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Rabindranath Tagore - "Chitra, a Play in One Act"

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Armadale

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Armadale




The sound of the wheels outside suddenly recalled him to the
business of the day. There was the carriage waiting to take him
on his round of visits; and there was Midwinter at his post,
pacing to and fro on the drive.

"Read that," cried Allan, throwing out the lawyer's letter; "I've
written him back a smasher."

He bustled away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a
wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay
the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth
had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting
himself in the neighborhood. "Whatever else they may say of me,
they shan't say I was afraid to face them." Heated red-hot with
that idea, he seized his hat and gloves, and hurrying out of the
room, met Midwinter in the corridor with the lawyer's letter in
his hand.

"Keep up your spirits!" cried Allan, seeing the anxiety in his
friend's face, and misinterpreting the motive of it immediately.
"If Darch can't be counted on to send us a helping hand into the
steward's office, Pedgift can."

"My dear Allan, I was not thinking of that; I was thinking of Mr.
Darch's letter. I don't defend this sour-tempered man; but I am
afraid we must admit he has some cause for complaint. Pray don't
give him another chance of putting you in the wrong. Where is
your answer to his letter?"

"Gone!" replied Allan. "I always strike while the iron's hot--a
word and a blow, and the blow first, that's my way. Don't,
there's a good fellow, don't fidget about the steward's books
and the rent-day. Here! here's a bunch of keys they gave me last
night: one of them opens the room where the steward's books are;
go in and read them till I come back. I give you my sacred word
of honor I'll settle it all with Pedgift before you see me
again."

"One moment," interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on
his way out to the carriage. "I say nothing against Mr. Pedgift's
fitness to possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify
me in distrusting him. But he has not introduced himself to your
notice in a very delicate way; and he has not acknowledged (what
is quite clear to my mind) that he knew of Mr. Darch's unfriendly
feeling toward you when he wrote. Wait a little before you go to
this stranger; wait till we can talk it over together to-night."

"Wait!" replied Allan. "Haven't I told you that I always strike
while the iron's hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy, I'll
look Pedgift through and through, and act accordingly. Don't keep
me any longer, for Heaven's sake. I'm in a fine humor for
tackling the resident gentry; and if I don't go at once, I'm
afraid it may wear off."

With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan
boisterously broke away. Before it was possible to stop him
again, he had jumped into the carriage and had left the house.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MARCH OF EVENTS.

Midwinter's face darkened when the last trace of the carriage
had disappeared from view. "I have done my best," he said, as he
turned back gloomily into the house "If Mr. Brock himself were
here, Mr. Brock could do no more!"

He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his
hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the
steward's books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting
nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various
movables of the steward's office had been provisionally placed
after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and
tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the
business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result exposed
his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers
bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the
correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could
understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted
bitterly as he left the room again to his two years' solitary
self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller's shop. "If I
could only have worked at a business!" he thought. "If I could
only have known that the company of poets and philosophers was
company too high for a vagabond like me!"

He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell
heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it
exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. "Curse
the place!" he said, snatching up his hat and stick. "I like the
bleakest hillside I ever slept on better than I like this house!"

He impatiently descended the door-steps, and stopped on the
drive, considering, by which direction he should leave the park
for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the
carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting
him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own
nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the
dream without entering it again. But one other way remained: the
way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning.
There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major's daughter
now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the
gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.

Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was
full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable
self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous
and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the
poor. "The heather-bell costs nothing!" he thought, looking
contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that
surrounded him; "and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as
the best of you!" He followed the artfully contrived ovals and
squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the
symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design.
"How many pounds a foot did _you_ cost?" he said, looking back
with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. "Wind away
over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain side, if
you can!"

He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him;
crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached
the major's cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion
at the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate,
to look at the trim little residence which would never have been
empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan's ill-advised
resolution to force the steward's situation on his friend.

The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and
still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the
windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the
sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park
as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden inclosure.
The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining--a
voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with
nothing but the hard power of it left--was the discordantly
predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled
the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the
voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow
Midwinter to distinguish the words that were spoken, he felt the
impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at
once stepped forward to continue his walk.

At the same moment, the face of a young girl (easily recognizable
as the face of Miss Milroy, from Allan's description of her)
appeared at the open window of the room. In spite of himself,
Midwinter paused to look at her. The expression of the bright
young face, which had smiled so prettily on Allan, was weary and
disheartened. After looking out absently over the park, she
suddenly turned her head back into the room, her attention having
been apparently struck by something that had just been said in
it. "Oh, mamma, mamma," she exclaimed, indignantly, "how _can_
you say such things!" The words were spoken close to the window;
they reached Midwinter's ears, and hurried him away before he
heard more. But the self-disclosure of Major Milroy's domestic
position had not reached its end yet. As Midwinter turned the
corner of the garden fence, a tradesman's boy was handing a
parcel in at the wicket gate to the woman servant. "Well," said
the boy, with the irrepressible impudence of his class, "how is
the missus?" The woman lifted her hand to box his ears. "How is
the missus?" she repeated, with an angry toss of her head, as the
boy ran off. "If it would only please God to take the missus, it
would be a blessing to everybody in the house."

