Armadale by Wilkie Collins
‘May I ask if I am right, sir,’ he began, ‘in believing that you have a very unfavourable opinion of Miss Gwilt? You are quite convinced, I think—’
‘My good fellow,’ interrupted Pedgift Senior, ‘why need you be in any doubt about it? You were under Mr Armadale’s open window all the while I was talking to him; and your ears, I presume, were not absolutely shut.’
Mr Bashwood showed no sense of the interruption. The little sting of the lawyer’s sarcasm was lost in the nobler pain that wrung him from the wound inflicted by Miss Gwilt.
‘You are quite convinced, I think, sir,’ he resumed, ‘that there are circumstances in this lady’s past life, which would be highly discreditable to her if they were discovered at the present time?’
‘The window was open at the great house, Bashwood; and your ears, I presume, were not absolutely shut.’
Still impenetrable to the sting, Mr Bashwood persisted more obstinately than ever.
‘Unless I am greatly mistaken,’ he said, ‘your long experience in such things has even suggested to you, sir, that Miss Gwilt might turn out to be known to the police?’
Pedgift Senior’s patience gave way. ‘You have been over ten minutes in this room,’ he broke out; ‘can you, or can you not, tell me in plain English what you want?’
In plain English – with the passion that had transformed him, the passion which (in Miss Gwilt’s own words) had made a man of him, burning in his haggard cheeks – Mr Bashwood met the challenge, and faced the lawyer (as the worried sheep faces the dog) on his own ground.
‘I wish to say, sir,’ he answered, ‘that your opinion in this matter is my opinion too. I believe there is something wrong in Miss Gwilt’s past life, which she keeps concealed from everybody — and I want to be the man who knows it.’
Pedgift Senior saw his chance, and instantly reverted to the question that he had postponed. ‘Why?’ he asked for the second time.
For the second time, Mr Bashwood hesitated. Could he acknowledge that he had been mad enough to love her, and mean enough to be a spy for her? Could he say, She has deceived me from the first, and she has deserted me now her object is served. After robbing me of my happiness, robbing me of my honour, robbing me of my last hope left in life, she has gone from me for ever, and left me nothing but my old man’s longing, slow and sly, and strong and changeless, for revenge. Revenge that I may have, if I can poison her success by dragging her frailties into the public view. Revenge that I will buy (for what is gold or what is life to me?) with the last farthing of my hoarded money and the last drop of my stagnant blood. Could he say that to the man who sat waiting for his answer? No: he could only crush it down and be silent.
The lawyer’s expression began to harden once more.2
‘One of us must speak out,’ he said; ‘and, as you evidently won’t, I will. I can only account for this extraordinary anxiety of yours to make yourself acquainted with Miss Gwilt’s secrets, in one of two ways. Your motive is either an excessively mean one (no offence, Bashwood, I am only putting the case), or an excessively generous one. After my experience of your honest character and your creditable conduct, it is only your due that I should absolve you at once of the mean motive. I believe you are as incapable as I am – I can say no more – of turning to mercenary account any discoveries you might make to Miss Gwilt’s prejudice in Miss Gwilt’s past life. Shall I go on any further? or would you prefer, on second thoughts, opening your mind frankly to me of your own accord?’
‘I should prefer not interrupting you, sir,’ said Mr Bashwood.
‘As you please,’ pursued Pedgift Senior. ‘Having absolved you of the mean motive, I come to the generous motive next. It is possible that you are an unusually grateful man; and it is certain that Mr Armadale has been remarkably kind to you. After employing you under Mr Midwinter, in the steward’s office, he has had confidence enough in your honesty and your capacity, now his friend has left him, to put his business entirely and unreservedly in your hands. It’s not in my experience of human nature – but it may be possible nevertheless – that you are so gratefully sensible of that confidence, and so gratefully interested in your employer’s welfare, that you can’t see him, in his friendless position, going straight to his own disgrace and ruin, without making an effort to save him. To put it in two words. Is it your idea that Mr Armadale might be prevented from marrying Miss Gwilt, if he could be informed in time of her real character? And do you wish to be the man who opens his eyes to the truth? If that is the case—’
He stopped in astonishment. Acting under some uncontrollable impulse, Mr Bashwood had started to his feet. He stood, with his withered face lit up by a sudden irradiation from within, which made him look younger than his age by a good twenty years – he stood, gasping for breath enough to speak, and gesticulated entreatingly at the lawyer with both hands.
