Armadale by Wilkie Collins
On receipt of this letter, Allan had seized the pen in his usual headlong way, and had insisted on Midwinter’s immediately joining Mr Brock and himself on their travels. The last days of March passed, and no answer to the proposal was received. The first days of April came, and on the seventh of the month there was a letter for Allan at last on the breakfast-table. He snatched it up, looked at the address, and threw the letter down again impatiently. The handwriting was not Midwinter’s. Allan finished his breakfast before he cared to read what his correspondent had to say to him.
The meal over, young Armadale lazily opened the letter. He began it with an expression of supreme indifference. He finished it with a sudden leap out of his chair, and a loud shout of astonishment. Wondering, as he well might, at this extraordinary outbreak, Mr Brock took up the letter, which Allan had tossed across the table to him. Before he had come to the end of it, his hands dropped helplessly on his knees, and the blank bewilderment of his pupil’s expression was accurately reflected on his own face.
If ever two men had good cause for being thrown completely off their balance, Allan and the rector were those two. The letter which had struck them both with the same shock of astonishment did, beyond all question, contain an announcement which, on a first discovery of it, was simply incredible. The news was from Norfolk, and was to this effect. In little more than one week’s time, death had mown down no less than three lives in the family at Thorpe-Ambrose – and Allan Armadale was at that moment heir to an estate of eight thousand a year!
A second perusal of the letter enabled the rector and his companion to master the details which had escaped them on a first reading. The writer was the family lawyer at Thorpe-Ambrose. After announcing to Allan the deaths of his cousin Arthur, at the age of twenty-five; of his uncle Henry, at the age of forty-eight; and of his cousin John, at the age of twenty-one, the lawyer proceeded to give a brief abstract of the terms of the elder Mr Blanchard’s will. The claims of male issue were, as is not unusual in such cases, preferred to the claims of female issue. Failing Arthur, and his issue male, the estate was left to Henry and his issue male. Failing them, it went to the issue male of Henry’s sister; and, in default of such issue, to the next heir male. As events had happened, the two young men, Arthur and John, had died unmarried, and Henry Blanchard had died, leaving no surviving child but a daughter. Under these circumstances, Allan was the next heir male pointed at by the will, and was now legally successor to the Thorpe-Ambrose estate. Having made this extraordinary announcement, the lawyer requested to be favoured with Mr Armadale’s instructions, and added, in conclusion, that he would be happy to furnish any further particulars that were desired.
It was useless to waste time in wondering at an event which neither Allan nor his mother had ever thought of as even remotely possible. The only thing to be done was to go back to England at once. The next day found the travellers installed once more in their London hotel, and the day after, the affair was placed in the proper professional hands. The inevitable corresponding and consulting ensued; and one by one the all-important particulars flowed in, until the measure of information was pronounced to be full.
This was the strange story of the three deaths:
At the time when Mr Brock had written to Mrs Armadale’s relatives to announce the news of her decease (that is to say, in the middle of the month of January), the family at Thorpe-Ambrose numbered five persons – Arthur Blanchard (in possession of the estate), living in the great house with his mother; and Henry Blanchard, the uncle, living in the neighbourhood, a widower with two children, a son and a daughter. To cement the family connection still more closely, Arthur Blanchard was engaged to be married to his cousin. The wedding was to be celebrated with great local rejoicings, in the coming summer, when the young lady had completed her twentieth year.
The month of February had brought changes with it in the family position. Observing signs of delicacy in the health of his son, Mr Henry Blanchard left Norfolk, taking the young man with him, under medical advice, to try the climate of Italy. Early in the ensuing month of March, Arthur Blanchard also left Thorpe-Ambrose, for a few days only, on business which required his presence in London. The business took him into the City. Annoyed by the endless impediments in the streets, he returned westward by one of the river steamers; and, so returning, met his death.
As the steamer left the wharf, he noticed a woman near him who had shown a singular hesitation in embarking, and who had been the last of the passengers to take her place in the vessel. She was neatly dressed in black silk, with a red Paisley shawl over her shoulders, and she kept her face hidden behind a thick veil. Arthur Blanchard was struck by the rare grace and elegance of her figure, and he felt a young man’s passing curiosity to see her face. She neither lifted her veil, nor turned her head his way. After taking a few steps hesitatingly backwards and forwards on the deck, she walked away on a sudden to the stern of the vessel. In a minute more, there was a cry of alarm from the man at the helm, and the engines were stopped immediately. The woman had thrown herself overboard.
The passengers all rushed to the side of the vessel to look. Arthur Blanchard alone, without an instant’s hesitation, jumped into the river. He was an excellent swimmer, and he reached the woman as she rose again to the surface, after sinking for the first time. Help was at hand; and they were both brought safely ashore. The woman was taken to the nearest police-station, and was soon restored to her senses; her preserver giving his name and address, as usual in such cases, to the inspector on duty, who wisely recommended him to get into a warm bath, and to send to his lodgings for dry clothes. Arthur Blanchard, who had never known an hour’s illness since he was a child, laughed at the caution, and went back in a cab. The next day, he was too ill to attend the examination before the magistrate. A fortnight afterwards, he was a dead man.
