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."
"In that case," pursued Mr. Neal, with all his wits in
remorseless working order, "I will add a dated note to the
address, repeating your own words as you have just spoken them,
and explaining the circumstances under which my handwriting
appears on the document." He wrote the note in the briefest and
plainest terms, read it over aloud as he had read over what went
before, signed his name and address at the end, and made the
doctor sign next, as witness of the proceedings, and as medical
evidence of the condition in which Mr. Armadale then lay. This
done, he placed the letter in a second inclosure, sealed it as
before, and directed it to Mr. Hammick, with the superscription
of "private" added to the address. "Do you insist on my posting
this?" he asked, rising with the letter in his hand.
"Give him time to think," said the doctor. "For the child's sake,
give him time to think! A minute may change him."
"I will give him five minutes," answered Mr. Neal, placing
his watch on the table, implacable just to the very last.
They waited, both looking attentively at Mr. Armadale. The signs
of change which had appeared in him already were multiplying
fast. The movement which continued mental agitation had
communicated to the muscles of his face was beginning, under
the same dangerous influence, to spread downward. His once
helpless hands lay still no longer; they struggled pitiably on
the bedclothes. At sight of that warning token, the doctor turned
with a gesture of alarm, and beckoned Mr. Neal to come nearer.
"Put the question at once," he said; "if you let the five minutes
pass, you may be too late."
Mr. Neal approached the bed. He, too, noticed the movement of
the hands. "Is that a bad sign?" he asked.
The doctor bent his head gravely. "Put your question at once,"
he repeated, "or you may be too late."
Mr. Neal held the letter before the eyes of the dying man "Do you
know what this is?"
"My letter."
"Do you insist on my posting it?"
He mastered his failing speech for the last time, and gave the
answer: "Yes!"
Mr. Neal moved to the door, with the letter in his hand. The
German followed him a few steps, opened his lips to plead for a
longer delay, met the Scotchman's inexorable eye, and drew back
again in silence. The door closed and parted them, without a word
having passed on either side.
The doctor went back to the bed and whispered to the sinking man:
"Let me call him back; there is time to stop him yet!" It was
useless. No answer came; nothing showed that he heeded, or even
heard. His eyes wandered from the child, rested for a moment on
his own struggling hand, and looked up entreatingly in the
compassionate face that bent over him. The doctor lifted the
hand, paused, followed the father's longing eyes back to the
child, and, interpreting his last wish, moved the hand gently
toward the boy's head. The hand touched it, and trembled
violently. In another instant the trembling seized on the arm,
and spread over the whole upper part of the body. The face turned
from pale to red, from red to purple, from purple to pale again.
Then the toiling hands lay still, and the shifting color changed
no more.
The window of the next room was open, when the doctor entered it
from the death chamber, with the child in his arms. He looked out
as he passed by, and saw Mr. Neal in the street below, slowly
returning to the inn.
"Where is the letter?" he asked.
Three words sufficed for the Scotchman's answer.
"In the post."
THE END OF THE PROLOGUE.
THE STORY.
_BOOK THE FIRST_.
CHAPTER I.
THE MYSTERY OF OZIAS MIDWINTER.
ON a warm May night, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one,
the Reverend Decimus Brock--at that time a visitor to the Isle of
Man--retired to his bedroom at Castletown, with a serious
personal responsibility in close pursuit of him, and with no
distinct idea of the means by which he might relieve himself from
the pressure of his present circumstances.
The clergyman had reached that mature period of human life at
which a sensible man learns to decline (as often as his temper
will let him) all useless conflict with the tyranny of his own
troubles. Abandoning any further effort to reach a decision in
the emergency that now beset him, Mr. Brock sat down placidly in
his shirt sleeves on the side of his bed, and applied his mind to
consider next whether the emergency itself was as serious as he
had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this new way
out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly
traveling to the end in view by the least inspiriting of all
human journeys--a journey through the past years of his own life.
