Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  Mr Bashwood, stealing up alone to the second floor to make his report, knew, the instant he set eyes on her, that the report was needless. ‘It’s not my fault,’ was all he said, as she slowly turned her head, and looked at him. ‘They met together, and there was no parting them.’

  She drew a long breath, and motioned to him to be silent. ‘Wait a little,’ she said; ‘I know all about it.’

  Turning from him at those words, she slowly paced the corridor to its furthest end; turned, and slowly came back to him with frowning brow and drooping head – with all the grace and beauty gone from her, but the inbred grace and beauty in the movement of her limbs.

  ‘Do you wish to speak to me?’ she asked; her mind far away from him, and her eyes looking at him vacantly as she put the question.

  He roused his courage as he had never roused it in her presence yet.

  ‘Don’t drive me to despair!’ he cried, with a startling abruptness. ‘Don’t look at me in that way, now I have found it out!’

  ‘What have you found out?’ she asked, with a momentary surprise in her face, which faded from it again before he could gather breath enough to go on.

  ‘Mr Armadale is not the man who took you away from me,’ he answered. ‘Mr Midwinter is the man. I found it out in your face yesterday. I see it in your face now. Why did you sign your name, “Armadale”, when you wrote to me? Why do you call yourself “Mrs Armadale” still?’

  He spoke those bold words, at long intervals, with an effort to resist her influence over him, pitiable and terrible to see.

  She looked at him for the first time with softened eyes. ‘I wish I had pitied you when we first met,’ she said gently, ‘as I pity you now.’

  He struggled desperately to go on, and say the words to her which he had strung himself to the pitch of saying on the drive from the terminus. They were words which hinted darkly at his knowledge of her past life; words which warned her – do what else she might; commit what crimes she pleased – to think twice before she deceived and deserted him again. In those terms he had vowed to himself to address her. He had the phrases picked and chosen; he had the sentences ranged and ordered in his mind; nothing was wanting but to make the one crowning effort of speaking them – and, even now, after all he had said, and all he had dared, the effort was more than he could compass! In helpless gratitude, even for so little as her pity, he stood looking at her, and wept the silent womanish tears that fall from old men’s eyes.

  She took his hand and spoke to him – with marked forbearance, but without the slightest sign of emotion on her side.

  ‘You have waited already at my request,’ she said. ‘Wait till tomorrow, and you will know all. If you trust nothing else that I have told you, you may trust what I tell you now. It will end to-night.’

  As she said the words, the doctor’s step was heard on the stairs. Mr Bashwood drew back from her, with his heart beating fast in unutterable expectation. ‘It will end to-night!’ he repeated to himself, under his breath, as he moved away towards the far end of the corridor.

  ‘Don’t let me disturb you, sir,’ said the doctor, cheerfully, as they met. ‘I have nothing to say to Mrs Armadale but what you or anybody may hear.’

  Mr Bashwood went on, without answering, to the far end of the corridor, still repeating to himself, ‘It will end to-night!’ The doctor passing him in the opposite direction, joined Miss Gwilt.

  ‘You have heard, no doubt,’ he began in his blandest manner and his roundest tones, ‘that Mr Armadale has arrived. Permit me to add, my dear lady, that there is not the least reason for any nervous agitation on your part. He has been carefully humoured, and he is as quiet and manageable as his best friends could wish. I have informed him that it is impossible to allow him an interview with the young lady to-night – but that he may count on seeing her (with the proper precautions) at the earliest propitious hour, after she is awake tomorrow morning. As there is no hotel near, and as the propitious hour may occur at a moment’s notice, it was clearly incumbent on me, under the peculiar circumstances, to offer him the hospitality of the Sanatorium. He has accepted it with the utmost gratitude; and has thanked me in a most gentlemanly and touching manner for the pains I have taken to set his mind at ease. Perfectly gratifying, perfectly satisfactory, so far! But there has been a little hitch – now happily got over – which I think it right to mention to you before we all retire for the night.’

