborn despair by which a man profanes his own soul, and lowers himself to the level of the brutes that perish.

  Look up, my poor suffering brother – look up, my ha
rdly-tried, my well-loved friend, higher than this! Meet the doubts that now assail you from the blessed vantage-ground of Christian courage and Christian hope; and your heart will turn again to Allan, and your mind will be at peace. Happen what may, God is all-merciful, God is all-wise: natural or supernatural, it happens through Him. The mystery of Evil that perplexes our feeble minds, the sorrow and the suffering that torture us in this little life, leave the one great truth unshaken that the destiny of man is in the hands of his Creator, and that God’s blessed Son died to make us worthier of it. Nothing that is done in unquestioning submission to the wisdom of the Almighty, is done wrong. No evils exists, out of which, in obedience to His laws, Good may not come. Be true to what Christ tells you is true. Encourage in yourself, be the circumstances what they may, all that is loving, all that is grateful, all that is patient, all that is forgiving, towards your fellow-men. And humbly and trustfully leave the rest to the God who made you, and to the Saviour who loved you better than his own life.

  This is the faith in which I have lived, by the Divine help and mercy, from my youth upward. I ask you earnestly, I ask you confidently, to make it your faith too. It is the mainspring of all the good I have ever done, of all the happiness I have ever known; it lightens my darkness, it sustains my hope; it comforts and quiets me, lying here, to live or die, I know not which. Let it sustain, comfort, and enlighten you. It will help you in your sorest need, as it has helped me in mine. It will show you another purpose in the events which brought you and Allan together than the purpose which your guilty father foresaw. Strange things, I do not deny it, have happened to you already. Stranger things still may happen before long, which I may not live to see. Remember, if that time comes, that I died firmly disbelieving in your influence over Allan being other than an influence for good. The great sacrifice of the Atonement – I say it reverently – has its mortal reflections, even in this world. If danger ever threatens Allan, you, whose father took his father’s life – You, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of God has appointed to save him.

  Come to me, if I live. Go back to the friend who loves you, whether I live or die. – Yours affectionately to the last,

  DECIMUS BROCK.

  ‘You, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of God has appointed to save him!’

  Those are the words which have shaken me to the soul. Those are the words which make me feel as if the dead man had left his grave, and had put his hand on the place in my heart where my terrible secret lies hidden from every living creature but myself. One part of the letter has come true already. The danger that it foresees, threatens Armadale at this moment – and threatens him from Me!

  If the favouring circumstances which have driven me thus far, drive me on to the end; and if that old man’s last earthly conviction is prophetic of the truth, Armadale will escape me, do what I may. And Midwinter will be the victim who is sacrificed to save his life.

  It is horrible! it is impossible! it shall never be! At the thinking of it only, my hand trembles, and my heart sinks. I bless the trembling that unnerves me! I bless the sinking that turns me faint! I bless those words in the letter which have revived the relenting thoughts that first came to me two days since! Is it hard, now that events are taking me, smoothly and safely, nearer and nearer to the End – is it hard to conquer the temptation to go on? No! If there is only a chance of harm coming to Midwinter, the dread of that chance is enough to decide me – enough to strengthen me to conquer the temptation, for his sake. I have never loved him yet, never, never, never as I love him now!

  Sunday, August 10th. – The eve of my wedding-day! I close and lock this book, never to write in it, never to open it again.

  I have won the great victory; I have trampled my own wickedness under foot. I am innocent; I am happy again. My love! my angel! when to-morrow gives me to you, I will not have a thought in my heart which is not your thought, as well as mine!

  CHAPTER XV

  THE WEDDING DAY

  The time was nine o’clock in the morning. The place was a private room in one of the old-fashioned inns, which still remain on the Borough side of the Thames. The date was Monday, the 11th of August. And the person was Mr Bashwood, who had travelled to London on a summons from his son, and had taken up his abode at the inn, on the previous day.

