Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  The clerk gravely opened the book, and stood aside from the desk on which it lay.

  The day’s register comprised three marriages solemnized that morning – and the first two signatures on the page, were ‘Allan Armadale ’ and ‘Lydia Gwilt’!

  Even the Spy – ignorant as he was of the truth; unsuspicious as he was of the terrible future consequences to which the act of that morning might lead – even the Spy started, when his eye first fell on the page. It was done! Come what might of it, it was done now. There, in black and white, was the registered evidence of the marriage, which was at once a truth in itself, and a lie in the conclusion to which it led! There – through the fatal similarity in the names – there, in Midwinter’s own signature, was the proof to persuade everybody that, not Midwinter, but Allan, was the husband of Miss Gwilt!

  Bashwood the younger closed the book and returned it to the clerk. He descended the vestry steps with his hands thrust doggedly into his pockets, and with a serious shock inflicted on his professional self-esteem.

  The beadle met him under the church wall. He considered for a moment whether it was worth while to spend a shilling in questioning the man, and decided in the affirmative. If they could be traced and overtaken, there might be a chance of seeing the colour of Mr Armadale’s money, even yet.

  ‘How long is it,’ he asked, ‘Since the first couple married here this morning, left the church?’

  ‘About an hour,’ said the beadle.

  ‘How did they go away?’

  The beadle deferred answering that second question until he had first pocketed his fee. ‘You won’t trace them from here, sir,’ he said, when he had got his shilling. ‘They went away on foot.’

  ‘And that is all you know about it?’

  ‘That, sir, is all I know about it.’

  Left by himself, even the Detective of the Private Inquiry Office paused for a moment before he returned to his father at the gate. He was roused from his hesitation by the sudden appearance, within the church enclosure, of the driver of the cab.

  ‘I’m afraid the old gentleman is going to be taken ill, sir,’ said the man.

  Bashwood the younger frowned angrily, and walked back to the cab. As he opened the door and looked in, his father leaned forward and confronted him, with lips that moved speechlessly, and with a white stillness over all the rest of his face.

  ‘She’s done us,’ said the Spy. ‘They were married here this morning.’

  The old man’s body swayed for a moment from one side to the other. The instant after, his eyes closed, and his head fell forward towards the front seat of the cab. ‘Drive to the hospital!’ cried his son. ‘He’s in a fit. This is what comes of putting myself out of my way to please my father,’ he muttered, sullenly raising Mr Bashwood’s head, and loosening his cravat. ‘A nice morning’s work. Upon my soul, a nice morning’s work!’

  The hospital was near, and the house-surgeon was at his post.

  ‘Will he come out of it?’ asked Bashwood the younger roughly.

  ‘Who are you? ’ asked the surgeon sharply, on his side.

  ‘I am his son.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought it,’ rejoined the surgeon, taking the restoratives that were handed to him by the nurse, and turning from the son to the father with an air of relief which he was at no pains to conceal. ‘Yes,’ he added, after a minute or two. ‘Your father will come out of it, this time.’

  ‘When can he be moved away from here?’

  ‘He can be moved from the hospital in an hour or two.’

  The Spy laid a card on the table. ‘I’ll come back for him or send for him,’ he said. ‘I suppose I can go now, if I leave my name and address?’ With those words, he put on his hat, and walked out.

  ‘He’s a brute!’ said the nurse.

  ‘No,’ said the surgeon quietly. ‘He’s a man.’

  Between nine and ten o’clock that night, Mr Bashwood awoke in his bed at the inn in the Borough. He had slept for some hours, since he had been brought back from the hospital; and his mind and body were now slowly recovering together.

