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Oscar Wilde - "De Profundis"

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Armadale

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Armadale




"All through that day the storm, raging unabatedly, never gave us
even the shadow of a chance of returning and searching the wreck.
The one hope for the yacht was to scud. Toward evening the gale,
after having carried us to the southward of Madeira, began at
last to break--the wind shifted again--and allowed us to bear up
for the island. Early the next morning we got back into port. Mr.
Blanchard and his daughter were taken ashore, the sailing-master
accompanying them, and warning us that he should have something
to say on his return which would nearly concern the whole crew.

"We were mustered on deck, and addressed by the sailing-master as
soon as he came on board again. He had Mr. Blanchard's orders to
go back at once to the timber-ship and to search for the missing
man. We were bound to do this for his sake, and for the sake
of his wife, whose reason was despaired of by the doctors if
something was not done to quiet her. We might be almost sure of
finding the vessel still afloat, for her ladling of timber would
keep her above water as long as her hull held together. If the
man was on board--living or dead--he must be found and brought
back. And if the weather continued to be moderate, there was no
reason why the men, with proper assistance, should not bring the
ship back, too, and (their master being quite willing) earn their
share of the salvage with the officers of the yacht.

"Upon this the crew gave three cheers, and set to work forthwith
to get the schooner to sea again. I was the only one of them who
drew back from the enterprise. I told them the storm had upset
me--I was ill, and wanted rest. They all looked me in the face as
I passed through them on my way out of the yacht, but not a man
of them spoke to me.

"I waited through that day at a tavern on the port for the first
news from the wreck. It was brought toward night-fall by one
of the pilot-boats which had taken part in the enterprise--a
successful enterprise, as the event proved--for saving the
abandoned ship. _La Grace de Dieu_ had been discovered still
floating, and the body of Ingleby had been found on board,
drowned in the cabin. At dawn the next morning the dead man was
brought back by the yacht; and on the same day the funeral took
place in the Protestant cemetery."


"Stop!" said the voice from the bed, before the reader could turn
to a new leaf and begin the next paragraph.

There was a change in the room, and there were changes in the
audience, since Mr. Neal had last looked up from the narrative.
A ray of sunshine was crossing the death-bed; and the child,
overcome by drowsiness, lay peacefully asleep in the golden
light. The father's countenance had altered visibly. Forced into
action by the tortured mind, the muscles of the lower face, which
had never moved yet, were moving distortedly now. Warned by the
damps gathering heavily on his forehead, the doctor had risen to
revive the sinking man. On the other side of the bed the wife's
chair stood empty. At the moment when her husband had interrupted
the reading, she had drawn back behind the bed head, out of his
sight. Supporting herself against the wall, she stood there in
hiding, her eyes fastened in hungering suspense on the manuscript
in Mr. Neal's hand.

In a minute more the silence was broken again by Mr. Armadale.

"Where is she?" he asked, looking angrily at his wife's empty
chair. The doctor pointed to the place. She had no choice but
to come forward. She came slowly and stood before him.

"You promised to go when I told you," he said. "Go now."

Mr. Neal tried hard to control his hand as it kept his place
between the leaves of the manuscripts but it trembled in spite
of him. A suspicion which had been slowly forcing itself on
his mind, while he was reading, became a certainty when he heard
those words. From one revelation to another the letter had gone
on, until it had now reached the brink of a last disclosure to
come. At that brink the dying man had predetermined to silence
the reader's voice, before he had permitted his wife to hear the
narrative read. There was the secret which the son was to know
in after years, and which the mother was never to approach. From
that resolution, his wife's tenderest pleadings had never moved
him an inch--and now, from his own lips, his wife knew it.

She made him no answer. She stood there and looked at him; looked
her last entreaty--perhaps her last farewell. His eyes gave her
back no answering glance: they wandered from her mercilessly to
the sleeping boy. She turned speechless from the bed. Without
a look at the child--without a word to the two strangers
breathlessly watching her--she kept the promise she had given,
and in dead silence left the room.

