Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  Thus far, the reader had advanced with no interruption to disturb him. But at the last words, the tones of another voice, low and broken, mingled with his own.

  ‘Was she a fair woman?’ asked the voice, ‘or dark, like me?’

  Mr Neal paused, and looked up. The doctor was still at the bed-head, with his fingers mechanically on the patient’s pulse. The child, missing his midday sleep, was beginning to play languidly with his new toy. The father’s eyes were watching him with a rapt and ceaseless attention. But one great change was visible in the listeners since the narrative had begun. Mrs Armadale had dropped her hold of her husband’s hand, and sat with her face steadily turned away from him. The hot African blood burnt red in her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question, ‘Was she a fair woman – or dark, like me?’

  ‘Fair,’ said her husband, without looking at her.

  Her hands, lying clasped together in her lap, wrung each other hard – she said no more. Mr Neal’s overhanging eyebrows lowered ominously, as he returned to the narrative. He had incurred his own severe displeasure – he had caught himself in the act of secretly pitying her.

  I have said – the letter proceeded – that Ingleby was admitted to my closest confidence. I was sorry to leave him; and I was distressed by his evident surprise and mortification when he heard that I was going away. In my own justification, I showed him the letter and the likeness, and told him the truth. His interest in the portrait seemed to be hardly inferior to my own. He asked me about Miss Blanchard’s family, and Miss Blanchard’s fortune with the sympathy of a true friend; and he strengthened my regard for him, and my belief in him, by putting himself out of the question, and by generously encouraging me to persist in my new purpose. When we parted, I was in high health and spirits. Before we met again the next day, I was suddenly struck by an illness which threatened both my reason and my life.

  I have no proof against Ingleby. There was more than one woman on the island whom I had wronged beyond all forgiveness,3 and whose vengeance might well have reached me at that time. I can accuse nobody. I can only say that my life was saved by my old black nurse; and that the woman afterwards acknowledged having used the known negro-antidote to a known negro-poison in those parts. When my first days of convalescence came, the ship in which my passage had been taken, had long since sailed. When I asked for Ingleby, he was gone. Proofs of his unpardonable misconduct in his situation were placed before me, which not even my partiality for him could resist. He had been turned out of the office in the first days of my illness, and nothing more was known of him, but that he had left the island.

  All through my sufferings, the portrait had been under my pillow. All through my convalescence, it was my one consolation when I remembered the past, and my one encouragement when I thought of the future. No words can describe the hold that first fancy had now taken of me – with time and solitude and suffering to help it. My mother, with all her interest in the match, was startled by the unexpected success of her own project. She had written to tell Mr Blanchard of my illness, but had received no reply. She now offered to write again, if I would promise not to leave her before my recovery was complete. My impatience acknowledged no restraint. Another ship in port gave me another chance of leaving for Madeira. Another examination of Mr Blanchard’s letter of invitation assured me that I should find him still in the island, if I seized my opportunity on the spot. In defiance of my mother’s entreaties, I insisted on taking my passage in the second ship – and this time, when the ship sailed, I was on board.

  The change did me good; the sea air made a man of me again. After an unusually rapid voyage, I found myself at the end of my pilgrimage. On a fine still evening which I can never forget, I stood alone on the shore, with her likeness in my bosom, and saw the white walls of the house where I knew that she lived.

  I strolled round the outer limits of the grounds, to compose myself before I went in. Venturing through a gate and a shrubbery, I looked into the garden, and saw a lady there, loitering alone on the lawn. She turned her face towards me – and I beheld the original of my portrait, the fulfilment of my dream! It is useless, and worse than useless, to write of it now. Let me only say that every promise which the likeness had made to my fancy, the living woman kept to my eyes, in the moment when they first looked on her. Let me say this – and no more.