  Having paved the way in those words (and in Mr Bashwood’s hearing) for the statement which he had previously announced his intention of making, in the event of Allan’s dying in the Sanatorium, the doctor was about to proceed, when his attention was attracted by a sound below like the trying of a door.

  He instantly descended the stairs, and unlocked the door of communication between the first and second floors, which he had locked behind him on his way up. But the person who had tried the door – if such a person there really had been – was too quick for him. He looked along the corridor, and over the staircase into the hall, and discovering nothing, returned to Miss Gwilt, after securing the door of communication behind him once more.

  ‘Pardon me,’ he resumed, ‘I thought I heard something downstairs. With regard to the little hitch that I adverted to just now, permit me to inform you that Mr Armadale has brought a friend here with him, who bears the strange name of Midwinter. Do you know the gentleman at all?’ asked the doctor, with a suspicious anxiety in his eyes, which strangely belied the elaborate indifference of his tone.

  ‘I know him to be an old friend of Mr Armadale’s,’ she said. ‘Does he—?’ Her voice failed her, and her eyes fell before the doctor’s steady scrutiny. She mastered the momentary weakness, and finished her question. ‘Does he, too, stay here to-night?’

  ‘Mr Midwinter is a person of coarse manners and suspicious temper,’ rejoined the doctor, steadily watching her. ‘He was rude enough to insist on staying here as soon as Mr Armadale had accepted my invitation.’

  He paused to note the effect of those words on her. Left utterly in the dark by the caution with which she had avoided mentioning her husband’s assumed name to him at their first interview, the doctor’s distrust of her was necessarily of the vaguest kind. He had heard her voice fail her – he had seen her colour change. He suspected her of a mental reservation on the subject of Midwinter – and of nothing more.

  ‘Did you permit him to have his way?’ she asked. ‘In your place, I should have shown him the door.’

  The impenetrable composure of her tone warned the doctor that her self-command was not to be further shaken that night. He resumed the character of Mrs Armadale’s medical referee on the subject of Mr Armadale’s mental health.3

  ‘If I had only had my own feelings to consult,’ he said, ‘I don’t disguise from you that I should (as you say) have shown Mr Midwinter the door. But on appealing to Mr Armadale, I found he was himself anxious not to be parted from his friend. Under those circumstances, but one alternative was left, the alternative of humouring him again. The responsibility of thwarting him – to say nothing,’ added the doctor, drifting for a moment towards the truth, ‘of my natural apprehension, with such a temper as his friend’s, of a scandal and disturbance in the house – was not to be thought of for a moment. Mr Midwinter accordingly remains here for the night; and occupies (I ought to say, insists on occupying) the next room to Mr Armadale. Advise me, my dear madam, in this emergency,’ concluded the doctor, with his loudest emphasis. ‘What rooms shall we put them in, on the first floor?’

  ‘Put Mr Armadale in Number Four.’

  ‘And his friend next to him, in number three?’ said the doctor. ‘Well! well! well! perhaps they are the most comfortable rooms. I’ll give my orders immediately. Don’t hurry away, Mr Bashwood,’ he called out cheerfully as he reached the top of the staircase. ‘I have left the assistant-physician’s key4 on the window-sill yonder, and Mrs Armadale can let you out at the staircase door whenever she pleases.5 Don’t sit up late, Mrs Armadale! Yours is
a nervous system that requires plenty of sleep. “Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”6 Grand line! God bless you – good-night!’

  Mr Bashwood came back from the far end of the corridor – still pondering, in unutterable expectation, on what was to come with the night.

  ‘Am I to go now?’ he asked.

  ‘No. You are to stay. I said you should know all if you waited till the morning. Wait here.’

  He hesitated and looked about him. ‘The doctor,’ he faltered. ‘I thought the doctor said—’

  ‘The doctor will interfere with nothing that I do in this house to-night. I tell you to stay. There are empty rooms on the floor above this. Take one of them.’

  Mr Bashwood felt the trembling fit coming on him again as he looked at her. ‘May I ask—?’ he began.

  ‘Ask nothing. I want you.’