There was something in the manner of her departure which shook
the self-possession of both the men who witnessed it. When the
door closed on her, they recoiled instinctively from advancing
further in the dark. The doctor's reluctance was the first to
express itself. He attempted to obtain the patient's permission
to withdraw until the letter was completed. The patient refused.

Mr. Neal spoke next at greater length and to more serious
purpose.

"The doctor is accustomed in his profession," he began, "and I am
accustomed in mine, to have the secrets of others placed in our
keeping. But it is my duty, before we go further, to ask if you
really understand the extraordinary position which we now occupy
toward one another. You have just excluded Mrs. Armadale, before
our own eyes, from a place in your confidence. And you are now
offering that same place to two men who are total strangers to
you."

"Yes," said Mr. Armadale, "_because_ you are strangers."

Few as the words were, the inference to be drawn from them was
not of a nature to set distrust at rest. Mr. Neal put it plainly
into words.

"You are in urgent need of my help and of the doctor's help," he
said. "Am I to understand (so long as you secure our assistance)
that the impression which the closing passages of this letter may
produce on us is a matter of indifference to you?"

"Yes. I don't spare you. I don't spare myself. I _do_ spare my
wife."

"You force me to a conclusion, sir, which is a very serious one,"
said Mr. Neal. "If I am to finish this letter under your
dictation, I must claim permission--having read aloud the greater
part of it already--to read aloud what remains, in the hearing
of this gentleman, as a witness."

"Read it."

Gravely doubting, the doctor resumed his chair. Gravely doubting,
Mr. Neal turned the leaf, and read the next words:


"There is more to tell before I can leave the dead man to
his rest. I have described the finding of his body. But I have
not described the circumstances under which he met his death.

"He was known to have been on deck when the yacht's boats were
seen approaching the wreck; and he was afterward missed in the
confusion caused by the panic of the crew. At that time the water
was five feet deep in the cabin, and was rising fast. There was
little doubt of his having gone down into that water of his own
accord. The discovery of his wife's jewel box, close under him,
on the floor, explained his presence in the cabin. He was known
to have seen help approaching, and it was quite likely that he
had thereupon gone below to make an effort at saving the box. It
was less probable--though it might still have been inferred--that
his death was the result of some accident in diving, which had
for the moment deprived him of his senses. But a discovery made
by the yacht's crew pointed straight to a conclusion which struck
the men, one and all, with the same horror. When the course of
their search brought them to the cabin, they found the scuttle
bolted, and the door locked on the outside. Had some one closed
the cabin, not knowing he was there? Setting the panic-stricken
condition of the crew out of the question, there was no motive
for closing the cabin before leaving the wreck. But one other
conclusion remained. Had some murderous hand purposely locked
the man in, and left him to drown as the water rose over him?

"Yes. A murderous hand had locked him in, and left him to drown.
That hand was mine. "


The Scotchman started up from the table; the doctor shrank from
the bedside. The two looked at the dying wretch, mastered by the
same loathing, chilled by the same dread. He lay there, with his
child's head on his breast; abandoned by the sympathies of man,
accursed by the justice of God--he lay there, in the isolation
of Cain, and looked back at them.

At the moment when the two men rose to their feet, the door
leading into the next room was shaken heavily on the outer side,
and a sound like the sound of a fall, striking dull on their
ears, silenced them both. Standing nearest to the door, the
doctor opened it, passed through, and closed it instantly. Mr.
Neal turned his back on the bed, and waited the event in silence.
The sound, which had failed to awaken the child, had failed also
to attract the father's notice. His own words had taken him far
from all that was passing at his deathbed. His helpless body was
back on the wreck, and the ghost of his lifeless hand was turning
the lock of the cabin door.

