Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  A succession of heavy squalls had brought round the course of the new storm that was coming, from the south to the north; and the sailing-master, watching his opportunity, had wore the yacht, to be ready for it. Before the last of our men had got on board again, it burst on us with the fury of a hurricane. Our boat was swamped, but not a life was lost. Once more, we ran before it, due south, at the mercy of the wind. I was on deck with the rest, watching the one rag of sail we could venture to set, and waiting to supply its place with another, if it blew out of the bolt-ropes, when the mate came close to me, and shouted in my ear through the thunder of the storm, ‘She has come to her senses in the cabin, and has asked for her husband. Where is he?’ Not a man on board knew. The yacht was searched from one end to another, without finding him. The men were mustered in defiance of the weather – he was not among them. The crews of the two boats were questioned. All the first crew could say, was that they had pulled away from the wreck when the rush into their boat took place, and that they knew nothing of who they let in or who they kept out. All the second crew could say was, that they had brought back to the yacht every living soul left by the first boat on the deck of the timber-ship. There was no blaming anybody; but at the same time, there was no resisting the fact, that the man was missing.

  All through that day the storm, raging unabatedly, never gave us even the shadow of a chance of returning and searching the wreck. The one hope for the yacht was to scud. Towards evening the gale, after having carried us to the southward of Madeira, began at last to break – the wind shifted again – and allowed us to bear up for the island. Early the next morning we got back into port. Mr Blanchard and his daughter were taken ashore; the sailing-master accompanying them, and warning us that he should have something to say on his return, which would nearly concern the whole crew.

  We were mustered on deck, and addressed by the sailing-master as soon as he came on board again. He had Mr Blanchard’s orders to go back at once to the timber-ship and to search for the missing man. We were bound to do this for his sake, and for the sake of his wife, whose reason was despaired of by the doctors if something was not done to quiet her. We might be almost sure of finding the vessel still afloat, for her lading of timber would keep her above water as long as her hull held together. If the man was on board – living or dead – he must be found and brought back. And if the weather continued to moderate, there was no reason why the men, with proper assistance, should not bring the ship back too, and (their master being quite willing) earn their share of the salvage with the officers of the yacht.

  Upon this the crew gave three cheers, and set to work forthwith to get the schooner to sea again. I was the only one of them who drew back from the enterprise. I told them the storm had upset me – I was ill, and wanted rest. They all looked me in the face as I passed through them on my way out of the yacht, but not a man of them spoke to me.

  I waited through that day at a tavern on the port for the first news from the wreck. It was brought towards nightfall by one of the pilot-boats which had taken part in the enterprise for saving the abandoned ship. La Grace de Dieu had been discovered still floating, and the body of Ingleby had been found on board, drowned in the cabin. At dawn the next morning, the dead man was brought back by the yacht; and on the same day the funeral took place in the Protestant cemetery.

  ‘Stop!’ said the voice from the bed, before the reader could turn to a new leaf and begin the next paragraph.

  There was a change in the room, and there were changes in the audience, since Mr Neal had last looked up from the narrative. A ray of sunshine was crossing the death-bed; and the child, overcome by drowsiness, lay peacefully asleep in the golden light. The father’s countenance had altered visibly. Forced into action by the tortured mind, the muscles of the lower face, which had never moved yet, were moving distortedly now. Warned by the damps gathering heavily on his forehead, the doctor had risen to revive the sinking man. On the other side of the bed the wife’s chair stood empty. At the moment when her husband had interrupted the reading, she had drawn back behind the bed-head, out of his sight. Supporting herself against the wall, she stood there in hiding, her eyes fastened in hungering suspense on the manuscript in Mr Neal’s hand.

  In a minute more the silence was broken again by Mr Armadale.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asked, looking angrily at his wife’s empty chair. The doctor pointed to the place. She had no choice but to come forward. She came slowly and stood before him.

  ‘You promised to go when I told you,’ he said. ‘Go now.’

  Mr Neal tried hard to control his hand as it kept his place between the leaves of the manuscript, but it trembled in spite of him. A suspicion which had been slowly forcing itself on his mind, while he was reading, became a certainty when he heard those words. From one revelation to another the letter had gone on, until it had now reached the brink of a last disclosure to come. At that brink the dying man had pre-determined to silence the reader’s voice, before he had permitted his wife to hear the narrative read. There was the secret which the son was to know in after years, and which the mother was never to approach. From that resolution, his wife’s tenderest pleadings had never moved him an inch – and now, from his own lips, his wife knew it.

  She made him no answer. She stood there and looked at him; looked her last entreaty – perhaps her last farewell. His eyes gave her back no answering glance: they wandered from her mercilessly to the sleeping boy. She turned speechless from the bed. Without a look at the child – without a word to the two strangers breathlessly watching her – she kept the promise she had given, and in dead silence left the room.

  There was something in the manner of her departure which shook the self-possession of both the men who witnessed it. When the door closed on her, they recoiled instinctively from advancing farther in the dark. The doctor’s reluctance was the first to express itself. He attempted to obtain the patient’s permission to withdraw until the letter was completed. The patient refused.

  Mr Neal spoke next at greater length and to more serious purpose.