  ‘Will you please to tell me—?’

  ‘I will tell you nothing till the night is over and the morning has come.’

  His curiosity conquered his fear. He persisted.

  ‘Is it something dreadful?’ he whispered. ‘Too dreadful to tell me?’

  She stamped her foot with a sudden outbreak of impatience. ‘Go!’ she said, snatching the key of the staircase door from the window-sill. ‘You do quite right to distrust me – you do quite right to follow me no farther in the dark. Go before the house is shut up. I can do without you.’ She led the way to the stairs, with the key in one hand, and the candle in the other.

  Mr Bashwood followed her in silence. No one, knowing what he knew of her earlier life, could have failed to perceive that she was a woman driven to the last extremity, and standing consciously on the brink of a Crime. In the first terror of the discovery, he broke free from the hold she had on him – he thought and acted like a man who had a will of his own again.

  She put the key in the door, and turned to him before she opened it, with the light of the candle on her face. ‘Forget me, and forgive me,’ she said. ‘We meet no more.’

  She opened the door, and, standing inside it, after he had passed her, gave him her hand. He had resisted her look, he had resisted her words, but the magnetic fascination of her touch conquered him at the final moment. ‘I can’t leave you!’ he said, holding helplessly by the hand she had given him. ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Come and see,’ she answered, without allowing him an instant to reflect.

  Closing her hand firmly on his, she led him along the first-floor corridor to the room numbered Four. ‘Notice that room,’ she whispered. After a look over the stairs to see that they were alone, she retraced her steps with him to the opposite extremity of the corridor. Here, facing the window which lit the place at the other end, was one little room, with a narrow grating in the higher part of the door, intended for the sleeping-apartment of the doctor’s deputy. From the position of this room, the grating commanded a view of the bed-chambers down each side of the corridor, and so enabled the deputy-physician to inform himself of any irregular proceedings on the part of the patients under his care, with little or no chance of being detected in watching them. Miss Gwilt opened the door and led the way into the empty room.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said, ‘while I go back upstairs; and lock yourself in, if you like. You will be in the dark – but the gas will be burning in the corridor. Keep at the grating, and make sure that Mr Armadale goes into the room I have just pointed out to you, and that he doesn’t leave it afterwards. If you lose sight of the room for a single moment, before I come back, you will repent it to the end of your life. If you do as I tell you, you shall see me to-morrow, and claim your own reward. Quick with your answer! Is it Yes or No?’

  He could make no reply in words. He raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it rapturously. She left him in the room. From his place at the grating he saw her glide down the corridor to the staircase door. She passed through it, and locked it. Then there was silence.

  The next sound was the sound of the women-servants’ voices. Two of them came up to put the sheets on the beds in Number Three and Number Four. The women were in high good-humour, laughing and talking to each other through the open doors of the rooms. The master’s customers were coming in at last, they said, with a vengeance; the house would soon begin to look cheerful, if things went on like this.

  After a little, the beds were got ready, and the women returned to the kitchen-floor, on which the sleeping rooms of the domestic servants were all situated. Then there was silence again.

  The next sound was the sound of the doctor’s voice. He appeared at the end of the corridor, showing Allan and Midwinter the way to their rooms. They all went together into Number Four. After a little, the doctor came out first. He waited till Midwinter joined him, and pointed with a formal bow to the door of Number Three. Midwinter entered the room without speaking, and shut himself in. The doctor, left alone, withdrew to the staircase door and unlocked it – then waited in the corridor, whistling to himself softly, under his breath.

  Voices pitched cautiously low became audible in a minute more in the hall. The Resident Dispenser and the Head Nurse appeared, on their way to the Dormitories of the Attendants at the top of the house. The man bowed silently, and passed the doctor; the woman curtseyed silently, and followed the man. The doctor acknowledged their salutations by a courteous wave of his hand; and once more left alone, paused a moment, still whistling softly to himself – then walked to the door of Number Four, and opened the case of the fumigating apparatus fixed near it in the corner of the wall. As he lifted the lid and looked in, his whistling ceased. He took a long purple bottle out, examined it by the gaslight, put it back, and closed the case. This done, he advanced on tiptoe to the open staircase door – passed through it – and secured it on the inner side as usual.