‘Say it again, sir!’ he burst out eagerly; recovering his breath, before Pedgift Senior had recovered his surprise. ‘The question about Mr Armadale, sir! – only once more! – only once more, Mr Pedgift, please!’
With his practised observation closely and distrustfully at work on Mr Bashwood’s face, Pedgift Senior motioned to him to sit down again, and put the question for the second time.
‘Do I think,’ said Mr Bashwood, repeating the sense, but not the words of the question, ‘that Mr Armadale might be parted from Miss Gwilt, if she could be shown to him as she really is? Yes, sir! And do I wish to be the man who does it? Yes, sir! yes, sir!! yes, sir!!!’
‘It’s rather strange,’ remarked the lawyer, looking at him more and more distrustfully, ‘that you should be so violently agitated, simply because my question happens to have hit the mark.’
The question happened to have hit a mark which Pedgift little dreamed of. It had released Mr Bashwood’s mind in an instant, from the dead pressure of his one dominant idea of revenge, and had shown him a purpose to be achieved by the discovery of Miss Gwilt’s secrets, which had never occurred to him till that moment. The marriage which he had blindly regarded as inevitable, was a marriage that might be stopped – not in Allan’s interests, but in his own – and the woman whom he believed that he had lost, might yet, in spite of circumstances, be a woman won! His brain whirled as he thought of it. His own roused resolution almost daunted him, by its terrible incongruity with all the familiar habits of his mind, and all the customary proceedings of his life.
Finding his last remark unanswered, Pedgift Senior considered a little, before he said anything more.3
‘One thing is clear,’ reasoned the lawyer with himself. ‘His true motive in this matter, is a motive which he is afraid to avow. My question evidently offered him a chance of misleading me, and he has accepted it on the spot. That’s enough for me. If I was Mr Armadale’s lawyer, the mystery might be worth investigating. As things are, it’s no interest of mine to hunt Mr Bashwood from one lie to another, till I run him to earth at last. I have nothing whatever to do with it; and I shall leave him free to follow his own roundabout courses, in his own roundabout way.’ Having arrived at that conclusion, Pedgift Senior pushed back his chair, and rose briskly to terminate the interview.
‘Don’t be alarmed, Bashwood,’ he began. ‘The subject of our conversation is a subject exhausted, so far as I am concerned. I have only a few last words to say, and it’s a habit of mine, as you know, to say my last words on my legs. Whatever else I may be in the dark about, I have made one discovery, at any rate. I have found out what you really want with me – at last! You want me to help you.’
‘If you would be so very, very kind, sir?’ stammered Mr Bashwood. ‘If you would only give me the great advantage of your opinion and advice—?’
‘Wait a bit, Bashwood. We will separate those two things if you please. A lawyer may offer an opinion like any other man; but when a lawyer gives his advice – by the Lord Harry, sir, it’s Professional! You’re welcome to my opinion in this matter; I have disguised it from nobody. I believe there have been events
‘Oh, sir, don’t say that!’ pleaded Mr Bashwood. ‘Don’t deny me the great favour, the inestimable advantage of your advice! I have such a poor head, Mr Pedgift! I am so old and so slow, sir, and I get so sadly startled and worried when I’m thrown out of my ordinary ways. It’s quite natural you should be a little impatient with me for taking up your time – I know that time is money, to a clever man like you. Would you excuse me – would you please excuse me, if I venture to say that I have saved a little something, a few pounds, sir; and being quite lonely, with nobody dependent on me, I’m sure I may spend my savings as I please?’ Blind to every consideration but the one consideration of propitiating Mr Pedgift, he took out a dingy, ragged old pocket-book, and tried, with trembling fingers, to open it on the lawyer’s table.