One by one the events of those years--all connected with the same
little group of characters, and all more or less answerable for
the anxiety which was now intruding itself between the clergyman
and his night's rest--rose, in progressive series, on Mr. Brock's
memory. The first of the series took him back, through a period
of fourteen years, to his own rectory on the Somersetshire shores
of the Bristol Channel, and closeted him at a private interview
with a lady who had paid him a visit in the character of a total
stranger to the parson and the place.
The lady's complexion was fair, the lady's figure was well
preserved; she was still a young woman, and she looked even
younger than her age. There was a shade of melancholy in her
expression, and an undertone of suffering in her voice--enough,
in each case, to indicate that she had known trouble, but not
enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of others. She
brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old, whom
she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way, at the
beginning of the interview, to amuse himself in the rectory
garden. Her card had preceded her entrance into the study, and
had announced her under the name of "Mrs. Armadale." Mr. Brock
began to feel interested in her before she had opened her lips;
and when the son had been dismissed, he awaited with some anxiety
to hear what the mother had to say to him.
Mrs. Armadale began by informing the rector that she was a widow.
Her husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their
union, on the voyage from Madeira to Lisbon. She had been brought
to England, after her affliction, under her father's protection;
and her child--a posthumous son--had been born on the family
estate in Norfolk. Her father's death, shortly afterward, had
deprived her of her only surviving parent, and had exposed her
to neglect and misconstruction on the part of her remaining
relatives (two brothers), which had estranged her from them, she
feared, for the rest of her days. For some time past she had
lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devoting herself
to the education of her boy, who had now reached an age at which
he required other than his mother's teaching. Leaving out of the
question her own unwillingness to part with him, in her solitary
position, she was especially anxious that he should not be thrown
among strangers by being sent to school. Her darling project was
to bring him up privately at home, and to keep him, as he
advanced in years, from all contact with the temptations and the
dangers of the world.
With these objects in view, her longer sojourn in her own
locality (where the services of the resident clergyman, in the
capacity of tutor, were not obtainable) must come to an end. She
had made inquiries, had heard of a house that would suit her in
Mr. Brock's neighborhood, and had also been told that Mr. Brock
himself had formerly been in the habit of taking pupils.
Possessed of this information, she had ventured to present
herself, with references that vouched for her respectability, but
without a formal introduction; and she had now to ask whether (in
the event of her residing in the neighborhood) any terms that
could be offered would induce Mr. Brock to open his doors once
more to a pupil, and to allow that pupil to be her son.
If Mrs. Armadale had been a woman of no personal attractions, or
if Mr. Brock had been provided with an intrenchment to fight
behind in the shape of a wife, it is probable that the widow's
journey might have been taken in vain. As things really were, the
rector examined the references which were offered to him, and
asked time for consideration. When the time had expired, he did
what Mrs. Armadale wished him to do--he offered his back to the
burden, and let the mother load him with the responsibility of
the son.
This was the first event of the series; the date of it being the
year eighteen hundred and thirty-seven. Mr. Brock's memory,
traveling forward toward the present from that point, picked up
the second event in its turn, and stopped next at the year
eighteen hundred and forty-five.
-------------
The fishing-village on the Somersetshire coast was still the
scene, and the characters were once again--Mrs. Armadale and her
son.
Through the eight years that had passed, Mr. Brock's
responsibility had rested on him lightly enough. The boy had
given his mother and his tutor but little trouble. He was
certainly slow over his books, but more from a constitutional
inability to fix his attention on his tasks than from want of
capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be
denied, was heedless to the last degree: he acted recklessly on
his first impulses, and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions.