A bell rang in the next room--eager voices talked; hurried
footsteps moved in it--an interval passed, and the doctor
returned. "Was she listening?" whispered Mr. Neal, in German.
"The women are restoring her," the doctor whispered back. "She
has heard it all. In God's name, what are we to do next?" Before
it was possible to reply, Mr. Armadale spoke. The doctor's return
had roused him to a sense of present things.

"Go on," he said, as if nothing had happened.

"I refuse to meddle further with your infamous secret," returned
Mr. Neal. "You are a murderer on your own confession. If that
letter is to be finished, don't ask _me_ to hold the pen for
you."

"You gave me your promise," was the reply, spoken with the same
immovable self-possession. "You must write for me, or break your
word."

For the moment, Mr. Neal was silenced. There the man
lay--sheltered from the execration of his fellow-creatures, under
the shadow of Death--beyond the reach of all human condemnation,
beyond the dread of all mortal laws; sensitive to nothing but his
one last resolution to finish the letter addressed to his son.

Mr. Neal drew the doctor aside. "A word with you," he said, in
German. "Do you persist in asserting that he may be speechless
before we can send to Stuttgart?"

"Look at his lips," said the doctor, "and judge for yourself."

His lips answered for him: the reading of the narrative had left
its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his
mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the
room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation labored more
and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was
emphatically a terrible one. After a moment more of hesitation,
Mr. Neal made a last attempt to withdraw from it.

"Now my eyes are open," he said, sternly, "do you dare hold me
to an engagement which you forced on me blindfold?"

"No," answered Mr. Armadale. "I leave you to break your word."

The look which accompanied that reply stung the Scotchman's pride
to the quick. When he spoke next, he spoke seated in his former
place at the table.

"No man ever yet said of me that I broke my word," he retorted,
angrily; "and not even you shall say it of me now. Mind this!
If you hold me to my promise, I hold you to my condition. I have
reserved my freedom of action, and I warn you I will use it at
my own sole discretion, as soon as I am released from the sight
of you."

"Remember he is dying," pleaded the doctor, gently.

"Take your place, sir," said Mr. Neal, pointing to the empty
chair. "What remains to be read, I will only read in your
hearing. What remains to be written, I will only write in your
presence. _You_ brought me here. I have a right to insist--and
I do insist--on your remaining as a witness to the last."

The doctor accepted his position without remonstrance. Mr. Neal
returned to the manuscript, and read what remained of it
uninterruptedly to the end:


"Without a word in my own defense, I have acknowledged my guilt.
Without a word in my own defense, I will reveal how the crime was
committed.

"No thought of him was in my mind, when I saw his wife insensible
on the deck of the timber-ship. I did my part in lowering her
safely into the boat. Then, and not till then, I felt the thought
of him coming back. In the confusion that prevailed while the men
of the yacht were forcing the men of the ship to wait their time,
I had an opportunity of searching for him unobserved. I stepped
back from the bulwark, not knowing whether he was away in the
first boat, or whether he was still on board--I stepped back,
and saw him mount the cabin stairs empty-handed, with the water
dripping from him. After looking eagerly toward the boat (without
noticing me), he saw there was time to spare before the crew were
taken. 'Once more!' he said to himself--and disappeared again, to
make a last effort at recovering the jewel box. The devil at my
elbow whispered, 'Don't shoot him like a man: drown him like a
dog!' He was under water when I bolted the scuttle. But his head
rose to the surface before I could close the cabin door. I looked
at him, and he looked at me--and I locked the door in his face.
The next minute, I was back among the last men left on deck.
The minute after, it was too late to repent. The storm was
threatening us with destruction, and the boat's crew were pulling
for their lives from the ship.

"My son! I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which
my love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why.