The news of the calamity reached Henry Blanchard and his son at Milan; and within an hour of the time when they received it, they were on their way back to England. The snow on the Alps had loosened earlier than usual that year, and the passes were notoriously dangerous. The father and son, travelling in their own carriage, were met on the mountain by the mail returning, after sending the letters on by hand. Warnings which would have produced their effect, under any ordinary circumstances, were now vainly addressed to the two Englishmen. Their impatience to be at home again, after the catastrophe which had befallen their family, brooked no delay. Bribes, lavishly offered to the postilions, tempted them to go on. The carriage pursued its way, and was lost to view in the mist. When it was seen again, it was disinterred from the bottom of a precipice – the men, the horses, and the vehicle all crushed together under the wreck and ruin of an avalanche.
So the three lives were mown down by death. So, in a clear sequence of events, a woman’s suicide-leap into a river had opened to Allan Armadale the succession to the Thorpe-Ambrose estates.
Who was the woman? The man who saved her life never knew. The magistrate who remanded her, the chaplain who exhorted her, the reporter who exhibited her in print – never knew. It was recorded of her with surprise, that, though most respectably dressed, she had nevertheless described herself as being ‘in distress’. She had expressed the deepest contrition, but had persisted in giving a name which was on the face of it a false one; in telling a commonplace story, which was manifestly an invention; and in refusing to the last to furnish any clue to her friends. A lady connected with a charitable institution (‘interested by her extreme elegance and beauty’) had volunteered to take charge of her, and to bring her into a better frame of mind. The first day’s experience of the penitent had been far from cheering, and the second day’s experience had been conclusive. She had left the institution by stealth; and – though the visiting clergyman, taking a special interest in the case, had caused special efforts to be made – all search after her, from that time forth, had proved fruitless.
While this useless investigation (undertaken at Allan’s express desire) was in pro
Left necessarily to his own guidance in this matter, Allan settled it for himself in his usual hot-headed generous way. He positively declined to take possession, until Mrs Blanchard and her niece (who had been permitted, thus far, as a matter of courtesy, to remain in their old home) had recovered from the calamity that had befallen them, and were fit to decide for themselves what their future proceedings should be. A private correspondence followed this resolution, comprehending, on Allan’s side, unlimited offers of everything he had to give (in a house which he had not yet seen); and, on the ladies’ side, a discreetly reluctant readiness to profit by the young gentleman’s generosity in the matter of time. To the astonishment of his legal advisers, Allan entered their office one morning, accompanied by Mr Brock; and announced, with perfect composure, that the ladies had been good enough to take his own arrangements off his hands, and that, in deference to their convenience, he meant to defer establishing himself at Thorpe-Ambrose till that day two months. The lawyers stared at Allan – and Allan, returning the compliment, stared at the lawyers.
‘What on earth are you wondering at, gentlemen?’ he inquired, with a boyish bewilderment in his good-humoured blue eyes. ‘Why shouldn’t I give the ladies their two months, if the ladies want them? Let the poor things take their own time, and welcome. My rights? and my position? Oh, pooh! pooh! I’m in no hurry to be squire of the parish – it’s not in my way. What do I mean to do for the two months? What I should have done anyhow, whether the ladies had stayed or not; I mean to go cruising at sea. That’s what I like! I’ve got a new yacht at home in Somersetshire – a yacht of my own building. And I’ll tell you what, sir,’ continued Allan, seizing the head partner by the arm, in the fervour of his friendly intentions, ‘you look sadly in want of a holiday in the fresh air, and you shall come along with me, on the trial-trip of my new vessel. And your partners, too, if they like. And the head-clerk, who is the best fellow I ever met with in my life. Plenty of room – we’ll all shake down together on the floor, and we’ll give Mr Brock a rug on the cabin-table. Thorpe-Ambrose be hanged! Do you mean to say if you had built a vessel yourself (as I have), you would go to any estate in the three kingdoms, while your own little beauty was sitting like a duck on the water at home, and waiting for you to try her? You legal gentlemen are great hands at argument. What do you think of that argument? I think it’s unanswerable – and I’m off to Somersetshire to-morrow.’
With those words, the new possessor of eight thousand a year dashed into the head-clerk’s office, and invited that functionary to a cruise on the high seas, with a smack on the shoulder which was heard distinctly by his masters in the next room. The Firm looked in interrogative wonder at Mr Brock. A client who could see a position among the landed gentry of England waiting for him, without being in a hurry to occupy it at the earliest possible opportunity, was a client of whom they possessed no previous experience.
‘He must have been very oddly brought up,’ said the lawyers to the rector.
