Armadale by Wilkie Collins
As I came to those last words, I heard the hammering down of the hatch over my head. I don’t suppose I’m more of a coward than most people – but there was a moment when the sweat poured down me like rain. I got to be my own man again, before the hammering was done, and found myself thinking of somebody very dear to me in England. I said to myself, ‘I’ll have a try for my life, for her sake, though the chances are dead against me.’
I put a letter from that person I have mentioned into one of the stoppered bottles of my dressing-case – along with the mate’s warning, in case I lived to see him again. I hung this, and a flask of whisky, in a sling round my neck – and, after first dressing myself in my confusion, thought better of it, and stripped again, for swimming, to my shirt and drawers. By the time I had done that, the hammering was over, and there was such a silence that I could hear the water bubbling into the scuttled vessel amidships. The next noise was the noise of the boat and the villains in her (always excepting my friend the mate) shoving off from the starboard side. I waited for the splash of the oars in the water, and then got my back under the hatch. The mate had kept his promise. I lifted it easily – crept across the deck, under cover of the bulwarks, on all fours – and slipped into the sea on the port side. Lots of things were floating about. I took the first thing I came to – a hencoop – and swam away with it about a couple of hundred yards, keeping the yacht between me and the boat. Having got that distance, I was seized with a shivering fit, and I stopped (fearing the cramp next) to take a pull at my flask. When I had closed the flask again, I turned for a moment to look back, and saw the yacht in the act of sinking. In a minute more there was nothing between me and the boat, but the pieces of wreck that had been purposely thrown out to float. The moon was shining; and, if they had had a glass in the boat, I believe they might have seen my head, though I carefully kept the hencoop between me and them.
As it was, they laid on their oars; and I heard loud voices among them disputing. After what seemed an age to me, I discovered what the dispute was about. The boat’s head was suddenly turned my way. Some cleverer scoundrel than the rest (the sailing-master, I daresay,) had evidently persuaded them to row back over the place where the yacht had gone down, and make quite sure that I had gone down with her.
They were more than half way across the distance that separated us, and I had given myself up for lost, when I heard a cry from one of them, and saw the boat’s progress suddenly checked. In a minute or two more, the boat’s head was turned again; and they rowed straight away from me like men rowing for their lives.
I looked on one side, towards the land, and saw nothing. I looked on the other, towards the sea, and discovered what the boat’s crew had discovered before me – a sail in the distance, growing steadily brighter and bigger in the moonlight the longer I looked at it. In a quarter of an hour more the vessel was within hail of me, and the crew had got me on board.
They were all foreigners, and they quite deafened me by their jabber. I tried signs, but before I could make them understand me, I was seized with another shivering fit, and was carried below. The vessel held on her course, I have no doubt, but I was in no condition to know anything about it. Before morning, I was in a fever; and from that time I can remember nothing clearly till I came to my senses at this place, and found myself under the care of a Hungarian merchant, the consignee (as they call it) of the coasting vessel that had picked me up. He speaks English as well or better than I do; and he has treated me with a kindness which I can find no words to praise. When he was a young man he was in England himself, learning business, and he says he has remembrances of our country which make his heart warm towards an Englishman. He has fitted me out with clothes, and has lent me the money to travel with, as soon as the doctor allows me to start for home. Supposing I don’t get a relapse, I shall be fit to travel in a week’s time from this. If I can catch the mail at Trieste, and stand the fatigue, I shall be back again at Thorpe-Ambrose in a week or ten days at most after you get my letter. You will agree with me that it is a terribly long letter. But I can’t help that. I seem to have lost my old knack at putting things short, and finishing on the first page. However, I am near the end now – for I have nothing left to mention but the reason why I write about what has happened to me, instead of waiting till I get home, and telling it all by word of mouth.
I fancy my head is still muddled by my illness. At any rate, it only struck me this morning that there is barely a chance of some vessel having passed the place where the yacht foundered, and having picked up the furniture, and other things wrenched out of her and left to float. Some false report of my being drowned may, in that case, have reached England.14 If this has happened (which I hope to God may be an unfounded fear on my part), go directly to Major Milroy at the cottage. Show him this letter – I have written it quite as much for his eye as for yours – and then give him the enclosed note, and ask him if he doesn’t think the circumstances justify me in hoping he will send it to Miss Milroy. I can’t explain why I don’t write directly to the major, or to Miss Milroy, instead of to you. I can only say there are considerations I am bound in honour to respect, which oblige me to act in this roundabout way.
I don’t ask you to answer this – for I shall be on my way home, I hope, long before your letter could reach me in this out-of-the-way place. Whatever you do, don’t lose a moment in going to Major Milroy. Go, on second thoughts, whether the loss of the yacht is known in England or not.
Yours truly,
ALLAN ARMADALE.
