"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.
"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."