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Edgar A. Guest - "A Heap O' Livin', by Edgar A. Guest"

Charles Dickens - "Master Humphrey's Clock"

Jerome K. Jerome - "They and I"

Arthur Conan Doyle - "Round The Red Lamp"

Armadale

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Armadale




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

"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 inclosed 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."


Thus far the reader had advanced with no interruption to disturb
him. But at the last words the tones of another voice, low and
broken, mingled with his own.

"Was she a fair woman," asked the voice, "or dark, like me?"

Mr. Neal paused, and looked up. The doctor was still at the bed
head, with his fingers mechanically on the patient's pulse. The
child, missing his midday sleep, was beginning to play languidly
with his new toy. The father's eyes were watching him with a rapt
and ceaseless attention. But one great change was visible in
the listeners since the narrative had begun. Mrs. Armadale had
dropped her hold of her husband's hand, and sat with her face
steadily turned away from him The hot African blood burned red
in her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question:
"Was she a fair woman, or dark, like me?"

"Fair," said her husband, without looking at her.

Her hands, lying clasped together in her lap, wrung each other
hard--she said no more. Mr. Neal's overhanging eyebrows lowered
ominously as he returned to the narrative. He had incurred his
own severe displeasure--he had caught himself in the act of
secretly pitying her.


"I have said"--the letter proceeded--"that Ingleby was admitted
to my closest confidence. I was sorry to leave him; and I was
distressed by his evident surprise and mortification when he
heard that I was going away. In my own justification, I showed
him the letter and the likeness, and told him the truth. His
interest in the portrait seemed to be hardly inferior to my own.
He asked me about Miss Blanchard's family and Miss Blanchard's
fortune with the sympathy of a true friend; and he strengthened
my regard for him, and my belief in him, by putting himself out
of the question, and by generously encouraging me to persist in
my new purpose. When we parted, I was in high health and spirits.
Before we met again the next day, I was suddenly struck by an
illness which threatened both my reason and my life.

"I have no proof against Ingleby. There was more than one woman
on the island whom I had wronged beyond all forgiveness, and
whose vengeance might well have reached me at that time. I can
accuse nobody. I can only say that my life was saved by my old
black nurse; and that the woman afterward acknowledged having
used the known negro antidote to a known negro poison in those
parts. When my first days of convalescence came, the ship in
which my passage had been taken had long since sailed. When
I asked for Ingleby, he was gone. Proofs of his unpardonable
misconduct in his situation were placed before me, which not even
my partiality for him could resist. He had been turned out of
the office in the first days of my illness, and nothing more was
known of him but that he had left the island.

"All through my sufferings the portrait had been under my pillow.
All through my convalescence it was my one consolation when I
remembered the past, and my one encouragement when I thought of
the future. No words can describe the hold that first fancy had
now taken of me--with time and solitude and suffering to help it.
My mother, with all her interest in the match, was startled by
the unexpected success of her own project. She had written to
tell Mr. Blanchard of my illness, but had received no reply. She
now offered to write again, if I would promise not to leave her
before my recovery was complete. My impatience acknowledged no
restraint. Another ship in port gave me another chance of leaving
for Madeira. Another examination of Mr. Blanchard's letter of
invitation assured me that I should find him still in the island,
if I seized my opportunity on the spot. In defiance of my
mother's entreaties, I insisted on taking my passage in the
second ship--and this time, when the ship sailed, I was on board.

"The change did me good; the sea-air made a man of me again.
After an unusually rapid voyage, I found myself at the end of
my pilgrimage. On a fine, still evening which I can never forget,
I stood alone on the shore, with her likeness in my bosom, and
saw the white walls of the house where I knew that she lived.

"I strolled round the outer limits of the grounds to compose
myself before I went in. Venturing through a gate and a
shrubbery, I looked into the garden, and saw a lady there,
loitering alone on the lawn. She turned her face toward me--and I
beheld the original of my portrait, the fulfillment of my dream!
It is useless, and worse than useless, to write of it now. Let me
only say that every promise which the likeness had made to my
fancy the living woman kept to my eyes in the moment when they
first looked on her. Let me say this--and no more.

