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Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Parasite"

Algernon Charles Swinburne - "Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards"

Martin Ward. - "At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald"

Bret Harte - "By Shore and Sedge"

Armadale

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Armadale




"Thus far," said Mr. Neal, "you merely show me that you are
exciting yourself. This is too serious a matter to be treated
as you are treating it now. You have involved Me in the business,
and I insist on seeing my way plainly. Don't raise your hands;
your hands are not a part of the question. If I am to be
concerned in the completion of this mysterious letter, it is only
an act of justifiable prudence on my part to inquire what the
letter is about. Mrs. Armadale appears to have favored you with
an infinite number of domestic particulars--in return, I presume,
for your polite attention in taking her by the hand. May I ask
what she could tell you about her husband's letter, so far as
her husband has written it?"

"Mrs. Armadale could tell me nothing," replied the doctor, with a
sudden formality in his manner, which showed that his forbearance
was at last failing him. "Before she was composed enough to think
of the letter, her husband had asked for it, and had caused it to
be locked up in his desk. She knows that he has since, time after
time, tried to finish it, and that, time after time, the pen has
dropped from his fingers. She knows, when all other hope of his
restoration was at an end, that his medical advisers encouraged
him to hope in the famous waters of this place. And last, she
knows how that hope has ended; for she knows what I told her
husband this morning."

The frown which had been gathering latterly on Mr. Neal's face
deepened and darkened. He looked at the doctor as if the doctor
had personally offended him.

"The more I think of the position you are asking me to take,"
he said, "the less I like it. Can you undertake to say positively
that Mr. Armadale is in his right mind?"

"Yes; as positively as words can say it."

"Does his wife sanction your coming here to request my
interference?"

"His wife sends me to you--the only Englishman in Wildbad--to
write for your dying countryman what he cannot write for himself;
and what no one else in this place but you can write for him."

That answer drove Mr. Neal back to the last inch of ground left
him to stand on. Even on that inch the Scotchman resisted still.

"Wait a little!" he said. "You put it strongly; let us be quite
sure you put it correctly as well. Let us be quite sure there is
nobody to take this responsibility but myself. There is a mayor
in Wildbad, to begin with--a man who possesses an official
character to justify his interference."

"A man of a thousand," said the doctor. "With one fault--he knows
no language but his own."

"There is an English legation at Stuttgart," persisted Mr. Neal.

"And there are miles on miles of the forest between this and
Stuttgart," rejoined the doctor. "If we sent this moment, we
could get no help from the legation before to-morrow; and it is
as likely as not, in the state of this dying man's articulation,
that to-morrow may find him speechless. I don't know whether
his last wishes are wishes harmless to his child and to others,
wishes hurtful to his child and to others; but I _do_ know that
they must be fulfilled at once or never, and that you are the
only man that can help him."

That open declaration brought the discussion to a close. It fixed
Mr. Neal fast between the two alternatives of saying Yes, and
committing an act of imprudence, or of saying No, and committing
an act of inhumanity. There was a silence of some minutes. The
Scotchman steadily reflected; and the German steadily watched
him.

The responsibility of saying the next words rested on Mr. Neal,
and in course of time Mr. Neal took it. He rose from his chair
with a sullen sense of injury lowering on his heavy eyebrows,
and working sourly in the lines at the corners of his mouth.

"My position is forced on me," he said. "I have no choice but
to accept it."

The doctor's impulsive nature rose in revolt against the
merciless brevity and gracelessness of that reply. "I wish to
God," he broke out fervently, "I knew English enough to take
your place at Mr. Armadale's bedside!"

"Bating your taking the name of the Almighty in vain," answered
the Scotchman, "I entirely agree with you. I wish you did."

Without another word on either side, they left the room
together--the doctor leading the way.

CHAPTER III.

THE WRECK OF THE TIMBER SHIP.

NO one answered the doctor's knock when he and his companion
reached the antechamber door of Mr. Armadale's apartments. They
entered unannounced; and when they looked into the sitting-room,
the sitting-room was empty.

"I must see Mrs. Armadale," said Mr. Neal. "I decline acting in
the matter unless Mrs. Armadale authorizes my interference with
her own lips."

"Mrs. Armadale is probably with her husband," replied the doctor.
He approached a door at the inner end of the sitting-room while
he spoke--hesitated--and, turning round again, looked at his sour
companion anxiously. "I am afraid I spoke a little harshly, sir,
when we were leaving your room," he said. "I beg your pardon for
it, with all my heart. Before this poor afflicted lady comes in,
will you--will you excuse my asking your utmost gentleness and
consideration for her?"

"No, sir," retorted the other harshly; "I won't excuse you. What
right have I given you to think me wanting in gentleness and
consideration toward anybody?"

The doctor saw it was useless. "I beg your pardon again," he
said, resignedly, and left the unapproachable stranger to
himself.

Mr. Neal walked to the window, and stood there, with his eyes
mechanically fixed on the prospect, composing his mind for the
coming interview.

