Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  The Resident Dispenser left the room.

  As soon as his back was turned, the doctor began opening and shutting drawers in various parts of the dispensary, with the air of a man who wants something in a hurry, and doesn’t know where to find it. ‘Bless my soul!’ he exclaimed, suddenly stopping at the drawer from which he had taken his cards of invitation on the previous day, ‘what’s this? A key? A duplicate key, as I’m alive, of my fumigating Apparatus upstairs! Oh dear, dear, how careless I get,’ said the doctor, turning round briskly to Miss Gwilt. ‘I hadn’t the least idea that I possessed this second key. I should never have missed it. I do assure you I should never have missed it, if anybody had taken it out of the drawer!’ He bustled away to the other end of the room – without closing the drawer, and without taking away the duplicate key.

  In silence, Miss Gwilt listened till he had done. In silence, she glided to the drawer. In silence, she took the key and hid it in her apron pocket.

  The Dispenser came back, with the fragments required of him, collected in a basin. ‘Thank you, Benjamin,’ said the doctor. ‘Kindly cover them with water, while I get the bottle down.’

  As accidents sometimes happen in the most perfectly regulated families, so clumsiness sometimes possesses itself of the most perfectly disciplined hands. In the process of its transfer from the shelf to the doctor, the bottle slipped, and fell smashed to pieces on the floor.

  ‘Oh, my fingers and thumbs!’ cried the doctor, with an air of comic vexation, ‘what in the world do you mean by playing me such a wicked trick as that? Well, well, well – it can’t be helped. Have we got any more of it, Benjamin?’

  ‘Not a drop, sir.’

  ‘Not a drop!’ echoed the doctor. ‘My dear madam, what excuses can I offer you? My clumsiness has made our little experiment impossible for to-day. Remind me to order some more to-morrow, Benjamin – and don’t think of troubling yourself to put that mess to rights. I’ll send the man here to mop it all up. Our Stout Friend is harmless enough now, my dear lady – in combination with a boarded floor and a coming mop! I’m so sorry; I really am so sorry to have disappointed you.’ With those soothing words, he offered his arm, and led Miss Gwilt out of the dispensary.

  ‘Have you done with me for the present?’ she asked when they were in the hall.

  ‘Oh dear, dear, what a way of putting it!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Dinner at six,’ he added with his politest emphasis, as she turned from him in disdainful silence, and slowly mounted the stairs to her own room.

  A clock of the noiseless sort – incapable of offending irritable nerves – was fixed in the wall, above the first-floor landing, at the Sanatorium. At the moment when the hands pointed to a quarter before six, the silence of the lonely upper regions was softly broken by the rustling of Miss Gwilt’s dress. She advanced along the corridor of the first-floor – paused at the covered Apparatus fixed outside the room numbered Four – listened for a moment – and then unlocked the cover with the duplicate key.

  The open lid cast a shadow over the inside of the casing. All she saw at first, was what she had seen already – the jar, and the pipe and glass funnel inserted in the cork. She removed the funnel; and, looking about her, observed on the window-sill close by, a wax-tipped wand used for lighting the gas. She took the wand, and, introducing it through the aperture occupied by the funnel, moved it to and fro in the jar. The faint splash of some liquid, and the grating noise of certain hard substances which she was stirring about, were the two sounds that caught her ear. She drew out the wand, and cautiously touched the wet left on it with the tip of her tongue. Caution was quite needless in this case. The liquid was – water.

  In putting the funnel back in its place, she noticed something faintly shining in the obscurely-lit vacant space at the side of the jar. She drew it out, and produced a Purple Flask. The liquid with which it was filled showed dark through the transparent colouring of the glass; and, fastened at regular intervals down one side of the Flask, were six thin strips of paper which divided the contents into six equal parts.

  There was no doubt now, that the Apparatus had been secretly prepared for her – the Apparatus of which she alone (besides the doctor) possessed the key.