"I will say nothing of my sufferings; I will plead for no mercy
to my memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange
trembling in my hand, while I write these lines, which warns me
to hasten to the end. I left the island without daring to look
for the last time at the woman whom I had lost so miserably, whom
I had injured so vilely. When I left, the whole weight of the
suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby's death rested on the
crew of the French vessel. No motive for the supposed murder
could be brought home to any of them; but they were known to be,
for the most part, outlawed ruffians capable of any crime, and
they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till
afterward that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting
round at last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague
description given of the strange man who had made one of the
yacht's crew, and who had disappeared the day afterward. The
widow alone knew, from that time forth, why her husband had been
murdered, and who had done the deed. When she made that
discovery, a false report of my death had been previously
circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the report
for my immunity from all legal proceedings; perhaps (no eye but
Ingleby's having seen me lock the cabin door) there was not
evidence enough to justify an inquiry; perhaps the widow shrank
from the disclosures which must have followed a public charge
against me, based on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However
it might be, the crime which I had committed unseen has remained
a crime unpunished from that time to this.

"I left Madeira for the West Indies in disguise. The first news
that met me when the ship touched at Barbadoes was the news of
my mother's death. I had no heart to return to the old scenes.
The prospect of living at home in solitude, with the torment
of my own guilty remembrances gnawing at me day and night,
was more than I had the courage to confront. Without landing,
or discovering myself to any one on shore, I went on as far
as the ship would take me--to the island of Trinidad.

"At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell
her the truth--and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty
to spare her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her
happiness to such an existence as mine--and I did her the injury
of marrying her. If she is alive when you read this, grant her
the mercy of still concealing the truth. The one atonement I can
make to her is to keep her unsuspicious to the last of the man
she has married. Pity her, as I have pitied her. Let this letter
be a sacred confidence between father and son.

"The time when you were born was the time when my health began
to give way. Some months afterward, in the first days of my
recovery, you were brought to me; and I was told that you had
been christened during my illness. Your mother had done as other
loving mothers do--she had christened her first-born by his
father's name. You, too, were Allan Armadale. Even in that early
time--even while I was happily ignorant of what I have discovered
since--my mind misgave me when I looked at you, and thought of
that fatal name.

"As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my
estates in Barbadoes. It crossed my mind--wild as the idea may
appear to you--to renounce the condition which compelled my son
as well as myself to take the Armadale name, or lose the
succession to the Armadale property. But, even in those days,
the rumor of a contemplated emancipation of the slaves--the
emancipation which is now close at hand--was spreading widely
in the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian
property might be affected if that threatened change ever took
place. No man could tell--if I gave you back my own paternal
name, and left you without other provision in the future than
my own paternal estate--how you might one day miss the broad
Armadale acres, or to what future penury I might be blindly
condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how the fatalities
gathered one on the other! Mark how your Christian name came
to you, how your surname held to you, in spite of me!

"My health had improved in my old home--but it was for a time
only. I sank again, and the doctors ordered me to Europe.
Avoiding England (why, you may guess), I took my passage, with
you and your mother, for France. From France we passed into
Italy. We lived here; we lived there. It was useless. Death had
got met and Death followed me, go where I might. I bore it, for
I had an alleviation to turn to which I had not deserved. You may
shrink in horror from the very memory of me now. In those days,
you comforted me. The only warmth I still felt at my heart was
the warmth you brought to it. My last glimpses of happiness in
this world were the glimpses given me by my infant son.

"We removed from Italy, and went next to Lausanne--the place
from which I am now writing to you. The post of this morning has
brought me news, later and fuller than any I had received thus
far, of the widow of the murdered man. The letter lies before me
while I write. It comes from a friend of my early days, who has
seen her, and spoken to her--who has been the first to inform her
that the report of my death in Madeira was false. He writes, at
a loss to account for the violent agitation which she showed on
hearing that I was still alive, that I was married, and that I
had an infant son. He asks me if I can explain it. He speaks in
terms of sympathy for her--a young and beautiful woman, buried
in the retirement of a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast;
her father dead; her family estranged from her, in merciless
disapproval of her marriage. He writes words which might have cut
me to the heart, but for a closing passage in his letter, which
seized my whole attention the instant I came to it, and which has
forced from me the narrative that these pages contain.