"I was too violently agitated to trust myself in her presence.
I drew back undiscovered, and, making my way to the front door of
the house, asked for her father first. Mr. Blanchard had retired
to his room, and could see nobody. Upon that I took courage, and
asked for Miss Blanchard. The servant smiled. 'My young lady is
not Miss Blanchard any longer, sir,' he said. 'She is married.'
Those words would have struck some men, in my position, to
the earth. They fired my hot blood, and I seized the servant
by the throat, in a frenzy of rage 'It's a lie!' I broke out,
speaking to him as if he had been one of the slaves on my own
estate. 'It's the truth,' said the man, struggling with me;
'her husband is in the house at this moment.' 'Who is he, you
scoundrel?'The servant answered by repeating my own name, to
my own face: '_Allan Armadale_.'

"You can now guess the truth. Fergus Ingleby was the outlawed son
whose name and whose inheritance I had taken. And Fergus Ingleby
was even with me for depriving him of his birthright.

"Some account of the manner in which the deception had been
carried out is necessary to explain--I don't say to justify--the
share I took in the events that followed my arrival at Madeira.

"By Ingleby's own confession, he had come to Barbadoes--knowing
of his father's death and of my succession to the estates--with
the settled purpose of plundering and injuring me. My rash
confidence put such an opportunity into his hands as he could
never have hoped for. He had waited to possess himself of
the letter which my mother wrote to Mr. Blanchard at the outset
of my illness--had then caused his own dismissal from his
situation--and had sailed for Madeira in the very ship that was
to have sailed with me. Arrived at the island, he had waited
again till the vessel was away once more on her voyage, and had
then presented himself at Mr. Blanchard's--not in the assumed
name by which I shall continue to speak of him here, but in the
name which was as certainly his as mine, 'Allan Armadale.' The
fraud at the outset presented few difficulties. He had only an
ailing old man (who had not seen my mother for half a lifetime)
and an innocent, unsuspicious girl (who had never seen her at
all) to deal with; and he had learned enough in my service to
answer the few questions that were put to him as readily as
I might have answered them myself. His looks and manners, his
winning ways with women, his quickness and cunning, did the rest.
While I was still on my sickbed, he had won Miss Blanchard's
affections. While I was dreaming over the likeness in the first
days of my convalescence, he had secured Mr. Blanchard's consent
to the celebration of the marriage before he and his daughter
left the island.

"Thus far Mr. Blanchard's infirmity of sight had helped the
deception. He had been content to send messages to my mother, and
to receive the messages which were duly invented in return. But
when the suitor was accepted, and the wedding-day was appointed,
he felt it due to his old friend to write to her, asking her
formal consent and inviting her to the marriage. He could only
complete part of the letter himself; the rest was finished, under
his dictation, by Miss Blanchard. There was no chance of being
beforehand with the post-office this time; and Ingleby, sure of
his place in the heart of his victim, waylaid her as she came out
of her father's room with the letter, and privately told her the
truth. She was still under age, and the position was a serious
one. If the letter was posted, no resource would be left but to
wait and be parted forever, or to elope under circumstances which
made detection almost a certainty. The destination of any ship
which took them away would be known beforehand; and the
fast-sailing yacht in which Mr. Blanchard had come to Madeira was
waiting in the harbor to take him back to England. The only other
alternative was to continue the deception by suppressing the
letter, and to confess the truth when they were securely married.
What arts of persuasion Ingleby used--what base advantage he
might previously have taken of her love and her trust in him to
degrade Miss Blanchard to his own level--I cannot say. He did
degrade her. The letter never went to its destination; and, with
the daughter's privity and consent, the father's confidence was
abused to the very last.

"The one precaution now left to take was to fabricate the answer
from my mother which Mr. Blanchard expected, and which would
arrive in due course of post before the day appointed for
the marriage. Ingleby had my mother's stolen letter with him;
but he was without the imitative dexterity which would have
enabled him to make use of it for a forgery of her handwriting.
Miss Blanchard, who had consented passively to the deception,
refused to take any active share in the fraud practiced on her
father. In this difficulty, Ingleby found an instrument ready to
his hand in an orphan girl of barely twelve years old, a marvel
of precocious ability, whom Miss Blanchard had taken a romantic
fancy to befriend and whom she had brought away with her from
England to be trained as her maid. That girl's wicked dexterity
removed the one serious obstacle left to the success of
the fraud. I saw the imitation of my mother's writing which she
had produced under Ingleby's instructions and (if the shameful
truth must be told) with her young mistress's knowledge--and
I believe I should have been deceived by it myself. I saw
the girl afterward--and my blood curdled at the sight of her.
If she is alive now, woe to the people who trust her! No creature
more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever walked
this earth.