No such ill-omened shadow as this had passed over the bright
domestic picture of the inhabitants of the cottage, which Allan's
enthusiasm had painted for the contemplation of his friend. It
was plain that the secret of the tenants had been kept from the
landlord so far. Five minutes more of walking brought Midwinter
to the park gates. "Am I fated to see nothing and hear nothing
to-day, which can give me heart and hope for the future?" he
thought, as he angrily swung back the lodge gate. "Even the
people Allan has let the cottage to are people whose lives are
imbittered by a household misery which it is _my_ misfortune to
have found out!"

He took the first road that lay before him, and walked on,
noticing little, immersed in his own thoughts.

More than an hour passed before the necessity of turning back
entered his mind. As soon as the idea occurred to him, he
consulted his watch, and determined to retrace his steps, so as
to be at the house in good time to meet Allan on his return. Ten
minutes of walking brought him back to a point at which three
roads met, and one moment's observation of the place satisfied
him that he had entirely failed to notice at the time by which of
the three roads he had advanced. No sign-post was to be seen; the
country on either side was lonely and flat, intersected by broad
drains and ditches. Cattle were grazing here and there, and a
windmill rose in the distance above the pollard willows that
fringed the low horizon. But not a house was to be seen, and not
a human creature appeared on the visible perspective of any one
of the three roads. Midwinter glanced back in the only direction
left to look at--the direction of the road along which he had
just been walking. There, to his relief, was the figure of a man,
rapidly advancing toward him, of whom he could ask his way.

The figure came on, clad from head to foot in dreary black--a
moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened
road. He was a lean, elderly, miserably respectable man. He wore
a poor old black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no
pretense of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers
clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty
black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet.
Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness
of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a
stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard
jaws. The one morsel of color he carried about him was a lawyer's
bag of blue serge, as lean and limp as himself. The one
attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary old face was a neat
set of teeth--teeth (as honest as his wig) which said plainly to
all inquiring eyes, "We pass our nights on his looking-glass, and
our days in his mouth."

All the little blood in the man's body faintly reddened his
fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the
way to Thorpe Ambrose. His weak, watery eyes looked hither and
thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a
lion instead of a man, and if the few words addressed to him had
been words expressing a threat instead of a question, he could
hardly have looked more confused and alarmed than he looked now.
For the first time in his life, Midwinter saw his own shy
uneasiness in the presence of strangers reflected, with tenfold
intensity of nervous suffering, in the face of another man--and
that man old enough to be his father.

"Which do you please to mean, sir--the town or the house? I beg
your pardon for asking, but they both go by the same name in
these parts."

He spoke with a timid gentleness of tone, an ingratiatory smile,
and an anxious courtesy of manner, all distressingly suggestive
of his being accustomed to receive rough answers in exchange for
his own politeness from the persons whom he habitually addressed.

"I was not aware that both the house and the town went by the
same name," said Midwinter; "I meant the house." He instinctively
conquered his own shyness as he answered in those words, speaking
with a cordiality of manner which was very rare with him in his
intercourse with strangers.

The man of miserable respectability seemed to feel the warm
return of his own politeness gratefully; he brightened and took a
little courage. His lean forefinger pointed eagerly to the right
road. "That way, sir," he said, "and when you come to two roads
next, please take the left one of the two. I am sorry I have
business the other way, I mean in the town. I should have been
happy to go with you and show you. Fine summer weather, sir, for
walking? You can't miss your way if you keep to the left. Oh,
don't mention it! I'm afraid I have detained you, sir. I wish you
a pleasant walk back, and--good-morning."

By the time he had made an end of speaking (under an impression
apparently that the more he talked the more polite he would be)
he had lost his courage again. He darted away down his own road,
as if Midwinter's attempt to thank him involved a series of
trials too terrible to confront. In two minutes more, his black
retreating figure had lessened in the distance till it looked
again, what it had once looked already, a moving blot on the
brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road.

The man ran strangely in Midwinter's thoughts while he took his
way back to the house. He was at a loss to account for it. It
never occurred to him that he might have been insensibly reminded
of himself, when he saw the plain traces of past misfortune and
present nervous suffering in the poor wretch's face. He blindly
resented his own perverse interest in this chance foot passenger
on the high-road, as he had resented all else that had happened
to him since the beginning of the day. "Have I made another
unlucky discovery?" he asked himself, impatiently. "Shall I see
this man again, I wonder? Who can he be?"