  I was too violently agitated to trust myself in her presence. I drew back, undiscovered; and making my way to the front door of the house, asked for her father first. Mr Blanchard had retired to his room, and could see nobody. Upon that I took courage, and asked for Miss Blanchard. The servant smiled. ‘My young lady is not Miss Blanchard any longer, sir,’ he said. ‘She is married.’ Those words would have struck some men, in my position, to the earth. They fired my hot blood, and I seized the servant by the throat, in a frenzy of rage. ‘It’s a lie,’ I broke out, speaking to him as if he had been one of the slaves on my own estate. ‘It’s the truth,’ said the man, struggling with me; ‘her husband is in the house at this moment.’ ‘Who is he, you scoundrel?’ The servant answered by repeating my own name, to my own face: ‘Allan Armadale ’.

  You can now guess the truth. Fergus Ingleby was the outlawed son, whose name and whose inheritance I had taken. And Fergus Ingleby was even with me for depriving him of his birthright.

  Some account of the manner in which the deception had been carried out, is necessary to explain – I don’t say to justify – the share I took in the events that followed my arrival at Madeira.

  By Ingleby’s own confession, he had come to Barbadoes – knowing of his father’s death and of my succession to the estates – with the settled purpose of plundering and injuring me. My rash confidence put such an opportunity into his hands, as he could never have hoped for. He had waited to possess himself of the letter which my mother wrote to Mr Blanchard at the outset of my illness – had then caused his own dismissal from his situation – and had sailed for Madeira in the very ship that was to have sailed with me. Arrived at the island, he had waited again, till the vessel was away once more on her voyage, and had then presented himself at Mr Blanchard’s – not in the assumed name by which I shall continue to speak of him here – but in the name which was as certainly his as mine, ‘Allan Armadale’. The fraud at the outset presented few difficulties. He had only an ailing old man (who had not seen my mother for half a lifetime), and an innocent unsuspicious girl (who had never seen her at all) to deal with; and he had learnt enough in my service to answer the few questions that were put to him, as readily as I might have answered them myself. His looks and manners, his winning ways with women, his quickness and cunning, did the rest. While I was still on my sickbed, he had won Miss Blanchard’s affections. While I was dreaming over the likeness in the first days of my convalescence, he had secured Mr Blanchard’s consent to the celebration of the marriage before he and his daughter left the island.

  Thus far, Mr Blanchard’s infirmity of sight had helped the deception. He had been content to send messages to my mother, and to receive the messages which were duly invented in return. But when the suitor was accepted, and the wedding-day was appointed, he felt it due to his old friend to write to her, asking her formal consent, and inviting her to the marriage. He could only complete part of the letter himself; the rest was finished, under his dictation, by Miss Blanchard. There was no chance of being beforehand with the post-office this time; and Ingleby, sure of his place in the heart of his victim, waylaid her as she came out of her father’s room with the letter, and privately told her the truth. She was still under age, and the position was a serious one. If the letter was posted, no resource would be left but to wait and be parted for ever, or to elope under circumstances which made detection almost a certainty. The destination of any ship which took them away would be known beforehand; and the fast-sailing yacht in which Mr Blanchard had come to Madeira was waiting in the harbour to take him back to England. The only other alternative was to continue the deception by suppressing
the letter, and to confess the truth when they were securely married. What arts of persuasion Ingleby used – what base advantage he might previously have taken of her love and her trust in him to degrade Miss Blanchard to his own level – I cannot say. He did degrade her. The letter never went to its destination; and, with the daughter’s privity and consent, the father’s confidence was abused to the very last.