It was midday; the sun shone bright and warm; and all the little
world of Wildbad was alive and merry in the genial springtime.
Now and again heavy wagons, with black-faced carters in charge,
rolled by the window, bearing their precious lading of charcoal
from the forest. Now and again, hurled over the headlong current
of the stream that runs through the town, great lengths of
timber, loosely strung together in interminable series--with
the booted raftsmen, pole in hand, poised watchful at either
end--shot swift and serpent-like past the houses on their course
to the distant Rhine. High and steep above the gabled wooden
buildings on the river-bank, the great hillsides, crested black
with firs, shone to the shining heavens in a glory of lustrous
green. In and out, where the forest foot-paths wound from the
grass through the trees, from the trees over the grass, the
bright spring dresses of women and children, on the search for
wild flowers, traveled to and fro in the lofty distance like
spots of moving light. Below, on the walk by the stream side,
the booths of the little bazar that had opened punctually with
the opening season showed all their glittering trinkets, and
fluttered in the balmy air their splendor of many-colored flags.
Longingly, here the children looked at the show; patiently the
sunburned lasses plied their knitting as they paced the walk;
courteously the passing townspeople, by fours and fives, and the
passing visitors, by ones and twos, greeted each other, hat in
hand; and slowly, slowly, the cripple and the helpless in their
chairs on wheels came out in the cheerful noontide with the rest,
and took their share of the blessed light that cheers, of the
blessed sun that shines for all.

On this scene the Scotchman looked, with eyes that never noted
its beauty, with a mind far away from every lesson that it
taught. One by one he meditated the words he should say when the
wife came in. One by one he pondered over the conditions he might
impose before he took the pen in hand at the husband's bedside.

"Mrs. Armadale is here," said the doctor's voice, interposing
suddenly between his reflections and himself.

He turned on the instant, and saw before him, with the pure
midday light shining full on her, a woman of the mixed blood of
the European and the African race, with the Northern delicacy in
the shape of her face, and the Southern richness in its color--a
woman in the prime of her beauty, who moved with an inbred grace,
who looked with an inbred fascination, whose large, languid black
eyes rested on him gratefully, whose little dusky hand offered
itself to him in mute expression of her thanks, with the welcome
that is given to the coming of a friend. For the first time
in his life the Scotchman was taken by surprise. Every
self-preservative word that he had been meditating but an instant
since dropped out of his memory. His thrice impenetrable armor
of habitual suspicion, habitual self-discipline, and habitual
reserve, which had never fallen from him in a woman's presence
before, fell from him in this woman's presence, and brought him
to his knees, a conquered man. He took the hand she offered him,
and bowed over it his first honest homage to the sex, in silence.

She hesitated on her side. The quick feminine perception which,
in happier circumstances, would have pounced on the secret of
his embarrassment in an instant, failed her now. She attributed
his strange reception of her to pride, to reluctance--to any
cause but the unexpected revelation of her own beauty. "I have no
words to thank you," she said, faintly, trying to propitiate him.
"I should only distress you if I tried to speak." Her lip began
to tremble, she drew back a little, and turned away her head in
silence.

The doctor, who had been standing apart, quietly observant in
a corner, advanced before Mr. Neal could interfere, and led Mrs.
Armadale to a chair. "Don't be afraid of him," whispered the good
man, patting her gently on the shoulder. "He was hard as iron in
my hands, but I think, by the look of him, he will be soft as wax
in yours. Say the words I told you to say, and let us take him to
your husband's room, before those sharp wits of his have time to
recover themselves."

She roused her sinking resolution, and advanced half-way to the
window to meet Mr. Neal. "My kind friend, the doctor, has told
me, sir, that your only hesitation in coming here is a hesitation
on my account," she said, her head drooping a little, and her
rich color fading away while she spoke. "I am deeply grateful,
but I entreat you not to think of _me_. What my husband wishes--"
Her voice faltered; she waited resolutely, and recovered herself.
"What my husband wishes in his last moments, I wish too."

This time Mr. Neal was composed enough to answer her. In low,
earnest tones, he entreated her to say no more. "I was only
anxious to show you every consideration," he said. "I am only
anxious now to spare you every distress." As he spoke, something
like a glow of color rose slowly on his sallow face. Her eyes
were looking at him, softly attentive; and he thought guiltily
of his meditations at the window before she came in.

The doctor saw his opportunity. He opened the door that led into
Mr. Armadale's room, and stood by it, waiting silently. Mrs.
Armadale entered first. In a minute more the door was closed
again; and Mr. Neal stood committed to the responsibility that
had been forced on him--committed beyond recall.

The room was decorated in the gaudy continental fashion, and
the warm sunlight was shining in joyously. Cupids and flowers
were painted on the ceiling; bright ribbons looped up the white
window-curtains; a smart gilt clock ticked on a velvet-covered
mantelpiece; mirrors gleamed on the walls, and flowers in all the
colors of the rainbow speckled the carpet. In the midst of the
finery, and the glitter, and the light, lay the paralyzed man,
with his wandering eyes, and his lifeless lower face--his head
propped high with many pillows; his helpless hands laid out over
the bed-clothes like the hands of a corpse. By the bed head
stood, grim, and old, and silent, the shriveled black nurse; and
on the counter-pane, between his father's outspread hands, lay
the child, in his little white frock, absorbed in the enjoyment
of a new toy. When the door opened, and Mrs. Armadale led
the way in, the boy was tossing his plaything--a soldier on
horseback--backward and forward over the helpless hands on either
side of him; and the father's wandering eyes were following
the toy to and fro, with a stealthy and ceaseless vigilance--a
vigilance as of a wild animal, terrible to see.

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 further
end of the room. The child looked up, toy in hand, as the
stranger came near, opened his bright brown eyes 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; 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 eye. "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 casters 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 paralyzed 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 laboring 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
furthest 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?"

"It 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 gayly 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. Secondly, to throw the
true light on the death of her husband a short time afterward, 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 neighborhood, the largest and 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 afterward. 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, an 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 forever. 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 favor,
and in a week afterward the death of my benefactor had made me
the largest proprietor and the richest man in Barbadoes.

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