"When I have written what you wish me to write," he asked, "what is to be done with it?" This time the answer came: negress left the room, and the child, in high triumph, trotted his toy-soldier up and down on the bed-clothes that lay rumpled over his fa "Seal it up in my presence, and post it to ther's breast. His mother's lovely face conmy Ex-" tracted with a pang of jealousy as she looked at him. His laboring articulation suddenly stopped, and he looked piteously in the questioner's face for the next word. "Do you mean your Executor ?" "Yes." "It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?" There was no answer. 66 'May I ask if it is a letter altering your will ?" "Nothing of the sort.' 997 Mr. Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one way out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that strange story of the unfinished letter which the doctor had repeated to him in Mrs. Armadale's words. The nearer he approached his unknown responsibility, the more ominous it seemed of something serious to come. Should he risk another question before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt crossed his mind he felt Mrs. Armadale's silk dress touch him on the side farthest from her husband. Her delicate dark hand was laid gently on his arm; her full deep African eyes looked at him in submissive entreaty. "My husband is very anxious," she whispered. "Will you quiet his anxiety, Sir, by taking your place at the writing-table?" It was from her lips that the request camefrom the lips of the person who had the best right to hesitate; the wife who was excluded from the secret! Most men in Mr. Neal's position would have given up all their safeguards on the spot. The Scotchman gave them all up but Shall I open your desk?" she asked, pushing back the child's plaything sharply while she spoke. An answering look from her husband guided her hand to the place under his pillow where the key was hidden. She opened the desk, and disclosed inside some small sheets of manuscript pinned together. "These?" she inquired, producing them. "Yes," he said. "You can go now." The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring a stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an anxiety in both their faces which they could neither of them control. The words that banished the wife from the room were spoken. The moment had come. "You can go now," said Mr. Armadale, for the second time. She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and an ashy paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the fatal letter which was a sealed secret to her; and a torture of jealous suspicion-suspicion of that other woman who had been the shadow and the poison of her life-wrung her to the heart. After moving a few steps from the bedside she stopped and came back again. Armed with the double courage of her love and her des air she pressed her lips on her dying husband's cheek, and pleaded with him for the last time. Her burning tears dropped on his face as she whispered to him, "Oh, Allan, think how I "I will write what you wish me.to write," he have loved you! think how hard I have tried to said, addressing Mr. Armadale. "I will scal it make you happy! think how soon I shall lose in your presence; and I will post it to your Ex-you! Oh, my own løve! don't, don't send me ecutor myself. But, in engaging to do this, I must beg you to remember that I am acting entirely in the dark; and I must ask you to excuse me if I reserve my own entire freedom of action, when your wishes in relation to the writing and the posting of the letter have been fulfilled." one. away!" The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the recollection of the love that had been given to him, and never returned, touched the heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing had touched it since the day of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke from him. He looked at her, and hesitated. "Let me stay," she whispered, pressing her face closer to his. "It will only distress you," he whispered back. "Nothing distresses me but being sent away from you!" He waited. and waited too. She saw that he was thinking, "If I let you stay a little-?" "Will you go when I tell you?" "On your oath ?" The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for a moment in the great outburst of anxiety which forced that question to his lips. He spoke those startling words as he had spoken no words yet. "On my oath!" she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the bedside, passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the room turned their heads away by common consent. In the silence that followed, the one sound stirring was the small sound of the child's toy as he moved it hither and thither on the bed. all hope of living to see my boy grow up to manhood, I have no choice but to write here what I would fain have said to him at a future time with my own lips. "I have three objects in writing. First, to reveal the circumstances which attended the marriage of an English lady of my acquaintance in the island of Madeira. Secondly, to throw the true light on the death of her hus timber-ship, La Grace de Dieu. Thirdly, to warn my son of a danger that lies in wait for him-a danger that will rise from his father's grave, when the earth has closed over his father's ashes. "The story of the English lady's marriage begins with my inheriting the great Armadale property and my taking the fatal Armadale name. The doctor was the first who broke the spell of stillness which had fallen on all the persons present. He approached the patient and ex-band a short time afterward on board the French amined him anxiously Mrs. Armadale rose from her knees, and, first waiting for her husband's permission, carried the sheets of manuscript which she had taken out of the desk to the table at which Mr. Neal was waiting. Flushed and eager, more beautiful than ever in the vehement agitation which still possessed her, she stooped