I looked up when I had come to the end of the letter, and saw, for the first time, that Bashwood had left his chair, and had placed himself opposite to me. He was intently studying my face, with the inquiring expression of a man who was trying to read my thoughts. His eyes fell guiltily when they met mine, and he shrank away to his chair. Believing, as he did, that I was really married to Armadale, was he trying to discover whether the news of Armadale’s rescue from the sea was good news or bad news, in my estimation? It was no time then for entering into explanations with him. The first thing to be done was to communicate instantly with the doctor. I called Bashwood back to me, and gave him my hand.
‘You have done me a service,’ I said, ‘which makes us closer friends than ever. I shall say more about this, and about other matters of some interest to both of us, later in the day. I want you now to lend me Mr Armadale’s letter (which I promise to bring back) and to wait here till I return. Will you do that for me, Mr Bashwood?’
He would do anything I asked him, he said. I went into the bed-room, and put on my bonnet and shawl.
‘Let me be quite sure of the facts before I leave you,’ I resumed, when I was ready to go out. ‘You have not shown this letter to anybody but me?’
‘Not a living soul has seen it but our two selves.’
‘What have you done with the note enclosed to Miss Milroy?’
He produced it from his pocket. I ran it over rapidly – saw that there was nothing in it of the slightest importance – and put it in the fire on the spot. That done, I left Bashwood in the sitting-room, and went to the Sanatorium, with Armadale’s letter in my hand.
The doctor had gone out; and the servant was unable to say positively at what time he would be back. I went into his study, and wrote a line preparing him for the news I had brought with me, which I sealed up, with Armadale’s letter, in an envelope, to await his return. That done, I told the servant I would call again in an hour, and left the place.
It was useless to go back to my lodgings and speak to Bashwood, until I knew first what the doctor meant to do. I walked about the neighbourhood, up and down new streets and crescents and squares, with a kind of dull, numbed feeling in me, which prevented, not only all voluntary exercise of thought, but all sensation of bodily fatigue. I remembered the same feeling overpowering me, years ago, on the morning when the people of the prison came to take me into court to be tried for my life. All that frightful scene came back again to my mind, in the strangest
When I went back to the Sanatorium, I was informed that the doctor had returned half-an-hour since, and that he was in his own room anxiously waiting to see me.
I went into the study, and found him sitting close by the fire, with his head down, and his hands on his knees. On the table near him, besides Armadale’s letter and my note, I saw, in the little circle of light thrown by the reading-lamp, an open railway guide. Was he meditating flight? It was impossible to tell from his face, when he looked up at me, what he was meditating, or how the shock had struck him when he first discovered that Armadale was a living man.
‘Take a seat near the fire,’ he said. ‘It’s very raw and cold to-day.’
I took a chair in silence. In silence, on his side, the doctor sat rubbing his knees before the fire.
‘Have you nothing to say to me?’ I asked.
He rose, and suddenly removed the shade from the reading-lamp so that the light fell on my face.
‘You are not looking well,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘My head feels dull, and my eyes are heavy and hot,’ I replied. ‘The weather, I suppose.’
It was strange how we both got farther and farther from the one vitally important subject which we had both come together to discuss!
‘I think a cup of tea would do you good,’ remarked the doctor.
I accepted his suggestion; and he ordered the tea. While it was coming, he walked up and down the room, and I sat by the fire – and not a word passed between us on either side.
The tea revived me; and the doctor noticed a change for the better in my face. He sat down opposite to me at the table, and spoke out at last.
‘If I had ten thousand pounds at this moment,’ he began, ‘I would give the whole of it never to have compromised myself in your desperate speculation on Mr Armadale’s death!’
He said those words with an abruptness, almost with a violence, which was strangely uncharacteristic of his ordinary manner. Was he frightened himself, or was he trying to frighten me? I determined to make him explain himself at the outset, so far as I was concerned. ‘Wait a moment, doctor,’ I said. ‘Do you hold me responsible for what has happened?’
‘Certainly not,’ he replied, stiffly. ‘Neither you nor anybody could have foreseen what has happened. When I say I would give ten thousand pounds to be out of this business, I am blaming nobody but myself. And when I tell you next, that I, for one, won’t allow Mr Armadale’s resurrection from the sea to be the ruin of me without a fight for it, I tell you, my dear madam, one of the plainest truths I ever told to man or woman, in the whole course of my life. Don’t suppose I am invidiously separating my interests from yours, in the common danger that now threatens us both. I simply indicate the difference in the risk that we have respectively run. You have not sunk the whole of your resources in establishing a Sanatorium; and you have not made a false declaration before a magistrate, which is punishable as perjury by the law.’
I interrupted him again. His selfishness did me more good than his tea – it roused my temper effectually. ‘suppose we let your risk and my risk alone, and come to the point,’ I said. ‘What do you mean by making a fight for it? I see a railway guide on your table. Does making a fight for it, mean – running away?’
‘Running away?’ repeated the doctor. ‘You appear to forget that every farthing I have in the world is embarked in this establishment.’
‘You stop here then?’ I said.
‘Unquestionably!’