  The one precaution now left to take, was to fabricate the answer from my mother which Mr Blanchard expected, and which would arrive in due course of post before the day appointed for the marriage. Ingleby had my mother’s stolen letter with him; but he was without the imitative dexterity which would have enabled him to make use of it for a forgery of her handwriting. Miss Blanchard, who had consented passively to the deception, refused to take any active share in the fraud practised on her father. In this difficulty, Ingleby found an instrument ready to his hand in an orphan girl of barely twelve years old,4 a marvel of precocious ability, whom Miss Blanchard had taken a romantic fancy to befriend, and whom she had brought away with her from England to be trained as her maid. That girl’s wicked dexterity removed the one serious obstacle left to the success of the fraud. I saw the imitation of my mother’s writing which she had produced under Ingleby’s instructions, and (if the shameful truth must be told) with her young mistress’s knowledge – and I believe I should have been deceived by it myself. I saw the girl afterwards – and my blood curdled at the sight of her. If she is alive now,woe to the people who trust her! No creature more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever walked this earth.

  The forged letter paved the way securely for the marriage; and when I reached the house, they were (as the servant had truly told me) man and wife. My arrival on the scene simply precipitated the confession which they had both agreed to make. Ingleby’s own lips shamelessly acknowledged the truth. He had nothing to lose by speaking out – he was married, and his wife’s fortune was beyond her father’s control. I pass over all that followed – my interview with the daughter, and my interview with the father – to come to results. For two days the efforts of the wife, and the efforts of the clergyman who had celebrated the marriage, were successful in keeping Ingleby and myself apart. On the third day I set my trap more successfully, and I and the man who had mortally injured me, met together alone, face to face.

  Remember how my confidence had been abused; remember how the one good purpose of my life had been thwarted; remember the violent passions rooted deep in my nature, and never yet controlled – and then imagine for yourself what passed between us. All I need tell here is the end. He was a taller and a stronger man than I, and he took his brute’s advantage with a brute’s ferocity. He struck me.

  Think of the injuries I had received at that man’s hands, and then think of his setting his mark on my face by a blow!

  I went to an English officer who had been my fellow-passenger on the voyage from Barbadoes. I told him the truth, and he agreed with me that a meeting was inevitable. Duelling had its received formalities and its established laws in those days;5 and he began to speak of them. I stopped him. ‘I will take a pistol in my right hand,’ I said, ‘and he shall take a pistol in his: I will take one end of a handkerchief in my left hand, and he shall take the other end in his; and across that handkerchief the duel shall be fought.’ The officer got up, and looked at me as if I had personally insulted him. ‘You are asking me to be present at a murder and a suicide,’ he said; ‘I decline to serve you.’ He left the room. As soon as he was gone I wrote down the words I had said to the officer, and sent them by a messenger to Ingleby. While I was waiting for an answer, I sat down before the glass, and looked at his mark on my face. ‘Many a man has had blood on his hands and blood on his conscience,’ I thought, ‘for less than this.’

  The messenger came back with Ingleby’s answer. It appointed a meeting for three o’clock the next day, at a lonely place in the interior of the island. I had resolved what to do if he refused; his letter released me from the horror of my own resolution. I felt grateful to him – yes, absolutely grateful to him – for writing it.

  The next day I went to the place. He was not there. I waited two hours, and he never came. At last the truth dawned on me. ‘Once a coward, always a coward,’ I thought. I went back to Mr Blanchard’s house. Before I got there, a sudden misgiving seized me, and I turned aside to the harbour. I was right; the harbour was the place to go to. A ship sailing for Lisbon that afternoon, had offered him the opportunity of taking a passage for himself and his wife, and escaping me. His answer to my challenge had served its purpose of sending me out of the way, into the interior of the island. Once more I had trusted in Fergus Ingleby, and once more those sharp wits of his had been too much for me.

  I asked my informant if Mr Blanchard was aware as yet of his daughter’s departure. He had discovered it, but not until the ship had sailed. This time I took a lesson in cunning from Ingleby. Instead of showing myself at Mr Blanchard’s house, I went first and looked at Mr Blanchard’s yacht.

