Armadale. Wilkie Collins
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maid and the mistress parted,” said Mr. Brock, “at the time of the mistress’s marriage. The maid and the mistress met again at Mrs. Armadale’s residence in Somersetshire last year. I myself met the woman in the village, and I myself know that her visit hastened Mrs. Armadale’s death. Wait a little, and compose yourself; I see I have startled you.”
He waited as he was bid, his color fading away to a gray paleness and the light in his clear brown eyes dying out slowly. What the rector had said had produced no transient impression on him; there was more than doubt, there was alarm in his face, as he sat lost in his own thought. Was the struggle of the past night renewing itself already? Did he feel the horror of his hereditary superstition creeping over him again?
“Can you put me on my guard against her?” he asked, after a long interval of silence. “Can you tell me her name?”
“I can only tell you what Mrs. Armadale told me,” answered Mr. Brock. “The woman acknowledged having been married in the long interval since she and her mistress had last met. But not a word more escaped her about her past life. She came to Mrs. Armadale to ask for money, under a plea of distress. She got the money, and she left the house, positively refusing, when the question was put to her, to mention her married name.”
“You saw her yourself in the village. What was she like?”
“She kept her veil down. I can’t tell you.”
“You can tell me what you did see?”
“Certainly. I saw, as she approached me, that she moved very gracefully, that she had a beautiful figure, and that she was a little over the middle height. I noticed, when she asked me the way to Mrs. Armadale’s house, that her manner was the manner of a lady, and that the tone of her voice was remarkably soft and winning. Lastly, I remembered afterward that she wore a thick black veil, a black bonnet, a black silk dress, and a red Paisley shawl. I feel all the importance of your possessing some better means of identifying her than I can give you. But unhappily—”
He stopped. Midwinter was leaning eagerly across the table, and Midwinter’s hand was laid suddenly on his arm.
“Is it possible that you know the woman?” asked Mr. Brock, surprised at the sudden change in his manner.
“No.”
“What have I said, then, that has startled you so?”
“Do you remember the woman who threw herself from the river steamer?” asked the other—“the woman who caused that succession of deaths which opened Allan Armadale’s way to the Thorpe Ambrose estate?”
“I remember the description of her in the police report,” answered the rector.
“That woman,” pursued Midwinter, “moved gracefully, and had a beautiful figure. That woman wore a black veil, a black bonnet, a black silk gown, and a red Paisley shawl—” He stopped, released his hold of Mr. Brock’s arm, and abruptly resumed his chair. “Can it be the same?” he said to himself in a whisper. “Is there a fatality that follows men in the dark? And is it following us in that woman’s footsteps?”
If the conjecture was right, the one event in the past which had appeared to be entirely disconnected with the events that had preceded it was, on the contrary, the one missing link which made the chain complete. Mr. Brock’s comfortable common sense instinctively denied that startling conclusion. He looked at Midwinter with a compassionate smile.
“My young friend,” he said, kindly, “have you cleared your mind of all superstition as completely as you think? Is what you have just said worthy of the better resolution at which you arrived last night?”
Midwinter’s head drooped on his breast; the color rushed back over his face; he sighed bitterly.
“You are beginning to doubt my sincerity,” he said. “I can’t blame you.”
“I believe in your sincerity as firmly as ever,” answered Mr. Brock. “I only doubt whether you have fortified the weak places in your nature as strongly as you yourself suppose. Many a man has lost the battle against himself far oftener than you have lost it yet, and has nevertheless won his victory in the end. I don’t blame you, I don’t distrust you. I only notice what has happened, to put you on your guard against yourself. Come! come! Let your own better sense help you; and you will agree with me that there is really no evidence to justify the suspicion that the woman whom I met in Somersetshire, and the woman who attempted suicide in London, are one and the same. Need an old man like me remind a young man like you that there are thousands of women in England with beautiful figures—thousands of women who are quietly dressed in black silk gowns and red Paisley shawls?”
Midwinter caught eagerly at the suggestion; too eagerly, as it might have occurred to a harder critic on humanity than Mr. Brock.
“You are quite right, sir,” he said, “and I am quite wrong. Tens of thousands of women answer the description, as you say. I have been wasting time on my own idle fancies, when I ought to have been carefully gathering up facts. If this woman ever attempts to find her way to Allan, I must be prepared to stop her.” He began searching restlessly among the manuscript leaves scattered about the table, paused over one of the pages, and examined it attentively. “This helps me to something positive,” he went on; “this helps me to a knowledge of her age. She was twelve at the time of Mrs. Armadale’s marriage; add a year, and bring her to thirteen; add Allan’s age (twenty-two), and we make her a woman of five-and-thirty at the present time. I know her age; and I know that she has her own reasons for being silent about her married life. This is something gained at the outset, and it may lead, in time, to something more.” He looked up brightly again at Mr. Brock. “Am I in the right way now, sir? Am I doing my best to profit by the caution which you have kindly given me?”
“You are vindicating your own better sense,” answered the rector, encouraging him to trample down his own imagination, with an Englishman’s ready distrust of the noblest of the human faculties. “You are paving the way for your own happier life.”
“Am I?” said the other, thoughtfully.
He searched among the papers once more, and stopped at another of the scattered pages.
“The ship!” he exclaimed, suddenly, his color changing again, and his manner altering on the instant.
“What ship?” asked the rector.
“The ship in which the deed was done,” Midwinter answered, with the first signs of impatience that he had shown yet. “The ship in which my father’s murderous hand turned the lock of the cabin door.”
“What of it?” said Mr. Brock.
He appeared not to hear the question; his eyes remained fixed intently on the page that he was reading.
“A French vessel, employed in the timber trade,” he said, still speaking to himself—“a French vessel, named La Grace de Dieu. If my father’s belief had been the right belief—if the fatality had been following me, step by step, from my father’s grave, in one or other of my voyages, I should have fallen in with that ship.” He looked up again at Mr. Brock. “I am quite sure about it now,” he said. “Those women are two, and not one.”
Mr. Brock shook his head.
“I am glad you have come to that conclusion,” he said. “But I wish you had reached it in some other way.”
Midwinter started passionately to his feet, and, seizing on the pages of the manuscript with both hands, flung them into the empty fireplace.
“For God’s sake let me burn it!” he exclaimed. “As long as there is a page left, I shall read it. And, as long as I read it, my father gets the better of me, in spite of myself!”
Mr. Brock pointed to the match-box. In another moment the confession was in flames. When the fire had consumed the last morsel of paper, Midwinter drew a deep breath of relief.
“I