over him as she put the letter into his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a woman's headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to him: "Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!" Her eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on his cheek. Before he could answer, before he could think, she was back with her husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that instant her beauty had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning in reluctant acknowledgment of his own inability to resist her, he turned over the leaves of the letter, looked at the blank place where the pen had dropped from the writer's hand and had left a blot on the paper, turned back again to the beginning, and said the words, in the wife's interest, which the wife herself had put into his lips "Perhaps, Sir, you may wish to make some corrections," he began, with all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with every outward appearance of letting his sour temper again get the better of him. "Shall I read over to you what you have already written?" Mrs. Armadale sitting at the bed-head on one side, and the doctor with his fingers on the patient's pulse sitting on the other, waited with widely different anxieties for the answer to Mr Neal's question. Mr. Armadale's eyes turned searchingly from his child to his wife. "You will hear it?" he said. Her breath came and went quickly; her hand stole up and took his; she bowed her head in silence. Her husband paused, taking secret counsel with his thoughts, and keeping his eyes fixed on his wife. At last he decided, and gave the answer. "Read it," he said. "And stop when I tell you." It was close on one o'clock, and the bell was ringing which summoned the visitors to their early dinner at the inn. The quick beat of footsteps and the gathering hum of voices outside penetrated gayly into the room as Mr. Neal spread the manuscript before him on the table and read the opening sentences in these words: "I address this letter to my son, when my son is of an age to understand it. Having lost "I am the only surviving son of the late Mathew Wrentmore, of Barbadoes I was born on our family estate in that island; and I lost my father when I was still a child. My mother was blindly fond of me: she denied me nothing; she let me live as I pleased. My boyhood and youth were passed in idleness and self-indulgence, among people-slaves and half-castes mostly-to whom my will was law. I doubt if there is a gentleman of my birth and station in all England as ignorant as I am at this moment. I doubt if there was ever a young man in this world whose passions were left so entirely without control of any kind as mine were in those early days. I "My mother had a woman's romantic objection to my father's homely Christian name was christened Allan, after the name of a wealthy cousin of my father's, the late Allan Armadale, who possessed estates in our neighborhood, the largest and the most productive in the island, and who consented to be my godfather by proxy. Mr. Armadale had never seen his West Indian property. He lived in England; and, after sending me the customary godfather's present, he held no further communication with my parents for years afterward. I was just twenty-one before we heard again from Mr. Armadale. On that occasion my mother received a letter from him asking if I was still alive, and offering no less (if I was) than to make me the heir to his West Indian property. "This piece of good fortune fell to me entirely through the misconduct of Mr. Armadale's son and only child. The young man had disgraced himself beyond all redemption; had left his home an outlaw; and had been thereupon renounced by his father at once and forever. Having no other near male relative to succeed him, Mr. Armadale thought of his cousin's son, and his own godson; and he offered the West Indian estate to me and my heirs after me on one condition-that I and my heirs should take his name. The proposal was gratefully accepted, and the proper legal measures were adopted for changing my name in the colony and in the mother-country. By the next mail information reached Mr. Armadale that his condition had heartily reciprocating all my mother's hopes and wishes he proposed (if I intended leaving Barbadoes shortly) that I should take Madeira on my way to England and pay him a visit at his temporary residence in the island. If this could not be, he mentioned the time at which he expected to be back in England, when I might be sure of finding a welcome at his own house of "At that time there happened to be a vacan- Thorpe-Ambrose. In conclusion he apologized cy in the clerk's office on the estate, and there for not writing at greater length; explaining came to fill it a young man about my own age, that his sight was affected, and that he had diswho had recently arrived in the island. He obeyed the doctor's orders by yielding to the announced himself by the name of Fergus In-temptation of writing to his old friend with his gleby. My impulses governed me in every thing; I knew no law but the law of my own caprice; and I took a fancy to the stranger the moment I set eyes on him. He had the manners of a gentleman, and he possessed the most attractive social qualities which, in my small experience, I had ever met with. When I heard that the written references to character which he had brought with him were pronounced to be unsatisfactory I interfered, and insisted that he should have the place. My will was law, and he had it. "My mother disliked and distrusted Ingleby from the first. When she found the intimacy between us rapidly ripening; when she found me admitting this inferior to the closest companionship and confidence-(I had lived with my inferiors all my life, and I liked it)—she made effort after effort to part us, and failed in one and all. Driven to her last resources she resolved to try the one chance left-the chance of persuading me to take a voyage which I had