  The vessel told me what the vessel’s master might have concealed – the truth. I found her in the confusion of a sudden preparation for sea. All the crew were on board, with the exception of some few who had been allowed their leave on shore, and who were away in the interior of the island, nobody knew where. When I discovered that the sailing-master was trying to supply their places with the best men he could pick up at a moment’s notice, my resolution was instantly taken. I knew the duties on board a yacht well enough, having had a vessel of my own, and having sailed her myself. Hurrying into the town, I changed my dress for a sailor’s coat and hat, and, returning to the harbour, I offered myself as one of the volunteer crew. I don’t know what the sailing-master saw in my face. My answers to his questions satisfied him, and yet he looked at me and hesitated. But hands were scarce, and it ended in my being taken on board. An hour later Mr Blanchard joined us, and was assisted into the cabin, suffering pitiably in mind and body both. An hour after that, we were at sea, with a starless night overhead, and a fresh breeze behind us.

  As I had surmised, we were in pursuit of the vessel in which Ingleby and his wife had left the island that afternoon. The ship was French, and was employed in the timber-trade: her name was La Grace de Dieu. Nothing more was known of her than that she was bound for Lisbon; that she had been driven out of her course; and that she had touched at Madeira, short of men and short of provisions. The last want had been supplied, but not the first. Sailors distrusted the seaworthiness of the ship, and disliked the look of the vagabond crew. When those two serious facts had been communicated to Mr Blanchard, the hard words he had spoken to his child in the first shock of discovering that she had helped to deceive him, smote him to the heart. He instantly determined to give his daughter a refuge on board his own vessel, and to quiet her by keeping her villain of a husband out of the way of all harm at my hands. The yacht sailed three feet and more to the ship’s one. There was no doubt of our overtaking La Grace de Dieu; the only fear was that we might pass her in the darkness.

  After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly dropped, and there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the order came to get the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large sails, we all knew what to expect. In little better than an hour more, the storm was upon us, the thunder was pealing over our heads, and the yacht was running for it. She was a powerful schooner-rigged vessel of three hundred tons, as strong as wood and iron could make her; she was handled by a sailing-master who thoroughly understood his work, and she behaved nobly. As the new morning came, the fury of the wind, blowing still from the south-west quarter, subsided a little, and the sea was less heavy. Just before daybreak we heard faintly, through the howling of the gale, the report of a gun. The men, collected anxiously on deck, looked at each other and said, ‘There she is!’

  With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber-ship it was. She lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her mainmast both gone – a
waterlogged wreck. The yacht carried three boats; one amidships, and two slung to davits on the quarters; and the sailing-master seeing signs of the storm renewing its fury before long, determined on lowering the quarter-boats while the lull lasted. Few as the people were on board the wreck, they were too many for one boat, and the risk of trying two boats at once was thought less, in the critical state of the weather, than the risk of making two separate trips from the yacht to the ship. There might be time to make one trip in safety, but no man could look at the heavens and say there would be time enough for two.

  The boats were manned by volunteers from the crew, I being in the second of the two. When the first boat was got alongside of the timber-ship – a service of difficulty and danger which no words can describe – all the men on board made a rush to leave the wreck together. If the boat had not been pulled off again before the whole of them had crowded in, the lives of all must have been sacrificed. As our boat approached the vessel in its turn, we arranged that four of us should get on board – two (I being one of them) to see to the safety of Mr Blanchard’s daughter, and two to beat back the cowardly remnant of the crew, if they tried to crowd in first. The other three – the coxswain and two oarsmen – were left in the boat to keep her from being crushed by the ship. What the others saw when they first boarded La Grace de Dieu, I don’t know: what I saw was the woman whom I had lost, the woman vilely stolen from me, lying in a swoon on the deck. We lowered her, insensible, into the boat. The remnant of the crew – five in number – were compelled by main force to follow her in an orderly manner, one by one, and minute by minute, as the chance offered for safely taking them in. I was the last who left; and, at the next roll of the ship towards us, the empty length of the deck, without a living creature on it from stem to stern, told the boat’s crew that their work was done. With the louder and louder howling of the fast-rising tempest to warn them, they rowed for their lives back to the yacht.