Armadale Read online

  The moment Mr Neal appeared in the doorway, those restless eyes stopped, looked up, and fastened on the stranger with a fierce eagerness of inquiry. Slowly the motionless lips struggled into movement. With thick, hesitating articulation, they put the question which the eyes asked mutely, into words.

  ‘Are you the man?’

  Mr Neal advanced to the bedside; Mrs Armadale drawing back from it as he approached, and waiting with the doctor at the farther end of the room. The child looked up, toy in hand, as the stranger came near – opened his bright brown eyes wide in momentary astonishment – and then went on with his game.

  ‘I have been made acquainted with your sad situation, sir,’ said Mr Neal. ‘And I have come here to place my services at your disposal; services which no one but myself– as your medical attendant informs me – is in a position to render you in this strange place. My name is Neal. I am a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh;1 and I may presume to say for myself that any confidence you wish to place in me will be confidence not improperly bestowed.’

  The eyes of the beautiful wife were not confusing him now. He spoke to the helpless husband quietly and seriously, without his customary harshness, and with a grave compassion in his manner which presented him at his best. The sight of the death-bed had steadied him.

  ‘You wish me to write something for you?’ he resumed, after waiting for a reply, and waiting in vain.

  ‘Yes!’ said the dying man, with the all-mastering impatience which his tongue was powerless to express, glittering angrily in his eyes. ‘My hand is gone; and my speech is going. Write!’

  Before there was time to speak again, Mr Neal heard the rustling of a woman’s dress, and the quick creaking of castors on the carpet behind him. Mrs Armadale was moving the writing-table across the room to the foot of the bed. If he was to set up those safeguards of his own devising that were to bear him harmless through all results to come, now was the time, or never. He kept his back turned on Mrs Armadale; and put his precautionary question at once in the plainest terms.

  ‘May I ask, sir, before I take the pen in hand, what it is you wish me to write?’

  The angry eyes of the paralysed man glittered brighter and brighter. His lips opened and closed again. He made no reply.

  Mr Neal tried another precautionary question, in a new direction.

  ‘When I have written what you wish me to write,’ he asked, ‘what is to be done with it?’

  This time the answer came:

  ‘Seal it up in my presence, and post it to my Ex—’

  His labouring articulation suddenly stopped, and he looked piteously in the questioner’s face for the next word.

  ‘Do you mean your Executor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?’ There was no answer. ‘May I ask if it is a letter altering your will?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort.’

  Mr Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one way out of it so far, was the way traced faintly through that strange story of the unfinished letter which the doctor had repeated to him in Mrs Armadale’s words. The nearer he approached his unknown responsibility, the more ominous it seemed of something serious to come. Should he risk another question before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt crossed his mind, he felt Mrs Armadale’s silk dress touch him, on the side farthest from her husband. Her delicate dark hand was laid gently on his arm; her full deep African eyes looked at him in submissive entreaty. ‘My husband is very anxious,’ she whispered. ‘Will you quiet his anxiety, sir, by taking your place at the writing-table?’

  It was from her lips that the request came – from the lips of the person who had the best right to hesitate, the wife who was excluded from the secret! Most men in Mr Neal’s position would have given up all their safeguards on the spot. The Scotchman gave them all up, but one.

  ‘I will write what you wish me to write,’ he said, addressing Mr Armadale. ‘I will seal it in your presence; and I will post it to your Executor myself. But, in engaging to do this, I must beg you to remember, that I am acting entirely in the dark; and I must ask you to excuse me, if I reserve my own entire freedom of action, when your wishes in relation to the writing and the posting of the letter have been fulfilled.’

  ‘Do you give me your promise?’

  ‘If you want my promise, sir, I will give it – subject to the condition I have just named.’

  ‘Take your condition, and keep your promise. My desk,’ he added, looking at his wife for the first time.

  She crossed the room eagerly to fetch the desk from a chair in a corner. Returning with it, she made a passing sign to the negress, who still stood, grim and silent, in the place that she had occupied from the first. The woman advanced, obedient to the sign, to take the child from the bed. At the instant when she touched him, the father’s eyes – fixed previously on the desk – turned on her with the stealthy quickness of a cat. ‘No!’ he said. ‘No!’ echoed the fresh voice of the boy, still charmed with his plaything, and still liking his place on the bed. The negress left the room, and the child, in high triumph, trotted his toy-soldier up and down on the bedclothes that lay rumpled over his father’s breast. His mother’s lovely face contracted with a pang of jealousy as she looked at him.

  ‘Shall I open your desk?’ she asked, pushing back the child’s plaything sharply while she spoke. An answering look from her husband guided her hand to the place under his pillow where the key was hidden. She opened the desk, and disclosed inside some small sheets of manuscript pinned together. ‘These?’ she inquired, producing them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can go now.’

  The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring a stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an anxiety in both their faces which they could neither of them control. The words that banished the wife from the room were spoken. The moment had come.

  ‘You can go now,’ said Mr Armadale, for the second time.