Time was to answer both those questions before many days more had
passed over the inquirer's head.


Allan had not returned when Midwinter reached the house. Nothing
had happened but the arrival of a message of apology from the
cottage. "Major Milroy's compliments, and he was sorry that Mrs.
Milroy's illness would prevent his receiving Mr. Armadale that
day." It was plain that Mrs. Milroy's occasional fits of
suffering (or of ill temper) created no mere transitory
disturbance of the tranquillity of the household. Drawing this
natural inference, after what he had himself heard at the cottage
nearly three hours since, Midwinter withdrew into the library to
wait patiently among the books until his friend came back.

It was past six o'clock when the well-known hearty voice was
heard again in the hall. Allan burst into the library, in a state
of irrepressible excitement, and pushed Midwinter back
unceremoniously into the chair from which he was just rising,
before he could utter a word.

"Here's a riddle for you, old boy!" cried Allan. "Why am I like
the resident manager of the Augean stable, before Hercules was
called in to sweep the litter out? Because I have had my place to
keep up, and I've gone and made an infernal mess of it! Why don't
you laugh? By George, he doesn't see the point! Let's try again.
Why am I like the resident manager--"

"For God's sake, Allan, be serious for a moment!" interposed
Midwinter. "You don't know how anxious I am to hear if you have
recovered the good opinion of your neighbors."

"That's just what the riddle was intended to tell you!" rejoined
Allan. "But if you will have it in so many words, my own
impression is that you would have done better not to disturb me
under that tree in the park. I've been calculating it to a
nicety, and I beg to inform you that I have sunk exactly three
degrees lower in the estimation of the resident gentry since I
had the pleasure of seeing you last."

"You _will_ have your joke out," said Midwinter, bitterly. "Well,
if I can't laugh, I can wait."

"My dear fellow, I'm not joking; I really mean what I say. You
shall hear what happened; you shall have a report in full of my
first visit. It will do, I can promise you, as a sample for all
the rest. Mind this, in the first place, I've gone wrong with the
best possible intentions. When I started for these visits, I own
I was angry with that old brute of a lawyer, and I certainly had
a notion of carrying things with a high hand. But it wore off
somehow on the road; and the first family I called on, I went in,
as I tell you, with the best possible intentions. Oh, dear, dear!
there was the same spick-and-span reception-room for me to wait
in, with the neat conservatory beyond, which I saw again and
again and again at every other house I went to afterward. There
was the same choice selection of books for me to look at--a
religious book, a book about the Duke of Wellington, a book about
sporting, and a book about nothing in particular, beautifully
illustrated with pictures. Down came papa with his nice white
hair, and mamma with her nice lace cap; down came young mister
with the pink face and straw-colored whiskers, and young miss
with the plump cheeks and the large petticoats. Don't suppose
there was the least unfriendliness on my side; I always began
with them in the same way--I insisted on shaking hands all round.
That staggered them to begin with. When I came to the sore
subject next--the subject of the public reception--I give you my
word of honor I took the greatest possible pains with my
apologies. It hadn't the slightest effect; they let my apologies
in at one ear and out at the other, and then waited to hear more.
Some men would have been disheartened: I tried another way with
them; I addressed myself to the master of the house, and put it
pleasantly next. 'The fact is,' I said, 'I wanted to escape the
speechifying--my getting up, you know, and telling you to your
face you're the best of men, and I beg to propose your health;
and your getting up and telling me to my face I'm the best of
men, and you beg to thank me; and so on, man after man, praising
each other and pestering each other all round the table.' That's
how I put it, in an easy, light-handed, convincing sort of way.
Do you think any of them took it in the same friendly spirit?
Not one! It's my belief they had got their speeches ready for
the reception, with the flags and the flowers, and that they're
secretly angry with me for stopping their open mouths just as
they were ready to begin. Anyway, whenever we came to the matter
of the speechifying (whether they touched it first or I), down
I fell in their estimation the first of those three steps I told
you of just now. Don't suppose I made no efforts to get up again!
I made desperate efforts. I found they were all anxious to know
what sort of life I had led before I came in for the Thorpe
Ambrose property, and I did my best to satisfy them. And what
came of that, do you think? Hang me, if I didn't disappoint them
for the second time! When they found out that I had actually
never been to Eton or Harrow, or Oxford or Cambridge, they were
quite dumb with astonishment. I fancy they thought me a sort of
outlaw. At any rate, they all froze up again; and down I fell
the second step in their estimation. Never mind! I wasn't to be
beaten; I had promised you to do my best, and I did it. I tried
cheerful small-talk about the neighborhood next. The women said
nothing in particular; the men, to my unutterable astonishment,
all began to condole with me. I shouldn't be able to find a pack
of hounds, they said, within twenty miles of my house; and they
thought it only right to prepare me for the disgracefully
careless manner in which the Thorpe Ambrose covers had been
preserved. I let them go on condoling with me, and then what do
you think I did? I put my foot in it again. 'Oh, don't take that
to heart!' I said; 'I don't care two straws about hunting or
shooting, either. When I meet with a bird in my walk, I can't for
the life of me feel eager to kill it; I rather like to see the
bird flying about and enjoying itself.' You should have seen
their faces! They had thought me a sort of outlaw before; now
they evidently thought me mad. Dead silence fell upon them all;
and down I tumbled the third step in the general estimation. It
was just the same at the next house, and the next and the next.
The devil possessed us all, I think. It _would_ come out, now in
one way, and now in another, that I couldn't make speeches--that
I had been brought up without a university education--and that
I could enjoy a ride on horseback without galloping after a
wretched stinking fox or a poor distracted little hare. These
three unlucky defects of mine are not excused, it seems, in
a country gentleman (especially when he has dodged a public
reception to begin with). I think I got on best, upon the whole,
with the wives and daughters. The women and I always fell, sooner
or later, on the subject of Mrs. Blanchard and her niece. We
invariably agreed that they had done wisely in going to Florence;
and the only reason we had to give for our opinion was that we
thought their minds would be benefited after their sad
bereavement, by the contemplation of the masterpieces of Italian
art. Every one of the ladies--I solemnly declare it--at every
house I went to, came sooner or later to Mrs. and Miss
Blanchard's bereavement and the masterpieces of Italian art. What
we should have done without that bright idea to help us, I really
don't know. The one pleasant thing at any of the visits was when
we all shook our heads together, and declared that the
masterpieces would console them. As for the rest of it, there's
only one thing more to be said. What I might be in other places
I don't know: I'm the wrong man in the wrong place here. Let me
muddle on for the future in my own way, with my own few friends;
and ask me anything else in the world, as long as you don't ask
me to make any more calls on my neighbors."