‘Very oddly,’ said the rector to the lawyers.15
A last leap over one month more, brought Mr Brock to the present time – to the bedroom at Castletown, in which he was sitting thinking, and to the anxiety which was obstinately intruding itself between him and his night’s rest. That anxiety was no unfamiliar enemy to the rector’s peace of mind. It had first found him out in Somersetshire six months since, and it had now followed him to the Isle of Man under the inveterately obtrusive form of Ozias Midwinter.
The change in Allan’s future prospects had worked no corresponding alteration in his perverse fancy for the castaway at the village inn. In the midst of the consultations with the lawyers he had found time to visit Midwinter; and on the journey back with the rector, there was Allan’s friend in the carriage, returning with them to Somersetshire by Allan’s own invitation. The ex-usher’s hair had grown again on his shaven skull, and his dress showed the renovating influence of an accession of pecuniary means; but in all other respects the man was unchanged. He met Mr Brock’s distrust, with the old uncomplaining resignation to it; he maintained the same suspicious silence on the subject of his relatives and his early life; he spoke of Allan’s kindness to him with the same undisciplined fervour of gratitude and surprise. ‘I have done what I could, sir,’ he said to Mr Brock, while Allan was asleep in the railway carriage. ‘I have kept out of Mr Armadale’s way, and I have not even answered his last letter to me. More than that, is more than I can do. I don’t ask you to consider my own feeling towards the only human creature who has never suspected and never ill-treated me. I can resist my own feeling, but I can’t resist the young gentleman himself. There’s not another like him in the world. If we are to be parted again, it must be his doing or yours – not mine. The dog’s master has whistled,’ said this strange man, with a momentary outburst of the hidden passion in him, and a sudden springing of angry tears in his wild brown eyes: ‘and it’s hard, sir, to blame the dog, when the dog comes.’
Once more, Mr Brock’s humanity got the better of Mr Brock’s caution. He determined to wait, and see what the coming days of social intercourse might bring forth.
The days passed; the yacht was rigged, and fitted for sea; a cruise was arranged to the Welsh coast – and Midwinter the Secret was the same Midwinter still. Confinement on board a little vessel of five-and-thirty tons, offered no great attraction to a man of Mr Brock’s time of life. But he sailed on the trial-trip of the yacht nevertheless, rather than trust Allan alone with his new friend.
Would the close companionship of the three on their cruise, tempt the man into talking of his own affairs? No; he was ready enough on other subjects, especially if Allan led the way to them. But not a word escaped him about himself. Mr Brock tried him with questions about his recent inheritance, and was answered as he had been answered once already at the Somersetshire inn. It was a curious coincidence, Midwinter admitted, that Mr Armadale’s prospects and his own prospects, should both have unexpectedly changed for the better about the same time. But there the resemblance ended. It was no large fortune that had fallen into his lap, though it was enough for his wants. It had not reconciled him with his relations, for the money had not come to him as a matter of kindness but as a matter of right. As for the circumstance which had led to his communicating with his family, it was not worth mentioning – seeing that the temporary renewal of intercourse which had followed, had produced no friendly results. Nothing had come of it but the money – and, with the money, an anxiety which troubled him sometimes, when he woke in the small hours of the morning.
At those last words he became suddenly silent, as if, for once, his well-guarded tongue had betrayed him. Mr Brock seized the opportunity, and bluntly asked him what the nature of the anxiety might be. Did it relate to money? No – it related to a Letter which had been waiting for him for many years. Had he received the letter? Not yet; it had been left under charge of one of the partners in the firm which had managed the business of his inheritance for him; the partner had been absent from England; and the letter, locked up among his own private papers, could not be got at till he returned. He was expected back towards the latter part of that present May, and if Midwinter could be sure where the cruise would take them to at the close of the month, he thought he would write and have the letter forwarded. Had he any family reasons to be anxious about it? None that he knew of; he was curious to see what had been waiting for him for many years, and that was all. So he answered the rector’s questions, with his tawny face turned away over the low bulwark of the yacht, and his fishing-line dragging in his supple brown hands.
Favoured by wind and weather, the little vessel had done wonders on her trial-trip. Before the period fixed for the duration of the cruise had half expired, the yacht wa
Late the next day, they set sail for the Isle of Man. For a few hours all went well; but sunset brought with it the signs of a coming change. With the darkness, the wind rose to a gale; and the question whether Allan and his journeymen had, or had not, built a stout sea-boat was seriously tested for the first time. All that night, after trying vainly to bear up for Holyhead, the little vessel kept the sea, and stood her trial bravely. The next morning, the Isle of Man16 was in view, and the yacht was safe at Castletown. A survey by daylight of hull and rigging showed that all the damage done might be set right again in a week’s time. The cruising party had accordingly remained at Castletown; Allan being occupied in superintending the repairs, Mr Brock in exploring the neighbourhood, and Midwinter in making daily pilgrimages on foot, to Douglas and back, to inquire for letters.17