  She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed; and an ashy paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the fatal letter which was a sealed secret to her; and a torture of jealous suspicion – suspicion of that other woman who had been the shadow and the poison of her life – wrung her to the heart. After moving a few steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back again. Armed with the double courage of her love and her despair, she pressed her lips on her dying husband’s cheek, and pleaded with him for the last time. Her burning tears dropped on his face as she whispered to him. ‘Oh! Allan, think how I have loved you! think how hard I have tried to make you happy! think how soon I shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don’t, don’t send me away!’

  The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the recollection of the love that had been given to him, and never returned, touched the heart of the fast sinking man as nothing had touched it since the day of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke from him. He looked at her, and hesitated.

  ‘Let me stay,’ she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.

  ‘It will only distress you,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from you!’

  He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.

  ‘If I let you stay a little—?’

  ‘Yes! yes!’

  ‘Will you go when I tell you?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘On your oath?’

  The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for a moment in the great outburst of anxiety which forced that question to his lips. He spoke those startling words as he had spoken no words yet.

  ‘On my oath!’ she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the bedside, passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the room turned their heads away by common consent. In the silence that followed, the one sound stirring was the small sound of the child’s toy, as he moved it hither and thither on the bed.

  The doctor was the first who
broke the spell of stillness which had fallen on all the persons present. He approached the patient, and examined him anxiously. Mrs Armadale rose from her knees; and, first waiting for her husband’s permission, carried the sheets of manuscript which she had taken out of the desk, to the table at which Mr Neal was waiting. Flushed and eager, more beautiful than ever in the vehement agitation which still possessed her, she stooped over him as she put the letter into his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a woman’s headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to him: ‘Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!’ Her eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on his cheek. Before he could answer, before he could think, she was back with her husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that instant her beauty had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning in reluctant acknowledgment of his own inability to resist her, he turned over the leaves of the letter; looked at the blank place where the pen had dropped from the writer’s hand, and had left a blot on the paper; turned back again to the beginning, and said the words, in the wife’s interest, which the wife herself had put into his lips.

  ‘Perhaps, sir, you may wish to make some corrections,’ he began, with all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with every outward appearance of letting his sour temper again get the better of him. ‘Shall I read over to you what you have already written?’

  Mrs Armadale sitting at the bed-head on one side, and the doctor with his fingers on the patient’s pulse, sitting on the other, waited with widely different anxieties for the answer to Mr Neal’s question. Mr Armadale’s eyes turned searchingly from his child to his wife.

  ‘You will hear it?’ he said. Her breath came and went quickly; her hand stole up and took his; she bowed her head in silence. Her husband paused, taking secret counsel with his thoughts, and keeping his eyes fixed on his wife. At last he decided, and gave the answer. ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘And stop when I tell you.’

  It was close on one o’clock, and the bell was ringing which summoned the visitors to their early dinner at the inn. The quick beat of footsteps, and the gathering hum of voices outside, penetrated gaily into the room, as Mr Neal spread the manuscript before him on the table, and read the opening sentences in these words:

  I address this letter to my son, when my son is of an age to understand it. Having lost all hope of living to see my boy grow up to manhood, I have no choice but to write here what I would fain have said to him at a future time, with my own lips.

  I have three objects in writing. First, to reveal the circumstances which attended the marriage of an English lady of my acquaintance, in the island of Madeira.2 Secondly, to throw the true light on the death of her husband a short time afterwards, on board the French timber-ship, La Grace de Dieu. Thirdly, to warn my son of a danger that lies in wait for him – a danger that will rise from his father’s grave, when the earth has closed over his father’s ashes.

  The story of the English lady’s marriage begins with my inheriting the great Armadale property, and my taking the fatal Armadale name.

  I am the only surviving son of the late Mathew Wrentmore, of Barbadoes. I was born on our family estate in that island; and I lost my father when I was still a child. My mother was blindly fond of me: she denied me nothing; she let me live as I pleased. My boyhood and youth were passed in idleness and self-indulgence, among people – slaves and half-castes mostly – to whom my will was law. I doubt if there is a gentleman of my birth and station in all England, as ignorant as I am at this moment. I doubt if there was ever a young man in this world whose passions were left so entirely without control of any kind, as mine were in those early days.

  My mother had a woman’s romantic objection to my father’s homely Christian name. I was christened Allan, after the name of a wealthy cousin of my father’s – the late Allan Armadale – who possessed estates in our neighbourhood, the largest and the most productive in the island, and who consented to be my godfather by proxy. Mr Armadale had never seen his West Indian property. He lived in England; and, after sending me the customary godfather’s present, he held no further communication with my parents for years afterwards. I was just twenty-one before we heard again from Mr Armadale. On that occasion, my mother received a letter from him, asking if I was still alive, and offering no less (if I was) than to make me the heir to his West Indian property.