‘And what do you mean to do when Mr Armadale comes to England?’
A solitary fly, the last of his race whom the winter had spared, was buzzing feebly about the doctor’s face. He caught it before he answered me, and held it out across the table in his closed hand.
‘If this fly’s name was Armadale,’ he said, ‘and if you had got him as I have got him now, what would you do?’
His eyes, fixed on my face up to this time, turned significantly, as he ended his question, to my widow’s dress. I, too, looked at it when he looked. A thrill of the old deadly hatred, and the old deadly determination, ran through me again.
‘I should kill him,’ I said.
The doctor started to his feet (with the fly still in his hand), and looked at me – a little too theatrically – with an expression of the utmost horror.
‘Kill him!’ repeated the doctor in a paroxysm of virtuous alarm. ‘Violence – murderous violence – in My Sanatorium! You take my breath away!’
I caught his eye, while he was expressing himself in this elaborately indignant manner, scrutinizing me with a searching curiosity which was, to say the least of it, a little at variance with the vehemence of his language and the warmth of his tone. He laughed uneasily, when our eyes met, and recovered his smoothly confidential manner in the instant that elapsed before he spoke again.
‘I beg a thousand pardons,’ he said. ‘I ought to have known better than to take a lady too literally at her word. Permit me to remind you, however, that the circumstances are too serious for anything in the nature of – let us say, an exaggeration or a joke. You shall hear what I propose, without further preface.’ He paused, and resumed his figurative use of the fly imprisoned in his hand. ‘Here is Mr Armadale. I can let him out, or keep him in, just as I please – and he knows it. I say to him,’ continued the doctor, facetiously addressing the fly, ‘Give me proper security, Mr Armadale, that no proceedings of any sort shall be taken against either this lady or myself, and I will let you out of the hollow of my hand. Refuse – and be the risk what it may, I will keep you in.’ Can you doubt, my dear madam, what Mr Armadale’s answer is, sooner or later, certain to be? Can you doubt,’ said the doctor, suiting the action to the word, and letting the fly go, ‘that it will end to the entire satisfaction of all parties, in this way?’
‘I won’t say at present,’ I answered, ‘whether I doubt or not. Let me make sure that I understand you first. You propose, if I am not mistaken, to shut the doors of this place on Mr Armadale, and not to let him out again, until he has agreed to the terms which it is our interest to impose on him? May I ask, in that case, how you mean to make him walk into the trap that you have set for him here?’
‘I propose,’ said the doctor, with his hand on the railway guide, ‘ascertaining first, at what time during every evening of this month the tidal trains from Dover and Folkestone reach the London Bridge terminus. And I propose next, posting a person whom Mr Armadale knows, and whom you and I can trust, to wait the arrival of the trains, and to meet our man at the moment when he steps out of the railway carriage.’
‘Have you thought,’ I inquired, ‘of who the person is to be?’
‘I have thought,’ said the doctor, taking up Armadale’s letter, ‘of the person to whom this letter is addressed.’
The answer startled me. Was it possible that he and Bashwood knew one another? I put the question immediately.
‘Until to-day, I never so much as heard of the gentleman’s name,’ said the doctor. ‘I have simply pursued the inductive process of reasoning, for which we are indebted to the immortal Bacon.15 How does this very important letter come into your possession? I can’t insult you by supposing it to have been stolen. Consequently, it has come to you with the leave and licence of the person to whom it is addressed. Consequently, that person is in your confidence. Consequently, he is the first person I think of. You see the process? Very good. Permit me a question or two, on the subject of Mr Bashwood, before we go on any further.’
The doctor’s questions went as straight to the point as usual. My answers informed him that Mr Bashwood stood towards Armadale in the relation of steward – that he had received the letter at Thorpe-Ambrose that morning, and had brought it straight to me by the first train – that he had not shown it, or spoken of it before leaving, to Major Milroy or to any one else – that I had not obtain
At that point in the interrogatory, the doctor’s eyes began to look at me distrustfully, behind the doctor’s spectacles.
‘What is the secret of this blind devotion of Mr Bashwood’s to your interests?’ he asked.
I hesitated for a moment – in pity to Bashwood, not in pity to myself. ‘If you must know,’ I answered, ‘Mr Bashwood is in love with me.’
‘Ay! ay!’ exclaimed the doctor, with an air of relief. ‘I begin to understand now. Is he a young man?’
‘He is an old man.’
The doctor laid himself back in his chair, and chuckled softly. ‘Better and better!’ he said. ‘Here is the very man we want. Who so fit as Mr Armadale’s steward to meet Mr Armadale on his return to London. And who so capable of influencing Mr Bashwood in the proper way as the charming object of Mr Bashwood’s admiration?’
There could be no doubt that Bashwood was the man to serve the doctor’s purpose, and that my influence was to be trusted to make him serve it. The difficulty was not here – the difficulty was in the unanswered question that I had put to the doctor a minute since. I put it to him again.