  ‘The doctor is accustomed in his profession,’ he began, ‘and I am accustomed in mine, to have the secrets of others placed in our keeping. But it is my duty, before we go farther, to ask if you really understand the extraordinary position which we now occupy towards one another. You have just excluded Mrs Armadale, before our own eyes, from a place in your confidence. And you are now offering that same place to two men who are total strangers to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Armadale – ‘because you are strangers.’

  Few as the words were, the inference to be drawn from them was not of a nature to set distrust at rest. Mr Neal put it plainly into words.

  ‘You are in urgent need of my help and of the doctor’s help,’ he said. ‘Am I to understand (so long as you secure our assistance) that the impression which the closing passages of this letter may produce on us is a matter of indifference to you?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t spare you. I don’t spare myself. I do spare my wife.’

  ‘You force me to a conclusion, sir, which is a very serious one,’ said Mr Neal. ‘If I am to finish this letter under your dictation, I must claim permission – having read aloud the greater part of it already – to read aloud what remains, in the hearing of this gentleman, as a witness.’

  ‘Read it.’

  Gravely doubting, the doctor resumed his chair. Gravely doubting, Mr Neal turned the leaf, and read the next words:

  There is more to tell before I can leave the dead man to his rest. I have described the finding of his body. But I have not described the circumstances under which he met his death.

  He was known to have been on deck when the yacht’s boats were seen approaching the wreck; and he was afterwards missed in the confusion caused by the panic of the crew. At that time the water was five feet deep in the cabin, and was rising fast. There was little doubt of his having gone down into that water of his own accord. The discovery of his wife’s j
ewel-box, close under him, on the floor, explained his presence in the cabin. He was known to have seen help approaching, and it was quite likely that he had thereupon gone below to make an effort at saving the box.

  It was less probable – though it might still have been inferred – that his death was the result of some accident in diving, which had for the moment deprived him of his senses. But a discovery made by the yacht’s crew, pointed straight to a conclusion, which struck the men, one and all, with the same horror. When the course of their search brought them to the cabin, they found the scuttle bolted, and the door locked on the outside. Had some one closed the cabin, not knowing he was there? Setting the panic-stricken condition of the crew out of the question, there was no motive for closing the cabin before leaving the wreck. But one other conclusion remained. Had some murderous hand purposely locked the man in, and left him to drown as the water rose over him?

  Yes. A murderous hand had locked him in, and left him to drown. That hand was mine.

  The Scotchman started up from the table; the doctor shrank from the bedside. The two looked at the dying wretch, mastered by the same loathing, chilled by the same dread. He lay there, with the child’s head on his breast; abandoned by the sympathies of man, accursed by the justice of God – he lay there, in the isolation of Cain, and looked back at them.

  At the moment when the two men rose to their feet, the door leading into the next room was shaken heavily on the outer side, and a sound like the sound of a fall, striking dull on their ears, silenced them both. Standing nearest to the door, the doctor opened it, passed through, and closed it instantly. Mr Neal turned his back on the bed, and waited the event in silence. The sound, which had failed to awaken the child, had failed also to attract the father’s notice. His own words had taken him far from all that was passing at his death-bed. His helpless body was back on the wreck, and the ghost of his lifeless hand was turning the lock of the cabin door.

  A bell rang in the next room – eager voices talked; hurried footsteps moved in it – an interval passed, and the doctor returned. ‘Was she listening?’ whispered Mr Neal, in German. ‘The women are restoring her,’ the doctor whispered back. ‘She has heard it all. In God’s name, what are we to do next?’ Before it was possible to reply, Mr Armadale spoke. The doctor’s return had roused him to a sense of present things.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, as if nothing had happened.

  ‘I refuse to meddle further with your infamous secret,’ returned Mr Neal. ‘You are a murderer on your own confession. If that letter is to be finished, don’t ask me to hold the pen for you.’

  ‘You gave me your promise,’ was the reply, spoken with the same immovable self-possession. ‘You must write for me, or break your word.’

  For the moment, Mr Neal was silenced. There the man lay – sheltered from the execration of his fellow-creatures, under the shadow of Death – beyond the reach of all human condemnation, beyond the dread of all mortal laws; sensitive to nothing but his one last resolution to finish the letter addressed to his son.

  Mr Neal drew the doctor aside. ‘A word with you,’ he said, in German. ‘Do you persist in asserting that he may be speechless before we can send to Stuttgart?’

  ‘Look at his lips,’ said the doctor, ‘and judge for yourself.’

  His lips answered for him: the reading of the narrative had left its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr Neal entered the room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation laboured more and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was emphatically a terrible one. After a moment more of hesitation, Mr Neal made a last attempt to withdraw from it.

  ‘Now my eyes are open,’ he said, sternly, ‘do you dare hold me to an engagement which you forced on me blindfold?’

  ‘No,’ answered Mr Armadale. ‘I leave you to break your word.’

  The look which accompanied that reply, stung the Scotchman’s pride to the quick. When he spoke next, he spoke seated in his former place at the table.