With that characteristic request, Allan's report of his exploring
expedition among the resident gentry came to a close. For a
moment Midwinter remained silent. He had allowed Allan to run on
from first to last without uttering a word on his side. The
disastrous result of the visits--coming after what had happened
earlier in the day; and threatening Allan, as it did, with
exclusion from all local sympathies at the very outset of his
local career--had broken down Midwinter's power of resisting the
stealthily depressing influence of his own superstition. It was
with an effort that he now looked up at Allan; it was with an
effort that he roused himself to answer.

"It shall be as you wish," he said, quietly. "I am sorry for what
has happened; but I am not the less obliged to you, Allan, for
having done what I asked you."

His head sank on his breast, and the fatalist resignation which
had once already quieted him on board the wreck now quieted him
again. "What _must_ be, _will_ be," he thought once more. "What
have I to do with the future, and what has he?"

"Cheer up!" said Allan. "_Your_ affairs are in a thriving
condition, at any rate. I paid one pleasant visit in the town,
which I haven't told you of yet. I've seen Pedgift, and Pedgift's
son, who helps him in the office. They're the two jolliest
lawyers I ever met with in my life; and, what's more, they can
produce the very man you want to teach you the steward's
business."

Midwinter looked up quickly. Distrust of Allan's discovery was
plainly written in his face already; but he said nothing.

"I thought of you," Allan proceeded, "as soon as the two Pedgifts
and I had had a glass of wine all round to drink to our friendly
connection. The finest sherry I ever tasted in my life; I've
ordered some of the same--but that's not the question just now.
In two words I told these worthy fellows your difficulty, and in
two seconds old Pedgift understood all about it. 'I have got the
man in my office,' he said, 'and before the audit-day comes, I'll
place him with the greatest pleasure at your friend's disposal.'"

At this last announcement, Midwinter's distrust found its
expression in words. He questioned Allan unsparingly.

The man's name, it appeared was Bashwood. He had been some time
(how long, Allan could not remember) in Mr. Pedgift's service.
He had been previously steward to a Norfolk gentleman (name
forgotten) in the westward district of the county. He had lost
the steward's place, through some domestic trouble, in connection
with his son, the precise nature of which Allan was not able to
specify. Pedgift vouched for him, and Pedgift would send him to
Thorpe Ambrose two or three days before the rent-day dinner. He
could not be spared, for office reasons, before that time. There
was no need to fidget about it; Pedgift laughed at the idea of
there being any difficulty with the tenants. Two or three day's
work over the steward's books with a man to help Midwinter who
practically understood that sort of thing would put him all right
for the audit; and the other business would keep till afterward.

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