Part 12

Even then the hard discipline of the man’s life asserted itself. He expected no sympathy, he counted on no merciful human respect for human weakness. The cruel necessity of self-suppression was present to his mind, while the tears were pouring over his cheeks. “Give me a minute,” he said, faintly. “I’ll fight it down in a minute; I won’t distress you in this way again.”

True to his resolution, in a minute he had fought it down. In a minute more he was able to speak calmly.

“We will get back, sir, to those better thoughts which have brought me from my room to yours,” he resumed. “I can only repeat that I should never have torn myself from the hold which this letter fastened on me, if I had not loved Allan Armadale with all that I have in me of a brother’s love. I said to myself, ‘If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving him is wrong!’ That was some hours since, and I am in the same mind still. I can’t believe--I won’t believe--that a friendship which has grown out of nothing but kindness on one side, and nothing but gratitude on the other, is destined to lead to an evil end. Judge, you who are a clergyman, between the dead father, whose word is in these pages, and the living son, whose word is now on his lips! What is it appointed me to do, now that I am breathing the same air, and living under the same roof with the son of the man whom my father killed--to perpetuate my father’s crime by mortally injuring him, or to atone for my father’s crime by giving him the devotion of my whole life? The last of those two faiths is my faith, and shall be my faith, happen what may. In the strength of that better conviction, I have come here to trust you with my father’s secret, and to confess the wretched story of my own life. In the strength of that better conviction, I can face you resolutely with the one plain question, which marks the one plain end of all that I have come here to say. Your pupil stands at the starting-point of his new career, in a position singularly friendless; his one great need is a companion of his own age on whom he can rely. The time has come, sir, to decide whether I am to be that companion or not. After all you have heard of Ozias Midwinter, tell me plainly, will you trust him to be Allan Armadale’s friend?”

Mr. Brock met that fearlessly frank question by a fearless frankness on his side.

“I believe you love Allan,” he said, “and I believe you have spoken the truth. A man who has produced that impression on me is a man whom I am bound to trust. I trust you.”

Midwinter started to his feet, his dark face flushing deep; his eyes fixed brightly and steadily, at last, on the rector’s face. “A light!” he exclaimed, tearing the pages of his father’s letter, one by one, from the fastening that held them. “Let us destroy the last link that holds us to the horrible past! Let us see this confession a heap of ashes before we part!”

“Wait!” said Mr. Brock. “Before you burn it, there is a reason for looking at it once more.”

The parted leaves of the manuscript dropped from Midwinter’s hands. Mr. Brock took them up, and sorted them carefully until he found the last page.

“I view your father’s superstition as you view it,” said the rector. “But there is a warning given you here, which you will do well (for Allan’s sake and for your own sake) not to neglect. The last link with the past will not be destroyed when you have burned these pages. One of the actors in this story of treachery and murder is not dead yet. Read those words.”

He pushed the page across the table, with his finger on one sentence. Midwinter’s agitation misled him. He mistook the indication, and read, “Avoid the widow of the man I killed, if the widow still lives.”

“Not that sentence,” said the rector. “The next.”

Midwinter read it: “Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to the marriage, if the maid is still in her service.”

“The 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 may say, like Macbeth: ‘Why, so, being gone, I am a man again!’” he broke out with a feverish gayety. “You look fatigued, sir; and no wonder,” he added, in a lower tone. “I have kept you too long from your rest--I will keep you no longer. Depend on my remembering what you have told me; depend on my standing between Allan and any enemy, man or woman, who comes near him. Thank you, Mr. Brock; a thousand thousand times, thank you! I came into this room the most wretched of living men; I can leave it now as happy as the birds that are singing outside!”

As he turned to the door, the rays of the rising sun streamed through the window, and touched the heap of ashes lying black in the black fireplace. The sensitive imagination of Midwinter kindled instantly at the sight.

“Look!” he said, joyously. “The promise of the Future shining over the ashes of the Past!”