  ‘No man ever yet said of me that I broke my word,’ he retorted, angrily; ‘and not even you shall say it of me now. Mind this! If you hold me to my promise, I hold you to my condition. I have reserved my freedom of action, and I warn you I will use it at my own sole discretion, as soon as I am released from the sight of you.’

  ‘Remember he is dying,’ pleaded the doctor, gently.

  ‘Take your place, sir,’ said Mr Neal, pointing to the empty chair. ‘What remains to be read, I will only read in your hearing. What remains to be written, I will only write in your presence. You brought me here. I have a right to insist – and I do insist – on your remaining as a witness to the last.’

  The doctor accepted his position without remonstrance. Mr Neal returned to the manuscript, and read what remained of it uninterruptedly to the end:

  *

  Without a word in my own defence, I have acknowledged my guilt. Without a word in my own defence, I will reveal how the crime was committed.

  No thought of him was in my mind, when I saw his wife insensible on the deck of the timber-ship. I did my part in lowering her safely into the boat. Then, and not till then, I felt the thought of him coming back. In the confusion that prevailed while the men of the yacht were forcing the men of the ship to wait their time, I had an opportunity of searching for him unobserved. I stepped back from the bulwark, not knowing whether he was away in the first boat, or whether he was still on board – I stepped back, and saw him mount the cabin stairs empty-handed, with the water dripping from him. After looking eagerly towards the boat (without noticing me), he saw there was time to spare before the crew were taken off. ‘Once more!’ he said to himself – and disappeared again, to make a last effort at recovering the jewel-box. The devil at my elbow whispered, ‘Don’t shoot him like a man: drown him like a dog!’ He was under water when I bolted the scuttle. But his head rose to the surface before I could close the cabin door. I looked at him, and he looked at me – and I locked the door in his face. The next minute, I was back among the last men left on deck. The minute after, it was too late to repent. The storm was threatening us with destruction, and the boat’s crew were pulling for their lives from the ship.

  My son! I have pursued you from my grave with a confession which my love might have spared you. Read on, and you will know why.

  I will say nothing of my sufferings; I will plead for no mercy to my memory. There is a strange sinking at my heart, a strange trembling in my hand, while I write these lines, which warns me to hasten to the end. I left the island without daring to look for the last time at the woman whom I had lost so miserably, whom I had injured so vilely. When I left, the whole weight of the suspicion roused by the manner of Ingleby’s death, rested on the crew of the French vessel. No motive for the supposed murder could be brought home to any of them – but they were known to be, for the most part, outlawed ruffians capable of any crime, and they were suspected and examined accordingly. It was not till afterwards that I heard by accident of the suspicion shifting round at last to me. The widow alone recognized the vague description given of the strange man who had made one of the yacht’s crew, and who had disappeared the day afterwards. The widow alone knew, from that time forth, why her husband had been murdered, and who had done the deed. When she made that discovery, a false report of my death had been previously circulated in the island. Perhaps I was indebted to the report for my immunity from all legal proceedings – perhaps (no eye but Ingleby’s having seen me lock the cabin door) there was not evidence enough to justify an inquiry – perhaps the widow shrank from the disclosures which must have followed a public charge against me, based on her own bare suspicion of the truth. However it might be, the crime which I had committed unseen, has remained a crime unpunished from that time to this.

  I left Madeira for the West Indies, in disguise. The first news that met me when the ship touched at Barbadoes, was the news of my mother’s death. I had no heart to r
eturn to the old scenes. The prospect of living at home in solitude, with the torment of my own guilty remembrances gnawing at me day and night, was more than I had the courage to confront. Without landing, or discovering myself to any one on shore, I went on as far as the ship would take me – to the island of Trinidad.

  At that place I first saw your mother. It was my duty to tell her the truth – and I treacherously kept my secret. It was my duty to spare her the hopeless sacrifice of her freedom and her happiness to such an existence as mine – and I did her the injury of marrying her. If she is alive when you read this, grant her the mercy of still concealing the truth. The one atonement I can make to her, is to keep her unsuspicious to the last of the man she has married. Pity her, as I have pitied her. Let this letter be a sacred confidence between father and son.

  The time when you were born, was the time when my health began to give way. Some months afterwards, in the first days of my recovery, you were brought to me; and I was told that you had been christened during my illness. Your mother had done as other loving mothers do – she had christened her first-born by his father’s name. You, too, were Allan Armadale. Even in that early time – even while I was happily ignorant of what I have discovered since – my mind misgave me when I looked at you, and thought of that fatal name.

  As soon as I could be moved, my presence was required at my estates in Barbadoes. It crossed my mind – wild as the idea may appear to you – to renounce the condition which compelled my son as well as myself to take the Armadale name, or lose the succession to the Armadale property. But, even in those days, the rumour of a contemplated emancipation of the slaves6 – the emancipation which is now close at hand – was spreading widely in the colony. No man could tell how the value of West Indian property might be affected if that threatened change ever took place. No man could tell – if I gave you back my own paternal name, and left you without other provision in the future than my own paternal estate – how you might one day miss the broad Armadale acres, or to what future penury I might be blindly condemning your mother and yourself. Mark how the fatalities gathered one on the other! Mark how your Christian name came to you, how your surname held to you, in spite of me!