‘Put your pocket-book back directly,’ said Pedgift Senior. ‘Richer men than you have tried that argument with me, and have found that there is such a thing (off the stage) as a lawyer who is not to be bribed. I will have nothing to do with the case, under existing circumstances. If you want to know why, I beg to inform you that Miss Gwilt ceased to be professionally interesting to me on the day when I ceased to be Mr Armadale’s lawyer. I may have other reasons besides, which I don’t think it necessary to mention. The reason already given is explicit enough. Go your own way, and take your responsibility on your own shoulders. You may venture within reach of Miss Gwilt’s claws, and come out again without being scratched. Time will show. In the meanwhile, I wish you good-morning – and I own, to my shame, that I never knew till to-day what a hero you were.’
This time, Mr Bashwood felt the sting. Without another word of expostulation or entreaty, without even saying ‘Good-morning’ on his side, he walked to the door, opened it softly, and left the room.
The parting look in his face, and the sudden silence that had fallen on him, were not lost on Pedgift Senior. ‘Bashwood will end badly,’ said the lawyer, shuffling his papers, and returning impenetrably to his interrupted work.
The change in Mr Bashwood’s face and manner to something dogged and self-contained, was so startlingly uncharacteristic of him, that it even forced itself on the notice of Pedgift Junior and the clerks, as he passed through the outer office. Accustomed to make the old man their butt, they took a boisterously comic view of the marked alteration in him. Deaf to the merciless raillery with which he was assailed on all sides, he stopped opposite young Pedgift; and looking him attentively in the face, said, in a quiet absent manner, like a man thinking aloud, ‘I wonder whether you would help me?’
‘Open an account instantly,’ said Pedgift Junior to the clerks, ‘in the name of Mr Bashwood. Place a chair for Mr Bashwood, with a footstool close by, in case he wants it. Supply me with a quire of extra doublewove satin paper, and a gross of picked quills to take notes of Mr Bashwood’s case; and inform my father instantly that I am going to leave him and set up in business for myself, on the strength of Mr Bashwood’s patronage. Take a seat, sir, pray take a seat, and express your feelings freely.’
Still impenetrably deaf to the raillery of which he was the object, Mr Bashwood waited until Pedgift Junior had exhausted himself, and then turned quietly away.
‘I ought to have known better,’ he said, in the same absent manner as before. ‘He is his father’s son all over – he would make game of me on my death-bed.’ He paused a moment at the door, mechanically brushing his hat with his hand, and went out into the street.
The bright sunshine dazzled his eyes, the passing vehicles and foot-passengers startled and bewildered him. He shrank into a by-street, and put his hand over his eyes. ‘I’d better go home,’ he thought, ‘and shut myself up, and think about it in my own room.’
His lodging was in a small house, in the poor quarter of the town. He let himself in with his key, and stole softly upstairs. The one little room he possessed met him cruelly, look round it where he might, with silent memorials of Miss Gwilt. On the chimney-piece were the flowers she had given him at various times, all withered long since, and all preserved on a little china pedestal, protected by a glass shade. On the wall hung a wretched coloured print of a woman, which he had caused to be nicely framed and glazed, because there was a look in it that reminded him of her face. In his clumsy old mahogany writing-desk were the few letters, brief and peremptory, which she had written to him at the time when he was watching and listening meanly at Thorpe-Ambrose to please her. And when, turning his back on these, he sat down wearily on his sofa-bedstead – there, hanging over one end of it, was the gaudy cravat of blue satin, which he had bought because she had told him she liked bright colours, and which he had never yet had the courage to wear, though he had taken it out morning after morning with the resolution to put it on! Habitually quiet in his actions, habitually restrained in his language, he now seized the cravat as if it was a living thing that could feel, and flung it to the other end of the room with an oath.