An inexplicable pity for the man, at the moment of his life when he needed pity least, stole over the rector’s heart when the door had closed, and he was left by himself again.

“Poor fellow!” he said, with an uneasy surprise at his own compassionate impulse. “Poor fellow!”

III. DAY AND NIGHT

The morning hours had passed; the noon had come and gone; and Mr. Brock had started on the first stage of his journey home.

After parting from the rector in Douglas Harbor, the two young men had returned to Castletown, and had there separated at the hotel door, Allan walking down to the waterside to look after his yacht, and Midwinter entering the house to get the rest that he needed after a sleepless night.

He darkened his room; he closed his eyes, but no sleep came to him. On this first day of the rector’s absence, his sensitive nature extravagantly exaggerated the responsibility which he now held in trust for Mr. Brock. A nervous dread of leaving Allan by himself, even for a few hours only, kept him waking and doubting, until it became a relief rather than a hardship to rise from the bed again, and, following in Allan’s footsteps, to take the way to the waterside which led to the yacht.

The repairs of the little vessel were nearly completed. It was a breezy, cheerful day; the land was bright, the water was blue, the quick waves leaped crisply in the sunshine, the men were singing at their work. Descending to the cabin, Midwinter discovered his friend busily occupied in attempting to set the place to rights. Habitually the least systematic of mortals, Allan now and then awoke to an overwhelming sense of the advantages of order, and on such occasions a perfect frenzy of tidiness possessed him. He was down on his knees, hotly and wildly at work, when Midwinter looked in on him; and was fast reducing the neat little world of the cabin to its original elements of chaos, with a misdirected energy wonderful to see.

“Here’s a mess!” said Allan, rising composedly on the horizon of his own accumulated litter. “Do you know, my dear fellow, I begin to wish I had let well alone!”

Midwinter smiled, and came to his friend’s assistance with the natural neat-handedness of a sailor.

The first object that he encountered was Allan’s dressing-case, turned upside down, with half the contents scattered on the floor, and with a duster and a hearth-broom lying among them. Replacing the various objects which formed the furniture of the dressing-case one by one, Midwinter lighted unexpectedly on a miniature portrait, of the old-fashioned oval form, primly framed in a setting of small diamonds.

“You don’t seem to set much value on this,” he said. “What is it?”

Allan bent over him, and looked at the miniature. “It belonged to my mother,” he answered; “and I set the greatest value on it. It is a portrait of my father.”

Midwinter put the miniature abruptly, into Allan’s hands, and withdrew to the opposite side of the cabin.

“You know best where the things ought to be put in your own dressing-case,” he said, keeping his back turned on Allan. “I’ll make the place tidy on this side of the cabin, and you shall make the place tidy on the other.”

He began setting in order the litter scattered about him on the cabin table and on the floor. But it seemed as if fate had decided that his friend’s personal possessions should fall into his hands that morning, employ them where he might. One among the first objects which he took up was Allan’s tobacco jar, with the stopper missing, and with a letter (which appeared by the bulk of it to contain inclosures) crumpled into the mouth of the jar in the stopper’s place.

“Did you know that you had put this here?” he asked. “Is the letter of any importance?”

Allan recognized it instantly. It was the first of the little series of letters which had followed the cruising party to the Isle of Man--the letter which young Armadale had briefly referred to as bringing him “more worries from those everlasting lawyers,” and had then dismissed from further notice as recklessly as usual.

“This is what comes of being particularly careful,” said Allan; “here is an instance of my extreme thoughtfulness. You may not think it but I put the letter there on purpose. Every time I went to the jar, you know, I was sure to see the letter; and every time I saw the letter, I was sure to say to myself, ‘This must be answered.’ There’s nothing to laugh at; it was a perfectly sensible arrangement, if I could only have remembered where I put the jar. Suppose I tie a knot in my pocket-handkerchief this time? You have a wonderful memory, my dear fellow. Perhaps you’ll remind me in the course of the day, in case I forget the knot next.”