  She put back the Flask, and locked the cover of the casing. For a moment, she stood looking at it, with the key in her hand. On a sudden, her lost colour came back. On a sudden, its natural animation returned, for the first time that day, to her face. She turned and hurried breathlessly upstairs to her room on the second floor. With eager hands, she snatched her cloak out of the wardrobe, and took her bonnet from the box. ‘I’m not in prison!’ she burst out impetuously. ‘I’ve got the use of my limbs! I can go – no matter where, as long as I am out of this house!’

  With her cloak on her shoulders, with her bonnet in her hand, she crossed the room to the door. A moment more – and she would have been out in the passage. In that moment, the remembrance flashed back on her of the husband whom she had denied to his face. She stopped instantly, and threw the cloak and bonnet from her on the bed. ‘No!’ she said. ‘The gulph is dug between us – the worst is done!’

  There was a knock at the door. The doctor’s voice outside, politely reminded her that it was six o’clock.

  She opened the door, and stopped him on his way downstairs.

  ‘What time is the train due to-night?’ she asked in a whisper.

  ‘At ten,’ answered the doctor, in a voice which all the world might hear, and welcome.

  ‘What room is Mr Armadale to have when he comes?’

  ‘What room would you like him to have?’

  ‘Number Four.’

  The doctor kept up appearances to the very last.

  ‘Number Four let it be,’ he said graciously. ‘Provided, of course, that Number Four is unoccupied at the time.’

  The evening wore on, and the night came.

  At a few minutes before ten, Mr Bashwood was again at his post; once more on the watch for the coming of the tidal train.

  The inspector on duty, who knew him by sight, and who had personally ascertained that his regular attendance at the terminus implied no designs on the purses and portmanteaus of the passengers, noticed two new circumstances in connection with Mr Bashwood that night. In the first place, instead of exhibiting his customary cheerfulness, he looked anxious and depressed. In the second place, while he was watching for the train, he was to all appeareance being watched in his turn, by a slim, dark, undersized man, who had left his luggage (marked with the name of Midwinter,) at the custom-house department the evening before, and who had returned to have it examined about half an hour since.

  What had brought Midwinter to the terminus? and why was he, too, waiting for the tidal train?

  After straying as far as Hendon during his lonely walk of the previous night, he had taken refuge at the village inn, and had fallen asleep (from sheer exhaustion) towards those later hours of the morning, which were the hours that his wife’s foresight had turned to account. When he returned to the lodging, the landlady could only inform him that her tenant had settled everything with her, and had left (for what destination neither she nor her servant could tell) more than two hours since.

  Having given some little time to inquiries, the result of which convinced him that the clue was lost so far, Midwinter had quitted the house, and had pursued his way mechanically to the busier and more central parts of the metropolis. With the light now thrown on his wife’s character, to call at the address she had given him as the address at which her mother lived would be plainly useless. He went on through the streets, resolute to discover her, and trying vainly to see the means to his end, till the sense of fatigue forced itself on him once more. Stopping to rest and recruit his strength at the first hotel he came to, a chance dispute between the waiter and a stranger about a lost portmanteau reminded him of his own luggage, left at the terminus, and instantly took his mind back to the circumstances under which he and Mr Bashwood had met. In a moment more, the idea
that he had been vainly seeking on his way through the streets flashed on him. In a moment more, he had determined to try the chance of finding the steward again on the watch for the person whose arrival he had evidently expected by the previous evening’s train.

  Ignorant of the report of Allan’s death at sea; uninformed, at the terrible interview with his wife, of the purpose which her assumption of a widow’s dress really had in view, Midwinter’s first vague suspicions of her fidelity had now inevitably developed into the conviction that she was false. He could place but one interpretation on her open disavowal of him, and on her taking the name under which he had secretly married her. Her conduct forced the conclusion on him that she was engaged in some infamous intrigue; and that she had basely secured herself beforehand in the position of all others in which she knew it would be most odious and most repellent to him to claim his authority over her. With that conviction he was now watching Mr Bashwood, firmly persuaded that his wife’s hiding-place was known to the vile servant of his wife’s vices – and darkly suspecting, as the time wore on, that the unknown man who had wronged him, and the unknown traveller for whose arrival the steward was waiting, were one and the same.