"The forged letter paved the way securely for the marriage;
and when I reached the house, they were (as the servant had
truly told me) man and wife. My arrival on the scene simply
precipitated the confession which they had both agreed to make.
Ingleby's own lips shamelessly acknowledged the truth. He had
nothing to lose by speaking out--he was married, and his wife's
fortune was beyond her father's control. I pass over all that
followed--my interview with the daughter, and my interview with
the father--to come to results. For two days the efforts of the
wife, and the efforts of the clergyman who had celebrated the
marriage, were successful in keeping Ingleby and myself apart. On
the third day I set my trap more successfully, and I and the man
who had mortally injured me met together alone, face to face.

"Remember how my confidence had been abused; remember how the one
good purpose of my life had been thwarted; remember the violent
passions rooted deep in my nature, and never yet controlled--and
then imagine for yourself what passed between us. All I need tell
here is the end. He was a taller and a stronger man than I, and
he took his brute's advantage with a brute's ferocity. He struck
me.

"Think of the injuries I had received at that man's hands, and
then think of his setting his mark on my face by a blow!

"I went to an English officer who had been my fellow-passenger
on the voyage from Barbadoes. I told him the truth, and he agreed
with me that a meeting was inevitable. Dueling had its received
formalities and its established laws in those days; and he began
to speak of them. I stopped him. 'I will take a pistol in my
right hand,' I said, 'and he shall take a pistol in his: I will
take one end of a handkerchief in my left hand, and he shall take
the other end in his; and across that handkerchief the duel shall
be fought.' The officer got up, and looked at me as if I had
personally insulted him. 'You are asking me to be present at a
murder and a suicide,' he said; 'I decline to serve you.' He left
the room. As soon as he was gone I wrote down the words I had
said to the officer and sent them by a messenger to Ingleby.
While I was waiting for an answer, I sat down before the glass,
and looked at his mark on my face. 'Many a man has had blood on
his hands and blood on his conscience,' I thought, 'for less than
this.'

"The messenger came back with Ingleby's answer. It appointed a
meeting for three o'clock the next day, at a lonely place in the
interior of the island. I had resolved what to do if he refused;
his letter released me from the horror of my own resolution.
I felt grateful to him--yes, absolutely grateful to him--for
writing it.

"The next day I went to the place. He was not there. I waited two
hours, and he never came. At last the truth dawned on me. 'Once
a coward, always a coward,' I thought. I went back to Mr.
Blanchard's house. Before I got there, a sudden misgiving seized
me, and I turned aside to the harbor. I was right; the harbor was
the place to go to. A ship sailing for Lisbon that afternoon had
offered him the opportunity of taking a passage for himself and
his wife, and escaping me. His answer to my challenge had served
its purpose of sending me out of the way into the interior of
the island. Once more I had trusted in Fergus Ingleby, and once
more those sharp wits of his had been too much for me.

"I asked my informant if Mr. Blanchard was aware as yet of
his daughter's departure. He had discovered it, but not until
the ship had sailed. This time I took a lesson in cunning from
Ingleby. Instead of showing myself at Mr. Blanchard's house,
I went first and looked at Mr. Blanchard's yacht.

"The vessel told me what the vessel's master might have
concealed--the truth. I found her in the confusion of a sudden
preparation for sea. All the crew were on board, with the
exception of some few who had been allowed their leave on shore,
and who were away in the interior of the island, nobody knew
where. When I discovered that the sailing-master was trying in,
to supply their places with the best men he could pick up at
a moment's notice, my resolution was instantly taken. I knew
the duties on board a yacht well enough, having had a vessel
of my own, and having sailed her myself. Hurrying into the town,
I changed my dress for a sailor's coat and hat, and, returning
to the harbor, I offered myself as one of the volunteer crew.
I don't know what the sailing-master saw in my face. My answers
to his questions satisfied him, and yet he looked at me and
hesitated. But hands were scarce, and it ended in my being taken
on board. An hour later Mr. Blanchard joined us, and was assisted
into the cabin, suffering pitiably in mind and body both. An hour
after that we were at sea, with a starless night overhead, and
a fresh breeze behind us.