  A light was burning on the bedside-table, and a letter lay on it, waiting for him till he was awake. It was in his son’s handwriting, and it contained these words:

  MY DEAR DAD, – Having seen you safe out of the hospital, and back at your hotel, I think I may fairly claim to have done my duty by you, and may consider myself free to look after my own affairs. Business will prevent me from seeing you to-night; and I don’t think it at all likely I shall be in your neighbourhood tomorrow morning. My advice to you is, to go back to Thorpe-Ambrose, and to stick to your employment in the steward’s office. Wherever Mr Armadale may be, he must, sooner or later, write to you on business. I wash my hands of the whole matter, mind, so far as I am concerned, from this time forth. But if you like to go on with it, my professional opinion is (though you couldn’t hinder his marriage), you may part him from his wife.

  Pray take care of yourself.

  Your affectionate son,

  JAMES BASHWOOD.

  The letter dropped from the old man’s feeble hands. ‘I wish Jemmy could have come to see me to-night,’ he thought. ‘But it’s very kind of him to advise me all the same.’

  He turned wearily on the pillow, and read the letter a second time. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing left for me but to go back. I’m too poor and too old to hunt after them all by myself.’ He closed his eyes: the tears trickled slowly over his wrinkled cheeks. ‘I’ve been a trouble to Jemmy,’ he murmured, faintly; ‘I’ve been a sad trouble, I’m afraid, to poor Jemmy!’ In a minute more his weakness overpowered him, and he fell asleep again.

  The clock of the neighbouring church struck. It was ten. As the bell tolled the hour, the tidal train – with Midwinter and his wife among the passengers – was speeding nearer and nearer to Paris. As the bell tolled the hour, the watch on board Allan’s outward-bound yacht, had sighted the lighthouse off the Land’s End, and had set the course of the vessel for Ushant and Finisterre.

  THE END OF THE FOURTH BOOK

  BOOK THE FIFTH

  CHAPTER I

  MISS GWILT’S DIARY

  Naples, October 10th. – It is two months to-day, since I declared that I had closed my Diary, never to open it again.

  Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to this secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever, though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me. My misery is a woman’s misery, and it will speak – here, rather than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one else to hear me.

  How happy I was in the first days that followed our marriage, and how happy I made him! Only two months have passed, and that time is a bygone time already! I try to think of anything I might have said or done wrongly, on my side – of anything he might have said or done wrongly, on his – and I can remember nothing unworthy of my husband, nothing unworthy of myself. I cannot even lay my ringer on the day when the cloud first rose between us.1

  I could bear it, if I loved him less dearly than I do. I could conquer the misery of our estrangement if he only showed the change in him as brutally as other men would show it.

  But this never has happened, never will happen. It is not in his nature to inflict suffering on others. Not a hard word, not a hard look, escapes him. It is only at night, when I hear him sighing in his sleep; and sometimes when I see him dreaming, in the morning hours, that I know how hopelessly I am losing the love he once felt for me. He hides, or tries to hide it, in the day, for my sake. He is all gentleness, all kindness – but his heart is not on his lips, when he kisses me now; his hand tells me nothing when it touches mine. Day after day, the hours that he gives to his hateful writing grow longer and longer; day after day, he becomes more and more silent, in the hours that he gives to Me.

  And, with all this, there is nothing that I can complain of – nothing marked enough to ju
stify me in noticing it. His disappointment shrinks from all open confession; his resignation collects itself by such fine degrees that even my watchfulness fails to see the growth of it. Fifty times a day, I feel the longing in me, to throw my arms round his neck, and say, ‘For God’s sake, do anything to me, rather than treat me like this!’ – and fifty times a day the words are forced back into my heart by the cruel considerateness of his conduct, which gives me no excuse for speaking them. I thought I had suffered the sharpest pain that I could feel, when my first husband laid his whip across my face. I thought I knew the worst that despair could do, on the day when I knew that the other villain, the meaner villain still, had cast me off. Live and learn. There is sharper pain than I felt under Waldron’s whip; there is bitterer despair than the despair I knew when Manuel deserted me.

  Am I too old for him? Surely not yet! Have I lost my beauty? Not a man passes me in the street but his eyes tell me I am as handsome as ever.

