ARMADALE (A Suspense Thriller). Уилки Коллинз
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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 freewill 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 deathbed, 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.”
“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