On the other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his
disposition was open as the day; a more generous, affectionate,
sweet-tempered lad it would have been hard to find anywhere. A
certain quaint originality of character, and a natural
healthiness in all his tastes, carried him free of most of the
dangers to which his mother's system of education inevitably
exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of the sea and of
all that belongs to it; and as he grew in years, there was no
luring him away from the water-side, and no keeping him out of
the boat-builder's yard. In course of time his mother caught him
actually working there, to her infinite annoyance and surprise,
as a volunteer. He acknowledged that his whole future ambition
was to have a yard of his own, and that his one present object
was to learn to build a boat for himself. Wisely foreseeing that
such a pursuit as this for his leisure hours was exactly what was
wanted to reconcile the lad to a position of isolation from
companions of his own rank and age, Mr. Brock prevailed on Mrs.
Armadale, with no small difficulty, to let her son have his way.
At the period of that second event in the clergyman's life with
his pupil which is now to be related, young Armadale had
practiced long enough in the builder's yard to have reached the
summit of his wishes, by laying with his own hands the keel of
his own boat.
Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allan had completed
his sixteenth year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the
yard, and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking
the _Times_ newspaper with him in his hand.
The years that had passed since they had first met had long since
regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbor. The first
advances which Mr. Brock's growing admiration for the widow had
led him to make in the early days of their intercourse had been
met on her side by an appeal to his forbearance which had closed
his lips for the future. She had satisfied him, at once and
forever, that the one place in her heart which he could hope to
occupy was the place of a friend. He loved her well enough to
take what she would give him: friends they became, and friends
they remained from that time forth. No jealous dread of another
man's succeeding where he had failed imbittered the clergyman's
placid relations with the woman whom he loved. Of the few
resident gentlemen in the neighborhood, none were ever admitted
by Mrs. Armadale to more than the merest acquaintance with her.
Contentedly self-buried in her country retreat, she was proof
against every social attraction that would have tempted other
women in her position and at her age. Mr. Brock and his
newspaper, appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea-table
three times a week, told her all she knew or cared to know of the
great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless
limits of her daily life.
On the evening in question Mr. Brock took the arm-chair in which
he always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank,
and opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs.
Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same
sofa, with the same sort of needle-work everlastingly in her
hand.
"Bless my soul!" cried the rector, with his voice in a new
octave, and his eyes fixed in astonishment on the first page of
the newspaper.
No such introduction to the evening readings as this had ever
happened before in all Mrs. Armadale's experience as a listener.
She looked up from the sofa in a flutter of curiosity, and
besought her reverend friend to favor her with an explanation.
"I can hardly believe my own eyes," said Mr. Brock. "Here is an
advertisement, Mrs. Armadale, addressed to your son."
Without further preface, he read the advertisement as follows:
IF this should meet the eye of ALLAN ARMADALE, he is desired to
communicate, either personally or by letter, with Messrs. Hammick
and Ridge (Lincoln's Inn Fields, London), on business of
importance which seriously concerns him. Any one capable of
informing Messrs. E. and R. where the person herein advertised
can be found would confer a favor by doing the same. To prevent
mistakes, it is further notified that the missing Allan Armadale
is a youth aged fifteen years, and that this advertisement is
inserted at the instance of his family and friends.
"Another family, and other friends," said Mrs. Armadale. "The
person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son."
The tone in which she spoke surprised Mr. Brock. The change in
her face, when he looked up, shocked him. Her delicate complexion
had faded away to a dull white; her eyes were averted from her
visitor with a strange mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked
an older woman than she was, by ten good years at least.
"The name is so very uncommon," said Mr. Brock, imagining he had
offended her, and trying to excuse himself. "It really seemed
impossible there could be two persons--"
"There _are_ two," interposed Mrs. Armadale. "Allan, as you know,
is sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you
will find the missing person described as being only fifteen.
Although he bears the same surname and the same Christian name,
he is, I thank God, in no way whatever related to my son. As long
as I live, it will be the object of my hopes and prayers that
Allan may never see him, may never even hear of him. My kind
friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with me if I leave
these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past misfortune
and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of, even
to _you_. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by
never referring to this again? Will you do even more--will you
promise not to speak of it to Allan, and not to let that
newspaper fall in his way?"
Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left
her to herself.
The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs.
Armadale to be capable of regarding her with any unworthy
distrust. But it would be idle to deny that he felt disappointed
by her want of confidence in him, and that he looked
inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on his way back
to his own house.
It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale's motives for
burying her son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote
country village was not so much to keep him under her own eye as
to keep him from discovery by his namesake. Why did she dread the
idea of their ever meeting? Was it a dread for herself, or a
dread for her son? Mr. Brock's loyal belief in his friend
rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at some
past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale's. That night he destroyed the
advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the
subject should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There
was another Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his
pupil's blood, and a vagabond advertised in the public
newspapers. So much accident had revealed to him. More, for Mrs.
Armadale's sake, he had no wish to discover--and more he would
never seek to know.
This was the second in the series of events which dated from the
rector's connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock's
memory, traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances,
reached the third stage of its journey through the by-gone time,
and stopped at the year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.
The five years that had passed had made little if any change in
Allan's character. He had simply developed (to use his tutor's
own expression) from a boy of sixteen to a boy of twenty-one. He
was just as easy and open in his disposition as ever; just as
quaintly and inveterately good-humored; just as heedless in
following his own impulses, lead him where they might. His bias
toward the sea had strengthened with his advance to the years of
manhood. From building a boat, he had now got on--with two
journeymen at work under him--to building a decked vessel of
five-and-thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to
divert him to higher aspirations; had taken him to Oxford, to see
what college life was like; had taken him to London, to expand
his mind by the spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had
diverted Allan, but had not altered him in the least. He was as
impenetrably superior to all worldly ambition as Diogenes
himself. "Which is best," asked this unconscious philosopher, "to
find out the way to be happy for yourself, or to let other people
try if they can find it out for you?" From that moment Mr. Brock
permitted his pupil's character to grow at its own rate of
development, and Allan went on uninterruptedly with the work of
his yacht.
Time, which had wrought so little change in the son, had not
passed harmless over the mother.
Mrs. Armadale's health was breaking fast. As her strength failed,
her temper altered for the worse: she grew more and more fretful,
more and more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more
reluctant to leave her own room. Since the appearance of the
advertisement five years since, nothing had happened to force her
memory back to the painful associations connected with her early
life. No word more on the forbidden topic had passed between the
rector and herself; no suspicion had ever been raised in Allan's
mind of the existence of his namesake; and yet, without the
shadow of a reason for any special anxiety, Mrs. Armadale had
become, of late years, obstinately and fretfully uneasy on the
subject of her son. More than once Mr. Brock dreaded a serious
disagreement between them; but Allan's natural sweetness of
temper, fortified by his love for his mother, carried him
triumphantly through all trials. Not a hard word or a harsh look
ever escaped him in her presence; he was unchangeably loving and
forbearing with her to the very last.
Such were the positions of the son, the mother, and the friend,
when the next notable event happened in the lives of the three.
On a dreary afternoon, early in the month of November, Mr. Brock
was disturbed over the composition of his sermon by a visit from
the landlord of the village inn.
After making his introductory apologies, the landlord stated the
urgent business on which he had come to the rectory clearly
enough.
A few hours since a young man had been brought to the inn by some
farm laborers in the neighborhood, who had found him wandering
about one of their master's fields in a disordered state of mind,
which looked to their eyes like downright madness. The landlord
had given the poor creature shelter while he sent for medical
help; and the doctor, on seeing him, had pronounced that he was
suffering from fever on the brain, and that his removal to the
nearest town at which a hospital or a work-house infirmary could
be found to receive him would in all probability be fatal to his
chances of recovery. After hearing this expression of opinion,
and after observing for himself that the stranger's only luggage
consisted of a small carpet-bag which had been found in the field
near him, the landlord had set off on the spot to consult the
rector, and to ask, in this serious emergency, what course he was
to take next.