Midwinter saw his first chance, since Mr. Brock’s departure, of usefully filling Mr. Brock’s place.

“Here is your writing-case,” he said; “why not answer the letter at once? If you put it away again, you may forget it again.”

“Very true,” returned Allan. “But the worst of it is, I can’t quite make up my mind what answer to write. I want a word of advice. Come and sit down here, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

With his loud boyish laugh--echoed by Midwinter, who caught the infection of his gayety--he swept a heap of miscellaneous incumbrances off the cabin sofa, and made room for his friend and himself to take their places. In the high flow of youthful spirits, the two sat down to their trifling consultation over a letter lost in a tobacco jar. It was a memorable moment to both of them, lightly as they thought of it at the time. Before they had risen again from their places, they had taken the first irrevocable step together on the dark and tortuous road of their future lives.

Reduced to plain facts, the question on which Allan now required his friend’s advice may be stated as follows:

While the various arrangements connected with the succession to Thorpe Ambrose were in progress of settlement, and while the new possessor of the estate was still in London, a question had necessarily arisen relating to the person who should be appointed to manage the property. The steward employed by the Blanchard family had written, without loss of time, to offer his services. Although a perfectly competent and trustworthy man, he failed to find favor in the eyes of the new proprietor. Acting, as usual, on his first impulses, and resolved, at all hazards, to install Midwinter as a permanent inmate at Thorpe Ambrose, Allan had determined that the steward’s place was the place exactly fitted for his friend, for the simple reason that it would necessarily oblige his friend to live with him on the estate. He had accordingly written to decline the proposal made to him without consulting Mr. Brock, whose disapproval he had good reason to fear; and without telling Midwinter, who would probably (if a chance were allowed him of choosing) have declined taking a situation which his previous training had by no means fitted him to fill.

Further correspondence had followed this decision, and had raised two new difficulties which looked a little embarrassing on the face of them, but which Allan, with the assistance of his lawyer, easily contrived to solve. The first difficulty, of examining the outgoing steward’s books, was settled by sending a professional accountant to Thorpe Ambrose; and the second difficulty, of putting the steward’s empty cottage to some profitable use (Allan’s plans for his friend comprehending Midwinter’s residence under his own roof), was met by placing the cottage on the list of an active house agent in the neighboring county town. In this state the arrangements had been left when Allan quitted London. He had heard and thought nothing more of the matter, until a letter from his lawyers had followed him to the Isle of Man, inclosing two proposals to occupy the cottage, both received on the same day, and requesting to hear, at his earliest convenience, which of the two he was prepared to accept.

Finding himself, after having conveniently forgotten the subject for some days past, placed face to face once more with the necessity for decision, Allan now put the two proposals into his friend’s hands, and, after a rambling explanation of the circumstances of the case, requested to be favored with a word of advice. Instead of examining the proposals, Midwinter unceremoniously put them aside, and asked the two very natural and very awkward questions of who the new steward was to be, and why he was to live in Allan’s house?

“I’ll tell you who, and I’ll tell you why, when we get to Thorpe Ambrose,” said Allan. “In the meantime we’ll call the steward X. Y. Z., and we’ll say he lives with me, because I’m devilish sharp, and I mean to keep him under my own eye. You needn’t look surprised. I know the man thoroughly well; he requires a good deal of management. If I offered him the steward’s place beforehand, his modesty would get in his way, and he would say ‘No.’ If I pitch him into it neck and crop, without a word of warning and with nobody at hand to relieve him of the situation, he’ll have nothing for it but to consult my interests, and say ‘Yes.’ X. Y. Z. is not at all a bad fellow, I can tell you. You’ll see him when we go to Thorpe Ambrose; and I rather think you and he will get on uncommonly well together.”

The humorous twinkle in Allan’s eye, the sly significance in Allan’s voice, would have betrayed his secret to a prosperous man. Midwinter was as far from suspecting it as the carpenters who were at work above them on the deck of the yacht.