Armadale by Wilkie Collins
For a moment, Midwinter faced the messenger of evil tidings in silent distress. That moment past, the sense of Allan’s critical position roused him, now the evil was known, to seek the remedy.
‘Has the little you have seen of your master, Richard, inclined you to like him?’ he asked.
This time, the man answered without hesitation. ‘A pleasanter and kinder gentleman than Mr Armadale no one could wish to serve.’
‘If you think that,’ pursued Midwinter, ‘you won’t object to give me some information which will help your master to set himself right with his neighbours. Come into the house.’
He led the way into the library, and, after asking the necessary questions, took down in writing a list of the names and addresses of the most influential persons living in the town and its neighbourhood. This done, he rang the bell for the head footman, having previously sent Richard with a message to the stables, directing an open carriage to be ready in an hour’s time.
‘When the late Mr Blanchard went out to make calls in the neighbourhood, it was your place to go with him, was it not?’ he asked, when the upper servant appeared. ‘Very well. Be ready in an hour’s time, if you please, to go out with Mr Armadale.’ Having given that order, he left the house again on his way back to Allan, with the visiting list in his hand. He smiled a little sadly as he descended the steps. ‘Who would have imagined,’ he thought, ‘that my footboy’s experience of the ways of gentlefolks, would be worth looking back at one day for Allan’s sake?’
The object of the popular odium lay innocently slumbering on the grass, with his garden hat over his nose, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his trousers wrinkled half way up his outstretched legs. Midwinter roused him without hesitation, and remorselessly repeated the servant’s news.
Allan accepted the disclosure thus forced on him without the slightest disturbance of temper. ‘Oh, hang ’em!’ was all he said. ‘Let’s have another cigar.’ Midwinter took the cigar out of his hand, and, insisting on his treating the matter seriously, told him in plain words that he must set himself right with his offended neighbours by calling on them personally to make his apologies. Allan sat up on the grass in astonishment; his eyes opened wide in incredulous dismay. Did Midwinter positively meditate forcing him into a ‘chimney-pot hat’,6 a nicely brushed frock-coat, and a clean pair of gloves? Was it actually in contemplation to shut him up in a carriage, with his footman on the box and his card-case in his hand, and send him round from house to house, to tell a pack of fools that he begged their pardon for not letting them make a public show of him? If anything so outrageously absurd as this was really to be done, it could not be done that day, at any rate. He had promised to go back to the charming Milroy at the cottage and to take Midwinter with him. What earthly need had he of the good opinion of the resident gentry? The only friends he wanted were the friends he had got already. Let the whole neighbourhood turn its back on him if it liked–back or face the Squire of Thorpe-Ambrose didn’t care two straws about it.
After allowing him to run on in this way until his whole stock of objections was exhausted, Midwinter wisely tried his personal influence next.7 He took Allan affectionately by the hand. ‘I am going to ask a great favour,’ he said. ‘If you won’t call on these people for your own sake, will you call on them to please me?’
Allan delivered himself of a groan of despair, stared in mute surprise at the anxious face of his friend, and good-humouredly gave way. As Midwinter took his arm, and led him back to the house, he looked round with rueful eyes at the cattle hard by, placidly whisking their tails in the pleasant shade. ‘Don’t mention it in the neighbourhood,’ he said; ‘I should like to change places with one of my own cows.’
Midwinter left him to dress, engaging to return when the carriage was at the door. Allan’s toilette did not promise to be a speedy one. He began it by reading his own visiting cards; and he advanced it a second stage by looking into his wardrobe, and devoting the resident gentry to the infernal regions. Before he could discover any third means of delaying his own proceedings, the necessary pretext was unexpectedly supplied by Richard’s appearance with a note in his hand. The messenger had just called with Mr Darch’s answer. Allan briskly shut up the wardrobe, and gave his whole attention to the lawyer’s letter. The lawyer’s letter rewarded him by the following lines:
Sir, – I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your favour of to-day’s date, honouring me with two proposals, namely, ONE inviting me to act as your legal adviser, and ONE inviting me to pay you a visit at your house. In reference to the first proposal, I beg permission to decline it with thanks. With regard to the second proposal, I have to inform you that circumstances have come to my knowledge relating to the letting of the cottage at Thorpe-Ambrose, which render it impossible for me (in justice to myself) to accept your invitation. I have ascertained, sir, that my offer reached you at the same time as Major Milroy’s; and that, with both proposals thus before you, you gave the preference to a total stranger, who addressed you through a house-agent, over a man who had faithfully served your relatives for two generations, and who had been the first person to inform you of the most important event in your life. After this specimen of your estimate of what is due to the claims of common courtesy and common justice, I cannot flatter myself that I possess any of the qualities which would fit me to take my place on the list of your friends. – I remain, sir, your obedient servant, JAMES DARCH.