"As I had surmised, we were in pursuit of the vessel in which
Ingleby and his wife had left the island that afternoon. The ship
was French, and was employed in the timber trade: her name was
_La Grace de Dieu_. Nothing more was known of her than that she
was bound for Lisbon; that she had been driven out of her course;
and that she had touched at Madeira, short of men and short of
provisions. The last want had been supplied, but not the first.
Sailors distrusted the sea-worthiness of the ship, and disliked
the look of the vagabond crew. When those two serious facts had
been communicated to Mr. Blanchard, the hard words he had spoken
to his child in the first shock of discovering that she had
helped to deceive him smote him to the heart. He instantly
determined to give his daughter a refuge on board his own vessel,
and to quiet her by keeping her villain of a husband out of the
way of all harm at my hands. The yacht sailed three feet and more
to the ship's one. There was no doubt of our overtaking _La Grace
de Dieu_; the only fear was that we might pass her in the
darkness.

"After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly
dropped, and there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the
order came to get the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large
sails, we all knew what to expect. In little better than an hour
more, the storm was upon us, the thunder was pealing over our
heads, and the yacht was running for it. She was a powerful
schooner-rigged vessel of three hundred tons, as strong as wood
and iron could make her; she was handled by a sailing-master who
thoroughly understood his work, and she behaved nobly. As the new
morning came, the fury of the wind, blowing still from the
southwest quarter, subsided a little, and the sea was less heavy.
Just before daybreak we heard faintly, through the howling of the
gale, the report of a gun. The men collected anxiously on deck,
looked at each other, and said: 'There she is!'

"With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber-ship it was.
She lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her
mainmast both gone--a water-logged wreck. The yacht carried three
boats; one amidships, and two slung to davits on the quarters;
and the sailing-master, seeing signs of the storm renewing its
fury before long, determined on lowering the quarter-boats while
the lull lasted. Few as the people were on board the wreck, they
were too many for one boat, and the risk of trying two boats at
once was thought less, in the critical state of the weather, than
the risk of making two separate trips from the yacht to the ship.
There might be time to make one trip in safety, but no man could
look at the heavens and say there would be time enough for two.

"The boats were manned by volunteers from the crew, I being in
the second of the two. When the first boat was got alongside of
the timber-ship--a service of difficulty and danger which no
words can describe--all the men on board made a rash to leave the
wreck together. If the boat had not been pulled off again before
the whole of them had crowded in, the lives of all must have been
sacrificed. As our boat approached the vessel in its turn, we
arranged that four of us should get on board--two (I being one of
them) to see to the safety of Mr. Blanchard's daughter, and two
to beat back the cowardly remnant of the crew if they tried
to crowd in first. The other three--the coxswain and two
oarsmen--were left in the boat to keep her from being crushed by
the ship. What the others saw when they first boarded _La Grace
de Dieu_ I don't know; what I saw was the woman whom I had lost,
the woman vilely stolen from me, lying in a swoon on the deck.
We lowered her, insensible, into the boat. The remnant of the
crew--five in number--were compelled by main force to follow her
in an orderly manner, one by one, and minute by minute, as the
chance offered for safely taking them in. I was the last who
left; and, at the next roll of the ship toward us, the empty
length of the deck, without a living creature on it from stem
to stern, told the boat's crew that their work was done. With
the louder and louder howling of the fast-rising tempest to warn
them, they rowed for their lives back to the yacht.

"A succession of heavy squalls had brought round the course of
the new storm that was coming, from the south to the north; and
the sailing-master, watching his opportunity, had wore the yacht
to be ready for it. Before the last of our men had got on board
again, it burst on us with the fury of a hurricane. Our boat was
swamped, but not a life was lost. Once more we ran before it,
due south, at the mercy of the wind. I was on deck with the rest,
watching the one rag of sail we could venture to set, and waiting
to supply its place with another, if it blew out of the
bolt-ropes, when the mate came close to me, and shouted in my ear
through the thunder of the storm: 'She has come to her senses in
the cabin, and has asked for her husband. Where is he?' Not a man
on board knew. The yacht was searched from one end to another
without finding him. The men were mustered in defiance of the
weather--he was not among them. The crews of the two boats were
questioned. All the first crew could say was that they had pulled
away from the wreck when the rush into their boat took place, and
that they knew nothing of whom they let in or whom they kept out.
All the second crew could say was that they had brought back to
the yacht every living soul left by the first boat on the deck of
the timber-ship. There was no blaming anybody; but, at the same
time, there was no resisting the fact that the man was missing.

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