"I now know what never even entered my mind as a suspicion till
the letter reached me. I now know that the widow of the man whose
death lies at my door has borne a posthumous child. That child
is a boy--a year older than my own son. Secure in her belief in
my death, his mother has done what my son's mother did: she has
christened her child by his father's name. Again, in the second
generation, there are two Allan Armadales as there were in the
first. After working its deadly mischief with the fathers, the
fatal resemblance of names has descended to work its deadly
mischief with the sons.

"Guiltless minds may see nothing thus far but the result of
a series of events which could lead no other way. I--with that
man's life to answer for--I, going down into my grave, with my
crime unpunished and unatoned, see what no guiltless minds can
discern. I see danger in the future, begotten of the danger in
the past--treachery that is the offspring of _his_ treachery,
and crime that is the child of _my_ crime. Is the dread that now
shakes me to the soul a phantom raised by the superstition of a
dying man? I look into the Book which all Christendom venerates,
and the Book tells me that the sin of the father shall be visited
on the child. I look out into the world, and I see the living
witnesses round me to that terrible truth. I see the vices which
have contaminated the father descending, and contaminating
the child; I see the shame which has disgraced the father's name
descending, and disgracing the child's. I look in on myself, and
I see my crime ripening again for the future in the self-same
circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the past,
and descending, in inherited contamination of evil, from me
to my son."


At those lines the writing ended. There the stroke had struck
him, and the pen had dropped from his hand.

He knew the place; he remembered the words. At the instant when
the reader's voice stopped, he looked eagerly at the doctor.
"I have got what comes next in my mind," he said, with slower
and slower articulation. "Help me to speak it."

The doctor administered a stimulant, and signed to Mr. Neal to
give him time. After a little delay, the flame of the sinking
spirit leaped up in his eyes once more. Resolutely struggling
with his failing speech, he summoned the Scotchman to take the
pen, and pronounced the closing sentences of the narrative, as
his memory gave them back to him, one by one, in these words:


"Despise my dying conviction if you will, but grant me, I
solemnly implore you, one last request. My son! the only hope
I have left for you hangs on a great doubt--the doubt whether we
are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that
mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we
all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is
before death. If this be so, indeed, respect--though you respect
nothing else--the warning which I give you from my grave. Never,
to your dying day, let any living soul approach you who is
associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your
father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if
the widow still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed
the way to the marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And
more than all, avoid the man who bears the same name as your own.
Offend your best benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has
connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you,
if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from
him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between
you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent
to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof,
and breathe the same air, with that man. Never let the two Allan
Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!

"There lies the way by which you may escape--if any way there be.
Take it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness,
through all your life to come!

"I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than
the influence of this confession to incline you to my will,
I would have spared you the disclosure which these pages contain.
You are lying on my breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a
child, while a stranger's hand writes these words for you as they
fall from my lips. Think what the strength of my conviction must
be, when I can find the courage, on my death-bed, to darken all
your young life at its outset with the shadow of your father's
crime. Think, and be warned. Think, and forgive me if you can."


There it ended. Those were the father's last words to the son.

Inexorably faithful to his forced duty, Mr. Neal laid aside the
pen, and read over aloud the lines he had just written. "Is there
more to add?" he asked, with his pitilessly steady voice. There
was no more to add.

Mr. Neal folded the manuscript, inclosed it in a sheet of paper,
and sealed it with Mr. Armadale's own seal. "The address?" he
said, with his merciless business formality. "To Allan Armadale,
junior," he wrote, as the words were dictated from the bed. "Care
of Godfrey Hammick, Esq., Offices of Messrs. Hammick and Ridge,
Lincoln's Inn Fields, London." Having written the address, he
waited, and considered for a moment. "Is your executor to open
this?" he asked.

"No! he is to give it to my son when my son is of an age to
understand it."

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