‘Stop the messenger!’ cried Allan, leaping to his feet, his ruddy face aflame with indignation. ‘Give me pen, ink and paper! By the Lord Harry, they’re a nice set of people in these parts; the whole neighbourhood is in a conspiracy to bully me!’ He snatched up the pen in a fine frenzy of epistolary inspiration. ‘Sir, – I despise you and your letter.—’At that point the pen made a blot, and the writer was seized with a momentary hesitation. ‘Too strong,’ he thought; ‘I’ll give it to the lawyer in his own cool and cutting style.’ He began again on a clean sheet of paper. ‘Sir, – You remind me of an Irish bull. I mean that story in Joe Miller, 8 where Pat remarked, in the hearing of a wag hard by, that “the reciprocity was all on one side”. Your reciprocity is all on one side. You take the privilege of refusing to be my lawyer, and then you complain of my taking the privilege of refusing to be your landlord.’ He paused fondly over those last words. ‘Neat!’ he thought. ‘Argument and hard hitting both in one. I wonder where my knack of writing comes from?’ He went on, and finished the letter in two more sentences. ‘As for your casting my invitation back in my teeth, I beg to inform you my teeth are none the worse for it. I am equally glad to have nothing to say to you, either in the capacity of a friend or a tenant. – ALLAN ARMADALE.’ He nodded exultingly at his own composition, as he addressed it and sent it down to the messenger. ‘Darch’s hide must be a thick one,’ he said, ‘if he doesn’t feel that!’
The sound of wheels outside suddenly recalled him to the business of the day. There was the carriage waiting to take him on his round of visits; and there was Midwinter at his post, pacing to and fro on the drive. ‘Read that,’ cried Allan, throwing out the lawyer’s letter; ‘I’ve written him back a smasher.’
He bustled away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr Darch had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting himself in the neighbourhood. ‘Whatever else they may say of me, they shan’t say I was afraid to face them.’ Heated red-hot with that idea, he seized his hat and gloves, and, hurrying out of the room, met Midwinter in the corridor with the lawyer’s letter in his hand.
‘Keep up your spirits!’ cried Allan, seeing the anxiety in his friend’s face, and misinterpreting the motive of it immediately. ‘If Darch can’t be counted on to send us a helping hand into the steward’s office, Pedgift can.’
‘My dear Allan, I was not thinking of that; I was thinking of Mr Darch’s letter. I don’t defend this sour-tempered man –
‘Gone!’ replied Allan; ‘I always strike while the iron’s hot – a word and a blow, and the blow first, that’s my way. Don’t, there’s a dear good fellow, don’t fidget about the steward’s books and the rent-day. Here! here’s a bunch of keys they gave me last night: one of them opens the room where the steward’s books are; go in and read them till I come back. I give you my sacred word of honour I’ll settle it all with Pedgift before you see me again.’
‘One moment,’ interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on his way out to the carriage. ‘I say nothing against Mr Pedgift’s fitness to possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify me in distrusting him. But he has not introduced himself to your notice in a very delicate way; and he has not acknowledged (what is quite clear to my mind) that he knew of Mr Darch’s unfriendly feeling towards you when he wrote. Wait a little before you go to this stranger; wait till we can talk it over together to-night.’
‘Wait!’ replied Allan. ‘Haven’t I told you that I always strike while the iron’s hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy; I’ll look Pedgift through and through, and act accordingly. Don’t keep me any longer, for heaven’s sake. I’m in a fine humour for tackling the resident gentry; and if I don’t go at once, I’m afraid it may wear off.’
With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan boisterously broke away. Before it was possible to stop him again, he had jumped into the carriage and had left the house.
CHAPTER IV
THE MARCH OF EVENTS
Midwinter’s face darkened when the last trace of the carriage had disappeared from view. ‘I have done my best,’ he said, as he turned back gloomily into the house. ‘If Mr Brock himself were here, Mr Brock could do no more!’