  This piece of good fortune fell to me entirely through the misconduct of Mr Armadale’s son, and only child. The young man had disgraced himself beyond all redemption; had left his home an outlaw; and had been thereupon renounced by his father at once and for ever. Having no other near male relative to succeed him, Mr Armadale thought of his cousin’s son, and his own godson; and he offered the West Indian estate to me, and my heirs after me, on one condition – that I, and my heirs, should take his name. The proposal was gratefully accepted, and the proper legal measures were adopted for changing my name in the colony, and in the mother-country. By the next mail, information reached Mr Armadale that his condition had been complied with. The return mail brought news from the lawyers. The will had been altered in my favour, and in a week afterwards, the death of my benefactor had made me the largest proprietor and the richest man in Barbadoes.

  This was the first event in the chain. The second event followed it six weeks aferwards.

  At that time there happened to be a vacancy in the clerk’s office on the estate, and there came to fill it, a young man about my own age, who had recently arrived in the island. He announced himself by the name of Fergus Ingleby. My impulses governed me in everything; I knew no law but the law of my own caprice, and I took a fancy to the stranger the moment I set eyes on him. He had the manners of a gentleman, and he possessed the most attractive social qualities which, in my small experience, I had ever met with. When I heard that the written references to character which he had brought with him, were pronounced to be unsatisfactory, I interfered, and insisted that he should have the place. My will was law, and he had it.

  My mother disliked and distrusted Ingleby from the first. When she found the intimacy between us rapidly ripening; when she found me admitting this inferior to the closest companionship and confidence – (I had lived with my inferiors all my life, and I liked it) – she made effort after effort to part us, and failed in one and all. Driven to her last resources she resolved to try the one chance left – the chance of persuading me to take a voyage which I had often thought of, a voyage to England.

  Before she spoke to me on the subject, she resolved to interest me in the idea of seeing England, as I had never been interested yet. She wrote to an old friend and an old admirer of hers, the late Stephen Blanchard, of Thorpe-Ambrose, in Norfolk – a gentleman of landed estate, and a widower with a grown-up family. After-discoveries informed me that she must have alluded to their former attachment (which was checked, I believe, by the parents on either side); and that, in asking Mr Blanchard’s welcome for her son when he came to England, she made inquiries about his daughter, which hinted at the chance of a marriage uniting the two families, if the young lady and I met and liked one another. We were equally matched in every respect, and my mother’s recollection of her girlish attachment to Mr Blanchard, made the prospect of my marrying her old admirer’s daughter the brightest and happiest prospect that her eyes could see. Of all this I knew nothing, until Mr Blanchard’s answer arrived at Barbadoes. Then my mother showed me the letter, and put the temptation which was to separate me from Fergus Ingleby, openly in my way.

  Mr Blanchard’s letter was dated from the island of Madeira. He was out of health, and he had been ordered there by the doctors to try the climate. His daughter was with him. After heartily reciprocating all my mother’s hopes and wishes, he proposed (if I intended leaving Barbadoes shortly) that I should take Madeira on my way to England, and pay him a visit at his temporary residence in the island. If this could not be, he mentioned the time at which he expected to be back in England, when I might be sure of
finding a welcome at his own house of Thorpe-Ambrose. In conclusion, he apologized for not writing at greater length; explaining that his sight was affected, and that he had disobeyed the doctor’s orders by yielding to the temptation of writing to his old friend with his own hand.

  Kindly as it was expressed, the letter itself might have had little influence on me. But there was something else besides the letter; there was enclosed in it a miniature portrait of Miss Blanchard. At the back of the portrait, her father had written half-jestingly, half-tenderly, ‘I can’t ask my daughter to spare my eyes as usual, without telling her of your inquiries, and putting a young lady’s diffidence to the blush. So I send her in effigy (without her knowledge) to answer for herself. It is a good likeness of a good girl. If she likes your son – and if I like him, which I am sure I shall – we may yet live, my good friend, to see our children what we might once have been ourselves – man and wife.’ My mother gave me the miniature with the letter. The portrait at once struck me – I can’t say why, I can’t say how – as nothing of the kind had ever struck me before.

  Harder intellects than mine might have attributed the extraordinary impression produced on me to the disordered condition of my mind at that time; to the weariness of my own base pleasures which had been gaining on me for months past; to the undefined longing which that weariness implied for newer interests and fresher hopes than any that had possessed me yet. I attempted no such sober self-examination as this: I believed in destiny then; I believe in destiny now. It was enough for me to know – as I did know – that the first sense I had ever felt of something better in my nature than my animal-self, was roused by that girl’s face looking at me from her picture, as no woman’s face had ever looked at me yet. In those tender eyes – in the chance of making that gentle creature my wife – I saw my destiny written. The portrait which had come into my hands so strangely and so unexpectedly, was the silent messenger of happiness close at hand, sent to warn, to encourage, to rouse me before it was too late. I put the miniature under my pillow at night; I looked at it again the next morning. My conviction of the day before remained as strong as ever; my superstition (if you please to call it so) pointed out to me irresistibly the way on which I should go. There was a ship in port which was to sail for England in a fortnight, touching at Madeira. In that ship I took my passage.