  Mr Bashwood had seen him at the apparatus; Mr Bashwood had noticed the manner of his withdrawal through the staircase-door. Again the sense of an unutterable expectation throbbed at his heart. A terror that was slow and cold and deadly crept into his hands, and guided them in the dark to the key that had been left for him in the inner side of the door. He turned it in vague distrust of what might happen next, and waited.

  The slow minutes passed, and nothing happened. The silence was horrible; the solitude of the lonely corridor was a solitude of invisible treacheries. He began to count to keep his mind employed – to keep his own growing dread away from him. The numbers, as he whispered them, followed each other slowly up to a hundred, and still nothing happened. He had begun the second hundred; he had got on to twenty – when, without a sound to betray that he had been moving in his room, Midwinter suddenly appeared in the corridor.

  He stood for a moment and listened – he went to the stairs and looked over into the hall beneath. Then, for the second time that night, he tried the staircase door, and for the second time found it fast. After a moment’s reflection, he tried the doors of the bedrooms on his right hand next, looked into one after the other, and saw that they were empty, then came to the door of the end room in which the steward was concealed. Here again, the lock resisted him. He listened, and looked up at the grating. No sound was to be heard, no light was to be seen inside. ‘Shall I break the door in,’ he said to himself, ‘and make sure? No; it would be giving the doctor an excuse for turning me out of the house.’ He moved away, and looked into the two empty rooms in the row occupied by Allan and himself, then walked to the window at the staircase end of the corridor. Here, the case of the fumigating apparatus attracted his attention. After trying vainly to open it, his suspicion seemed to be aroused. He searched back along the corridor, and observed that no object of a similar kind appeared outside any of the other bedchambers. Again at the window, he looked again at the apparatus, and turned away from it with a gesture which plainly indicated that he had tried, and failed, to guess what it might be.

  Baffled at all points, he still showed no sign of returning to his bedchamber. He stood at the window, with his eyes fixed on the door of Allan’s room, thinking. If
Mr Bashwood, furtively watching him through the grating, could have seen him at that moment in the mind as well as in the body, Mr Bashwood’s heart might have throbbed even faster than it was throbbing now, in expectation of the next event which Midwinter’s decision of the next minute was to bring forth.

  On what was his mind occupied as he stood alone, at the dead of night, in the strange house?

  His mind was occupied in drawing its disconnected impressions together, little by little, to one point. Convinced, from the first, that some hidden danger threatened Allan in the Sanatorium, his distrust – vaguely associated, thus far, with the place itself; with his wife (whom he firmly believed to be now under the same roof with him); with the doctor, who was as plainly in her confidence as Mr Bashwood himself – now narrowed its range, and centred itself obstinately in Allan’s room. Resigning all further effort to connect his suspicion of a conspiracy against his friend, with the outrage which had the day before been offered to himself – an effort which would have led him, if he could have maintained it, to a discovery of the Fraud really contemplated by his wife – his mind, clouded and confused by disturbing influences, instinctively took refuge in its impressions of facts as they had shown themselves, since he had entered the house. Everything that he had noticed below stairs suggested that there was some secret purpose to be answered by getting Allan to sleep in the Sanatorium. Everything that he had noticed above stairs, associated the lurking-place in which the danger lay hid, with Allan’s room. To reach this conclusion, and to decide on baffling the conspiracy, whatever it might be, by taking Allan’s place, was with Midwinter the work of an instant. Confronted by actual peril, the great nature of the man intuitively freed itself from the weaknesses that had beset it in happier and safer times. Not even the shadow of the old superstition rested on his mind now – no fatalist suspicion of himself disturbed the steady resolution that was in him. The one last doubt that troubled him, as he stood at the window thinking, was the doubt whether he could persuade Allan to change rooms with him, without involving himself in an explanation which might lead Allan to suspect the truth.