The time passed; and still, though his resolution to stand between Miss Gwilt and her marriage remained unbroken, he was as far as ever from discovering the means which might lead him to his end. The more he thought and thought of it, the darker and the darker his course in the future looked to him.
He rose again, as wearily as he had sat down, and went to his cupboard. ‘I’m feverish and thirsty,’ he said; ‘a cup of tea may help me.’ He opened his canister, and measured out his small allowance of tea, less carefully than usual. ‘Even my own hands won’t serve me today!’ he thought, as he scraped together the few grains of tea that he had spilt, and put them carefully back in the canister.
In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the kitchen-fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his teapot in his hand.
Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the many English matrons whose path through this world is a path of thorns; and who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity is afforded them, in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet of other people in a like condition with themselves. Her one vice was of the lighter sort – the vice of curiosity; and among the many counterbalancing virtues she possessed, was the virtue of greatly respecting Mr Bashwood, as a lodger whose rent was regularly paid, and whose ways were always quiet and civil from one year’s end to another.
‘What did you please to want, sir?’ asked the landlady. ‘Boiling water, is it? Did you ever know the water boil, Mr Bashwood, when you wanted it? Did you ever see a sulkier fire than that? I’ll put a stick or two in, if you’ll wait a little, and give me the chance. Dear, dear me, you’ll excuse my mentioning it, sir, but how poorly you do look to-day!’
The strain on Mr Bashwood’s mind was beginning to tell. Something of the helplessness which he had shown at the station, appeared again in his face and manner as he put his teapot on the kitchen-table, and sat down.
‘I’m in trouble, ma’am,’ he said quietly; ‘and I find trouble gets harder to bear than it used to be.’
‘Ah, you may well say that!’ groaned the landlady. ‘ I’m ready for the undertaker, Mr Bashwood, when my time comes, whatever you may be. You’re too lonely, sir. When you’re in trouble it’s some help – though not much – to shift a share of it off on another person’s shoulders. If your good lady had only been alive now, sir, what a comfort you would have found her, wouldn’t you?’
A momentary spasm of pain passed across Mr Bashwo
‘What I always say to my husband, when he’s low, sir,’ pursued the landlady, intent on the kettle, ‘is, “What would you do now, Sam, without Me?” When his temper don’t get the better of him (it will boil directly, Mr Bashwood), he says, “Elizabeth, I could do nothing.” When his temper does get the better of him, he says, “I should try the public-house, missus; and I’ll try it now.” Ah, I’ve got my troubles! A man with grown-up sons and daughters, tippling in a public-house! I don’t call to mind, Mr Bashwood, whether you ever had any sons and daughters? And yet, now I think of it, I seem to fancy you said yes, you had. Daughters, sir, weren’t they? – and, ah, dear! dear! to be sure! all dead.’
‘I had one daughter, ma’am,’ said Mr Bashwood, patiently – ‘Only one, who died before she was a year old.’
‘Only one!’ repeated the sympathizing landlady. ‘It’s as near boiling as it ever will be, sir; give me the teapot. Only one! Ah, it comes heavier (don’t it?) when it’s an only child? You said it was an only child, I think, didn’t you, sir?’
For a moment, Mr Bashwood looked at the woman with vacant eyes, and without attempting to answer her. After ignorantly recalling the memory of the wife who had disgraced him, she was now, as ignorantly, forcing him back on the miserable remembrance of the son who had ruined and deserted him. For the first time, since he had told his story to Midwinter, at their introductory interview in the great house, his mind reverted once more to the bitter disappointment and disaster of the past. Again, he thought of the bygone days, when he had become security for his son, and when that son’s dishonesty had forced him to sell everything he possessed, to pay the forfeit that was exacted when the forfeit was due. ‘I have a son, ma’am,’ he said, becoming conscious that the landlady was looking at him in mute and melancholy surprise. ‘I did my best to help him forward in the world, and he has behaved very badly to me.’