  He had never yet looked so pitiably old and helpless as he looked now. The fever and chill of alternating hope and despair, had dried and withered and wasted him. The angles of his figure had sharpened. The outline of his face had shrunk. His dress pointed the melancholy change in him, with a merciless and shocking emphasis. Never, even in his youth, had he worn such clothes as he wore now. With the desperate resolution to leave no chance untried of producing an impression on Miss Gwilt, he had cast aside his dreary black garments; he had even mustered the courage to wear his blue satin cravat. His coat was a riding coat of light grey. He had ordered it, with a vindictive subtlety of purpose, to be made on the pattern of a coat that he had seen Allan wear. His waistcoat was white; his trousers were of the gayest summer pattern, in the largest check. His wig was oiled and scented, and brushed round, on either side, to hide the wrinkles on his temples. He was an object to laugh at – he was an object to weep over. His enemies, if a creature so wretched could have had enemies, would have forgiven him, on seeing him in his new dress. His friends – had any of his friends been left – would have been less distressed if they had looked at him in his coffin, than if they had looked at him as he was now. Incessantly restless, he paced the room from end to end. Now he looked at his watch; now he looked out of window; now he looked at the well-furnished breakfast-table – always with the same wistful uneasy inquiry in his eyes. The waiter coming in, with the urn of boiling water, was addressed for the fiftieth time in the one form of words which the miserable creature seemed to be capable of uttering that morning, – ‘My son is coming to breakfast. My son is very particular. I want everything of the best – hot things, and cold things – and tea and coffee – and all the rest of it, waiter; all the rest of it.’ For the fiftieth time, he now reiterated those anxious words. For the fiftieth time, the impenetrable waiter had just returned his one pacifying answer, – ‘All right, sir; you may leave it to me’ – when the sound of leisurely footsteps was heard on the stairs; the door opened; and the long-expected son sauntered indolently into the room, with a neat little black-leather bag in his hand.

  ‘Well done, old gentleman!’ said Bashwood the younger, surveying his father’s dress with a smile of sardonic encouragement. ‘You’re ready to be married to Miss Gwilt at a moment’s notice!’

  The father took the son’s hand, and tried to echo the son’s laugh.

  ‘You have such good spirits, Jemmy,’ he said, using the name in its familiar form, as he had been accustomed to use it, in happier days. ‘You always had good spirits, my dear, from a child. Come and sit down; I’ve ordered you a nice breakfast. Everything of the best! everything of the best! What a relief it is to see you! Oh, dear, dear, what a relief it is to see you.’ He stopped and sat down at the table – his face flushed with the effort to control the impatience that was devouring him. ‘Tell me about her!’ he burst out, giving up the effort with a sudden self-abandonment. ‘I shall die, Jemmy, if I wait for it any longer. Tell me! tell me! tell me!’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ said Bashwood the younger, perfectly unmoved by his father’s impatience. ‘We’ll try the breakfast first, and come to the lady afterwards? Gently does it, old gentleman – gently does it!’

  He put his leather bag on a chair, and sat down opposite to his father, composed, and smiling, and humming a little tune.

  No ordinary observation, applying the ordinary rules of analysis, would have detected the character of Bashwood the younger in his face. His youthful look, aided by his light hair, and his plump beardless cheeks; his easy manner, and his ever ready smile; his eyes which met unshrinkingly the eyes of every one whom he addressed, all combined to make the impressi
on of him a favourable impression in the general mind. No eye for reading character, but such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand, could have penetrated the smoothly-deceptive surface of this man, and have seen him for what he really was – the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat – the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging,1 whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat – the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization; a man who was in this instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product of the vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man who would have been useless to his employers if he could have felt a touch of human sympathy in his father’s presence; and who would have deservedly forfeited his situation, if, under any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a sense of pity or a sense of shame.

  ‘Gently does it, old gentleman,’ he repeated, lifting the covers from the dishes, and looking under them one after the other all round the table. ‘Gently does it!’

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Jemmy,’ pleaded his father. ‘Try, if you can, to think how anxious I must be. I got your letter as long ago as yesterday morning. I have had to travel all the way from Thorpe-Ambrose, – I have had to get through the dreadful long evening, and the dreadful long night – with your letter telling me that you had found out who she is, and telling me nothing more. Suspense is very hard to bear, Jemmy, when you come to my age. What was it prevented you, my dear, from coming to me when I got here yesterday evening?’