He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the steward’s books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various moveables of the steward’s office had been provisionally placed, after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the business records of the Thorpe-Ambrose estate. The result exposed his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The Ledgers bewildered him; the Leases, the Plans, and even the Correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted bitterly as he left the room again to his two years’ solitary self-instruction in the Shrewsbury bookseller’s shop. ‘If I could only have worked at a business!’ he thought. ‘If I could only have known that the company of Poets and Philosophers was company too high for a vagabond like me!’1
He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. ‘Curse the place!’ he said, snatching up his hat and stick. ‘I like the bleakest hill-side I ever slept on, better than I like this house!’
He impatiently descended the doorsteps, and stopped on the drive, considering by which direction he should leave the park for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the dream without entering it again. But one other way remained – the way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning. There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major’s daughter now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.
Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was full of that sourly-savage resistance to the inevitable self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the poor. ‘The heather-bell costs nothing!’ he thought, looking contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that surrounded him; ‘and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as the best of you!’ He followed the artfully-contrived ovals and squares of the Italian garden, with a vagabond indifference to the symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design. ‘How many pounds a foot did you cost?’ he said, looking back with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. ‘Wind away over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain-side, if you can!’
He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him; crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached the major’s cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion, at the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate, to look at the trim little residence which would never have been empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan’s ill-advised resolution to force the steward’s situation on his friend.
The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park, as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden enclosure. The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining – a voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with nothing but the hard power of it left – was the discordantly predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow Midwinter to distinguish the words that were spoken, he felt the impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at once stepped forward to continue his walk. At the same moment, the face of a young girl (easily recognizable as the face of Miss Milroy, from Allan’s description of her) appeared at the open window of the room. In spite of himself, Midwinter paused to look at her. The expression of the bright young face, which had smiled so prettily on Allan, was weary and disheartened. After looking out absently over the park she suddenly turned her head back into the room; her attention having been apparently struck by something that had just been said in it. ‘Oh, mamma, mamma,’ she exclaimed indignantly, ‘how can you say such things!’ The words were spoken close to the window; they reached Midwinter’s ears, and hurried him away before he heard more. But the self-disclosure of Major Milroy’s domestic position had not reached its end yet. As Midwinter turned the corner of the garden fence, a tradesman’s boy was handing a parcel in at the wicket gate to the woman servant. ‘Well,’ said the boy, with the irrepressible impudence of his class, ‘how is the missus?’ The woman lifted her hand to box his ears. ‘How is the missus?’ she repeated, with an angry toss of her head as the boy ran off. ‘If it would only please God to take the missus, it would be a blessing to everybody in the house.’
No such ill-omened shadow as this had passed over the bright domestic picture of the inhabitants of the cottage, which Allan’s enthusiasm had painted for the contemplation of his friend. It was plain that the secret of the tenants had been kept from the landlord so far. Five minutes more of walking brought Midwinter to the park gates. ‘Am I fated to see nothing and hear nothing to-day which can give me heart and hope for the future?’ he thought, as he angrily swung back the lodge gate. ‘Even the people Allan has let the cottage to, are people whose lives are embittered by a household misery which it is my misfortune to have found out!’
He took the first road that lay before him, and walked on, noticing little, immersed in his own thoughts. More than an hour passed before the necessity of turning back entered his mind. As soon as the idea occurred to him, he consulted his watch, and determined to retrace his steps, so as to be at the house in good time to meet Allan on his return. Ten minutes of walking brought him back to a point at which three roads met; and one moment’s observation of the place satisfied him that he had entirely failed to notice, at the time, by which of the th
The figure came on, clad from head to foot in dreary black – a moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road. He was a lean, elderly, miserably respectable man. He wore a poor old black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no pretence of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed ungainly feet. Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a stock, drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard jaws. The one morsel of colour he carried about him, was a lawyer’s bag of blue serge as lean and limp as himself. The one attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary old face, was a neat set of teeth – teeth (as honest as his wig), which said plainly to all inquiring eyes, ‘We pass our nights on his looking-glass, and our days in his mouth.’
All the little blood in the man’s body faintly reddened his fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the way to Thorpe-Ambrose. His weak watery eyes looked hither and thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a lion instead of a man, and if the few words addressed to him had been words expressing a threat instead of a question, he could hardly have looked more confused and alarmed than he looked now. For the first time in his life, Midwinter saw his own shy uneasiness in the presence of strangers reflected, with tenfold intensity of nervous suffering, in the face of another man – and that man old enough to be his father.