  The train was late that night, and the carriages were more than usually crowded when they arrived at last. Midwinter became involved in the confusion on the platform, and in the effort to extricate himself he lost sight of Mr Bashwood for the first time.

  A lapse of some few minutes had passed before he again discovered the steward talking eagerly to a man in a loose shaggy coat, whose back was turned towards him. Forgetful of all the cautions and restraints which he had imposed on himself before the train appeared, Midwinter instantly advanced on them. Mr Bashwood saw his threatening face as he came on, and fell back in silence. The man in the loose coat turned to look where the steward was looking, and disclosed to Midwinter, in the full light of the station-lamp, Allan’s face!

  For the moment they both stood speechless, hand in hand, looking at each other. Allan was the first to recover himself.

  ‘Thank God for this!’ he said fervently. ‘I don’t ask how you came here – it’s enough for me that you have come. Miserable news has met me already, Midwinter. Nobody but you can comfort me, and help me to bear it.’ His voice faltered over those last words, and he said no more.

  The tone in which he had spoken roused Midwinter to meet the circumstances as they were, by appealing to the old grateful interest in his friend which had once been the foremost interest of his life. He mastered his personal misery for the first time since it had fallen on him, and gently taking Allan aside, asked what had happened.

  The answer – after informing him of his friend’s reported death at sea – announced (on Mr Bashwood’s authority) that the news had reached Miss Milroy, and that the deplorable result of the shock thus inflicted, had obliged the major to place his daughter in the neighbourhood of London, under medical care.

  Before saying a word on his side, Midwinter looked distrustfully behind him. Mr Bashwood had followed them. Mr Bashwood was watching to see what they did next.

  ‘Was he waiting your arrival here to tell you this about Miss Milroy?’ asked Midwinter, looking back again from the steward to Allan.

  ‘Yes,’ said Allan. ‘He has been kindly waiting here, night after night, to meet me, and break the news to me.’

  Midwinter paused once more. The attempt to reconcile the conclusion he had drawn from his wife’s conduct with the discovery that Allan was the man for whose arrival Mr Bashwood had been waiting, was hopeless. The one present chance of discovering a truer solution of the mystery, was to press the steward on the one available point in which he had laid himself open to attack. He had positively denied on the previous evening that he knew anything of Allan’s movements, or that he had any interest in Allan’s return to England. Having detected Mr Bashwood in one lie told to himself, Midwinter instantly suspected him of telling another to Allan. He seized the opportunity of sifting the statement about Miss Milroy on the spot.

  ‘How have you become acquainted with this sad news?’ he inquired, turning suddenly on Mr Bashwood.

  ‘Through the major of course,’ said Allan, before the steward could answer.

  ‘Who is the doctor who has the care of Miss Milroy?’ persisted Midwinter, still addressing Mr Bashwood.

  For the second time the steward made no reply. For the second time, Allan answered for him.

  ‘He is a man with a foreign name,’ said Allan. ‘He keeps a Sanatorium near Hampstead. What did you say the place was called, Mr Bashwood?’

  ‘Fairweather Vale, sir,’ said the steward, answering his employer as a matter of necessity, but answering very unwillingly.

  The address of the Sanatorium instantly reminded Midwinter that he had traced his wife to Fairweather Vale Villas the previous night. He began to see light through the darkness, dimly, for the first time. The instinct which comes with emergency, before the slower process of reason can assert itself, brought him at a leap to the conclusion that Mr Bashwood – who had been certainly acting under his wife’s influence the previous day – might be acting again under his wife’s influence now. He persisted in sifting the steward’s statement, with the conviction growing firmer and firmer in his mind that the statement was a lie, and that his wife was concerned in it.

  ‘Is the major in Norfolk?’ he asked, ‘or is he near his daughter in London?’

  ‘In Norfolk,’ said Mr Bashwood. Having answered Allan’s look of inquiry, instead of Midwinter’s spoken question, in those words, he hesitated, looked Midwinter in the face for the first time, and added, suddenly, ‘I object, if you please, to be cross-examined, sir. I know what I have told Mr Armadale, and I know no more.’