often thought of, a voyage to England. "Before she spoke to me on the subject she resolved to interest me in the idea of seeing England, as I had never been interested yet. She wrote to an old friend and an old admirer of hers, the late Stephen Blanchard, of ThorpeAmbrose, in Norfolk-a gentleman of landed estate, and a widower with a grown-up family. After-discoveries informed me that she must have alluded to their former attachment (which was checked, I believe, by the parents on either side); and that, in asking Mr. Blanchard's welcome for her son when he came to England, she made inquiries about his daughter, which hinted at the chance of a marriage uniting the two families, if the young lady and I met and liked one another. We were equally matched in every respect, and my mother's recollection of her girlish attachment to Mr. Blanchard made the prospect of my marrying her old admirer's daughter the brightest and happiest prospect that her eyes could see. Of all this I knew nothing until Mr. Blanchard's answer arrived at Barbadoes. Then my mother showed me the letter, and put the temptation which was to separate me from Fergus Ingleby openly in my way. "Mr. Blanchard's letter was dated from the island of Madeira. He was out of health, and he had been ordered there by the doctors to try the climate. His daughter was with him. After own hand. "Kindly as it was expressed the letter itself might have had little influence on me. But there was something else besides the letter: there was inclosed in it a miniature portrait of Miss Blanchard. At the back of the portrait her father had written half-jestingly, half-tenderly, I can't ask my daughter to spare my eyes as usual, without telling her of your inquiries and putting a young lady's diffidence to the blush. So I send her in effigy (without her knowledge) to answer for herself. It is a good likeness of a good girl. If she likes your sonand if I like him, which I am sure I shall-we may yet live, my good friend, to see our children what we might once have been ourselvesman and wife.' My mother gave me the miniature with the letter. The portrait at once struck me—I can't say why, I can't say howas nothing of the kind had ever struck me before. "Harder intellects than mine might have attributed the extraordinary impression produced on me to the disordered condition of my mind at that time; to the weariness of my own base pleasures which had been gaining on me for months past; to the undefined longing which that weariness implied for newer interests and fresher hopes than any that had possessed me yet. I attempted no such sober self-examination as this: I believed in destiny then; I believe in destiny now. It was enough for me to know-as I did know-that the first sense I had ever felt of something better in my nature than my animal-self was roused by that girl's face looking at me from her picture, as no woman's face had ever looked at me yet. In those tender eyes-in the chance of making that gentle creature my wife-I saw my destiny written. The portrait which had come into my hands so strangely and so unexpectedly was the silent messenger of happiness close at hand, sent to warn, to encourage, to rouse me before it was too late. I put the miniature under my pillow at night; I looked at it again the next morning. My conviction of the day before remained as strong as ever; my superstition (if you please to call it so) pointed out to me irresistibly the way on which I should go. There was a ship in port which was to sail for England in a fortnight, touching at Madeira. In that ship I took my passage." Thus far the reader had advanced with no in terruption to disturb him. But at the last words | valescence it was my one consolation when I the tones of another voice, low and broken, remembered the past, and my one encouragemingled with his own. ment when I thought of the future. No words "Was she a fair woman?" asked the voice, can describe the hold that first fancy had now "or dark like me?" 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 "Fair," said her husband, without looking at ship-and this time, when the ship sailed, I was on board. 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 mid-day 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 burned red in her dusky cheeks as she obstinately repeated the question, “Was she a fair woman-or dark like me?" 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, 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 afterward 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 con "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 toward me-and I beheld the original of my portrait, the fulfillment 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 an whose inheritance I had taken. And Fergus Ingleby was even with me for depriving him of his birth-right. "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. My "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. 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 out'set 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 learned 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 sick bed 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. might previously have taken of her love and her trust in him to degrade Miss Blanchard to his own level-I can not 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 practiced on her father. In this difficulty Ingleby found an instrument ready to his hand in an orphan girl of barely twelve years old, 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 afterward—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. “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 forever, or to elope under circum-of my life had been thwarted; remember the viostances 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 harbor 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 Remember how my confidence had been abused; remember how the one good purpose lent 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 |