  Ah, no! no! the secret lies deeper than that! I have thought and thought about it, till a horrible fancy has taken possession of me. He has been noble and good in his past life, and I have been wicked and disgraced. Who can tell what a gap that dreadful difference may make between us, unknown to him and unknown to me? It is folly, it is madness – but when I lie awake by him in the darkness, I ask myself whether any unconscious disclosure of the truth escapes me in the close intimacy that now unites us? Is there an unutterable Something left by the horror of my past life, which clings invisibly to me still? And is he feeling the influence of it, sensibly, and yet incomprehensibly to himself? Oh me! is there no purifying power in such love as mine? Are there plague-spots of past wickedness on my heart which no after-repentance can wash out?

  Who can tell? There is something wrong in our married life – I can only come back to that. There is some adverse influence that neither he nor I can trace, which is parting us farther and farther from each other, day by day. Well! I suppose I shall be hardened in time, and learn to bear it.

  An open carriage has just driven by my window, with a nicely-dressed lady in it. She had her husband by her side, and her children on the seat opposite. At the moment when I saw her she was laughing and talking in high spirits; a sparkling, light-hearted, happy woman, Ah, my lady, when you were a few years younger, if you had been left to yourself, and thrown on the world like me—’

  October 11th. – The eleventh day of the month was the day (two months since) when we were married. He said nothing about it to me when we woke, nor I to him. But I thought I would make it the occasion, at breakfast-time, of trying to win him back.

  I don’t think I ever took such pains with my toilette before; I don’t think I ever looked better than I looked when I went downstairs this morning. He had breakfasted by himself, and I found a little slip of paper on the table with an apology written on it. The post to England, he said, went out that day, and his letter to the newspaper must be finished. In his place, I would have let fifty posts go out, rather than breakfast without him. I went into his room. There he was, immersed body and soul in his hateful writing! ‘Can’t you give me a little time this morning?’ I asked. He got up with a start. ‘Certainly, if you wish it.’ He never even looked at me as he said the words. The very sound of his voice told me that all his interest was centred in the pen that he had just laid down. ‘I see you are occupied,’ I said; ‘I don’t wish it.’ Before I had closed the door on him he was back at his desk. I have often heard that the wives of authors have been for the most part unhappy women. And now I know why.

  I suppose, as I said yesterday, I shall learn to bear it. (What stuff, by the by, I seem to have written yesterday! How ashamed I should be if anybody saw it but myself!) I hope the trumpery newspaper he writes for won’t succeed! I hope his rubbishing letter will be well cut up by some other newspaper as soon as it gets into print!

  What am I to do with myself all the morning? I can’t go out, – it’s raining. If I open the piano, I shall disturb the industrious journalist who is scribbling in the next room. Oh dear! it was lonely enough in my lodging at Thorpe-Ambrose, but how much lonelier it is here. Shall I read? No; books don’t interest me; I hate the whole tribe of authors. I think I shall look back through these pages, and live my life over again when I was plotting and planning, and finding a new excitement to occupy me in every new hour of the day.

  He might have looked at me, though he was so busy with his writing. He might have said, ‘How nicely you are dressed this morning!’

  He might have remembered, – never mind what! All he remembers is the newspaper.

  Twelve o’clock. – I have been reading and thinking; and, thanks to my Diary, I have got through an hour.

  What a time it was, – what a life it was, at Thorpe-Ambrose! I wonder I kept my senses. It makes my heart beat, it makes my face flush, only to read about it now!

  The rain still falls, and the journalist still scribbles. I don’t want to think the thoughts of that past time over again. And yet, what else can I do?

  Supposing – I only say supposing – I felt now, as I felt when I travelled to London with Armadale; and when I saw my way to his life as plainly as I saw the man himself all through the journey…?

  I’ll go and look out of the window. I’ll go and count the people as they pass by.

