Armadale, Wilkie Collins [smallest ebook reader txt] 📗

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 this 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 Sanitarium! 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. 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 license 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 toward 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 obtained this service at his hands by trusting him with my secret; that I had communicated with him in the character of Armadale's widow; that he had suppressed the letter, under those circumstances, solely in obedience to a general caution I had given him to keep his own counsel, if anything strange happened at Thorpe Ambrose, until he had first consulted me; and, lastly, that the reason why he had done as I told him in this matter, was that in this matter, and in all others, Mr. Bashwood was blindly devoted to my interests.

"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.

"'Suppose Mr. Armadale's steward meets his employer at the terminus,' I said. 'May I ask once more how Mr. Armadale is to be persuaded to come here?'

"'Don't think me ungallant,' rejoined the doctor in his gentlest manner, 'if I ask, on my side, how are men persuaded to do nine-tenths of the foolish acts of their lives? They are persuaded by your charming sex. The weak side of every man is the woman's side of him. We have only to discover the woman's side of Mr. Armadale--to tickle him on it gently--and to lead him our way with a silken string. I observe here,' pursued the doctor, opening Armadale's letter, 'a reference to a certain young lady, which looks promising. Where is the note that Mr. Armadale speaks of as addressed to Miss Milroy?'

"Instead of answering him, I started, in a sudden burst of excitement, to my feet. The instant he mentioned Miss Milroy's name all that I had heard from Bashwood of her illness, and of the cause of it, rushed back into my memory. I saw the means of decoying Armadale into the Sanitarium as plainly as I saw the doctor on the other side of the table, wondering at the extraordinary change in me. What a luxury it was to make Miss Milroy serve my interests at last!

"'Never mind the note,' I said. 'It's burned, for fear of accidents. I can tell you all (and more) than the note could have told you. Miss Milroy cuts the knot! Miss Milroy ends the difficulty! She is privately engaged to him. She has heard the false report of his death; and she has been seriously ill at Thorpe Ambrose ever since. When Bashwood meets him at the station, the very first question he is certain to ask--'

"'I see!' exclaimed the doctor, anticipating me. 'Mr. Bashwood has nothing to do but to help the truth with a touch of fiction. When he tells his master that the false report has reached Miss Milroy, he has only to add that the shock has affected her head, and that she is here under medical care. Perfect! perfect! We shall have him at the Sanitarium as fast as the fastest cab-horse in London can bring him to us. And mind! no risk--no necessity for trusting other people. This is not a mad-house; this is not a licensed establishment; no doctors' certificates are necessary here! My dear lady, I congratulate you; I congratulate myself. Permit me to hand you the railway guide, with my best compliments to Mr. Bashwood, and with the page turned down for him, as an additional attention, at the right place.'

"Remembering how long I had kept Bashwood waiting for me, I took the book at once, and wished the doctor good-evening without further ceremony. As he politely opened the door for me, he reverted, without the slightest necessity for doing so, and without a word from me to lead to it, to the outburst of virtuous alarm which had escaped him at the earlier part of our interview.

"'I do hope,' he said, 'that you will kindly forget and forgive my extraordinary want of tact and perception when--in short, when I caught the fly. I positively blush at my own stupidity in putting a literal interpretation on a lady's little joke! Violence in My Sanitarium!' exclaimed the doctor, with his eyes once more fixed attentively on my face--'violence in this enlightened nineteenth century! Was there ever anything so ridiculous? Do fasten your cloak before you go out, it is so cold and raw! Shall I escort you? Shall I send my servant? Ah, you were always independent! always, if I may say so, a host in yourself! May I call to-morrow morning, and hear what you have settled with Mr. Bashwood?'

"I said yes, and got away from him at last. In a quarter of an hour more I was back at my lodgings, and was informed by the servant that 'the elderly gentleman' was still waiting for me.

"I have not got the heart or the patience--I hardly know which--to waste many words on what passed between me and Bashwood. It was so easy, so degradingly easy, to pull the strings of the poor old puppet in any way I pleased! I met none of the difficulties which I should have been obliged to meet in the case of a younger man, or of a man less infatuated with admiration for me. I left the allusions to Miss Milroy in Armadale's letter, which had naturally puzzled him, to be explained at a future time. I never even troubled myself to invent a plausible reason for wishing him to meet Armadale at the terminus, and to entrap him by a stratagem into the doctor's Sanitarium. All that I found it necessary to do was to refer to what I had written to Mr. Bashwood, on my arrival in London, and to what I had afterward said to him, when he came to answer my letter personally at the hotel.

"'You know already,' I said, 'that my marriage has not been a happy one. Draw your own conclusions from that; and don't press me to tell you whether the news of Mr. Armadale's rescue from the sea is, or is not, the welcome news that it ought to be to his wife!' That was enough to put his withered old face