  The words, and the voice in which they were spoken, were alike at variance with Mr Bashwood’s usual language and Mr Bashwood’s usual tone. There was a sullen depression in his face – there was a furtive distrust and dislike in his eyes when they looked at Midwinter, which Midwinter himself now noticed for the first time. Before he could answer the steward’s extraordinary outbreak, Allan interfered.

  ‘Don’t think me impatient,’ he said. ‘But it’s getting late; it’s a long way to Hampstead. I’m afraid the Sanatorium will be shut up.’

  Midwinter started. ‘You are not going to the Sanatorium to-night!’ he exclaimed.

  Allan took his friend’s hand, and wrung it hard. ‘If you were as fond of her as I am,’ he whispered, ‘you would take no rest, you could get no sleep, till you had seen the doctor, and heard the best and the worst he had to tell you. Poor dear little soul! who knows, if she could only see me alive and well—’ The tears came into his eyes, and he turned away his head in silence.

  Midwinter looked at the steward. ‘Stand back,’ he said. ‘I want to speak to Mr Armadale.’ There was something in his eye which it was not safe to trifle with. Mr Bashwood drew back out of hearing, but not out of sight. Midwinter laid his hand fondly on his friend’s shoulder.

  ‘Allan,’ he said, ‘I have reasons—’ He stopped. Gould the reasons be given before he had fairly realized them himself; at that time, too, and under those circumstances? Impossible! ‘I have reasons,’ he resumed, ‘for advising you not to believe too readily what Mr Bashwood may say. Don’t tell him this, but take the warning.’

  Allan looked at his friend in astonishment. ‘It was you who always liked Mr Bashwood!’ he exclaimed. ‘It was you who trusted him, when he first came to the great house!’

  ‘Perhaps I was wrong, Allan, and perhaps you were right. Will you only wait till we can telegraph to Major Milroy and get his answer? Will you only wait over the night?’

  ‘I shall go mad if I wait over the night,’ said Allan. ‘You have made me more anxious than I was before. If I am not to speak about it to Bashwood, I must and will go to the Sanatorium, and find out whether she is or is not there, from the doctor himself.’

  Midwinter saw that it was useless. In Allan’s interests there was only
one other course left to take. ‘Will you let me go with you?’ he asked.

  Allan’s face brightened for the first time. ‘You dear, good fellow!’ he exclaimed. ‘It was the very thing I was going to beg of you myself.’

  Midwinter beckoned to the steward. ‘Mr Armadale is going to the Sanatorium,’ he said, ‘and I mean to accompany him. Get a cab and come with us.’

  He waited, to see whether Mr Bashwood would comply. Having been strictly ordered, when Allan did arrive, not to lose sight of him, and having, in his own interests, Midwinter’s unexpected appearance to explain to Miss Gwilt, the steward had no choice but to comply. In sullen submission he did as he had been told. The keys of Allan’s baggage were given to the foreign travelling servant whom he had brought with him, and the man was instructed to wait his master’s orders at the terminus hotel. In a minute more the cab was on its way out of the station – with Midwinter and Allan inside, and with Mr Bashwood by the driver on the box.

  Between eleven and twelve o’clock that night, Miss Gwilt, standing alone at the window which lit the corridor of the Sanatorium on the second floor, heard the roll of wheels coming towards her. The sound, gathering rapidly in volume through the silence of the lonely neighbourhood, stopped at the iron gates. In another minute she saw the cab draw up beneath her, at the house door.

  The earlier night had been cloudy, but the sky was clearing now, and the moon was out. She opened the window to see and hear more clearly. By the light of the moon she saw Allan get out of the cab, and turn round to speak to some other person inside. The answering voice told her, before he appeared in his turn, that Armadale’s companion was her husband.

  The same petrifying influence that had fallen on her at the interview with him of the previous day, fell on her now. She stood by the window, white and still, and haggard and old – as she had stood when she first faced him in her widow’s weeds.