  A funeral has gone by, with the penitents in their black hoods, and the wax torches sputtering in the wet, and the little bell ringing, and the priests droning their monotonous chant. A pleasant sight to meet me at the window! I shall go back to my Diary.

  Supposing I was not the altered woman I am – I only say, supposing – how would the Grand Risk that I once thought of running, look now? I have married Midwinter in the name that is really his own. And by doing that, I have taken the first of those three steps which were once to lead me, through Armadale’s life, to the fortune and the station of Armadale’s widow. No matter how innocent my intentions might have been on the wedding-day – and they were innocent – this is one of the unalterable results of the marriage. Well, having taken the first step, then, whether I would or no, how – supposing I meant to take the second step, which I don’t – how would present circumstances stand towards me? Would they warn me to draw back, I wonder? or would they encourage me to go on?

  It will interest me to calculate the chances; and I can easily tear the leaf out, and destroy it, if the prospect looks too encouraging.

  We are living here (for economy’s sake), far away from the expensive English quarter, in a suburb of the city, on the Portici side. We have made no travelling acquaintances among our own country-people. Our poverty is against us; Midwinter’s shyness is against us; and (with the women) my personal appearance is against us. The men from whom my husband gets his information for the newspaper, meet him at the cafe, and never come here. I discourage his bringing any strangers to see me; for, though years have passed since I was last at Naples, I cannot be sure that some of the many people I once knew in this place may not be living still. The moral of all this is (as the children’s story-books say), that not a single witness has come to this house who could declare, if any after-inquiry took place in England, that Midwinter and I had been living here as man and wife. So much for present circumstances as they affect Me.

  Armadale next. Has any unforeseen accident led him to communicate with Thorpe-Ambrose? Has he broken the conditions which the major imposed on him, and asserted himself in the character of Miss Milroy’s promised husband since I saw him last?

  Nothing of the sort has taken place. No unforeseen accident has altered his position – his tempting position – towards myself. I know all that has happened to him since he left England, through the letters which he writes to Midwinter, and which Midwinter shows to me.

  He has been wrecked, to begin with. His trumpery little yacht has actually tried to drown him, after all, and has failed! It happened (as Midwinter warned him it might happen with so small a vessel) in a sudden storm. They were blown ashore on the coast of
Portugal. The yacht went to pieces, but the lives, and papers, and so on, were saved. The men have been sent back to Bristol, with recommendations from their master, which have already got them employment on board an outward-bound ship. And the master himself is on his way here, after stopping first at Lisbon, and next at Gibraltar, and trying ineffectually in both places to supply himself with another vessel. His third attempt is to be made at Naples, where there is an English yacht ‘laid up’, as they call it, to be had for sale or hire. He has had no occasion to write home since the wreck – for he took away from Goutts’s the whole of the large sum of money lodged there for him, in circular notes.2 And he has felt no inclination to go back to England himself – for, with Mr Brock dead, Miss Milroy at school, and Midwinter here, he has not a living creature in whom he is interested, to welcome him if he returned. To see us, and to see the new yacht, are the only two present objects he has in view. Midwinter has been expecting him for a week past, and he may walk into this very room in which I am writing, at this very moment, for all I know to the contrary.

  Tempting circumstances, these – with all the wrongs I have suffered at his mother’s hands and at his, still alive in my memory; with Miss Milroy confidently waiting to take her place at the head of his household; with my dream of living happy and innocent in Midwinter’s love, dispelled for ever, and with nothing left in its place to help me against myself. I wish it wasn’t raining; I wish I could go out.

  Perhaps, something may happen to prevent Armadale from coming to Naples? When he last wrote, he was waiting at Gibraltar for an English steamer in the Mediterranean trade to bring him on here. He may get tired of waiting before the steamer comes, or he may hear of a yacht at some other place than this. A little bird whispers in my ear that it may possibly be the wisest thing he ever did in his life, if he breaks his engagement to join us at Naples.