Armadale, Wilkie Collins [smallest ebook reader txt] 📗

finding how I had surprised him, to take him while he was off his guard, and to ask why my question about Armadale had produced such a change in his behavior to me. But after what had happened already, I was afraid to risk returning to the subject too soon. Something or other--what they call an instinct, I dare say--warned me to let Armadale alone for the present, and to talk to him first about himself. As I told you in one of my early letters, I had noticed signs and tokens in his manner and appearance which convinced me, young as he was, that he had done something or suffered something out of the common in his past life. I had asked myself more and more suspiciously every time I saw him whether he was what he appeared to be; and first and foremost among my other doubts was a doubt whether he was passing among us by his real name. Having secrets to keep about my own past life, and having gone myself in other days by more than one assumed name, I suppose I am all the readier to suspect other people when I find something mysterious about them. Any way, having the suspicion in my mind, I determined to startle him, as he had startled me, by an unexpected question on my side--a question about his name.

"While I was thinking, he was thinking; and, as it soon appeared, of what I had just said to him. 'I am so grieved to have frightened you,' he whispered, with that gentleness and humility which we all so heartily despise in a man when he speaks to other women, and which we all so dearly like when he speaks to ourselves. 'I hardly know what I have been saying,' he went on; 'my mind is miserably disturbed. Pray forgive me, if you can; I am not myself to-night.'

"'I am not angry,' I said; 'I have nothing to forgive. We are both imprudent; we are both unhappy.' I laid my head on his shoulder. 'Do you really love me?' I asked him, softly, in a whisper.

"His arm stole round me again; and I felt the quick beat of his heart get quicker and quicker. 'If you only knew!' he whispered back; 'if you only knew--' He could say no more. I felt his face bending toward mine, and dropped my head lower, and stopped him in the very act of kissing me.

"'No,' I said; 'I am only a woman who has taken your fancy. You are treating me as if I was your promised wife.'

"'Be my promised wife!' he whispered, eagerly, and tried to raise my head. I kept it down. The horror of these old remembrances that you know of came back and made me tremble a little when he asked me to be his wife. I don't think I was actually faint; but something like faintness made me close my eyes. The moment I shut them, the darkness seemed to open as if lightning had split it; and the ghosts of those other men rose in the horrid gap, and looked at me.

"'Speak to me!' he whispered, tenderly. 'My darling, my angel, speak to me!'

"His voice helped me to recover myself. I had just sense enough left to remember that the time was passing, and that I had not put my question to him yet about his name.

"'Suppose I felt for you as you feel for me?' I said. 'Suppose I loved you dearly enough to trust you with the happiness of all my life to come?'

"I paused a moment to get my breath. It was unbearably still and close; the air seemed to have died when the night came.

"'Would you be marrying me honorably,' I went on, 'if you married me in your present name?'

"His arm dropped from my waist, and I felt him give one great start. After that he sat by me, still, and cold, and silent, as if my question had struck him dumb. I put my arm round his neck, and lifted my head again on his shoulder. Whatever the spell was I had laid on him, my coming closer in that way seemed to break it.

"'Who told you?' He stopped. 'No,' he went on, 'nobody can have told you. What made you suspect--?' He stopped again.

"'Nobody told me,' I said; 'and I don't know what made me suspect. Women have strange fancies sometimes. Is Midwinter really your name?'

"'I can't deceive you,' he answered, after another interval of silence; 'Midwinter is not really my name.'

"I nestled a little closer to him.

"'What is your name?' I asked.

"He hesitated.

"I lifted my face till my cheek just touched his. I persisted, with my lips close at his ear:

"'What, no confidence in me even yet! No confidence in the woman who has almost confessed she loves you--who has almost consented to be your wife!'

"He turned his face to mine. For the second time he tried to kiss me, and for the second time I stopped him.

"'If I tell you my name,' he said, 'I must tell you more.'

"I let my cheek touch his again.

"'Why not?' I said. 'How can I love a man--much less marry him--if he keeps himself a stranger to me?'

"There was no answering that, as I thought. But he did answer it.

"'It is a dreadful story,' he said. 'It may darken all your life, if you know it, as it has darkened mine.'

"I put my other arm round him, and persisted. 'Tell it me; I'm not afraid; tell it me.'

"He began to yield to my other arm.

"'Will you keep it a sacred secret?' he said. 'Never to be breathed--never to be known but to you and me?'

"I promised him it should be a secret. I waited in a perfect frenzy of expectation. Twice he tried to begin, and twice his courage failed him.

"'I can't!' he broke out in a wild, helpless way. 'I can't tell it!'

"My curiosity, or more likely my temper, got beyond all control. He had irritated me till I was reckless what I said or what I did. I suddenly clasped him close, and pressed my lips to his. 'I love you!' I whispered in a kiss. 'Now will you tell me?'

"For the moment he was speechless. I don't know whether I did it purposely to drive him wild. I don't know whether I did it involuntarily in a burst of rage. Nothing is certain but that I interpreted his silence the wrong way. I pushed him back from me in a fury the instant after I had kissed him. 'I hate you!' I said. 'You have maddened me into forgetting myself. Leave me. I don't care for the darkness. Leave me instantly, and never see me again!'

"He caught me by the hand and stopped me. He spoke in a new voice; he suddenly commanded, as only men can.

"'Sit down,' he said. 'You have given me back my courage--you shall know who I am.'

"In the silence and the darkness all round us, I obeyed him, and sat down.

"In the silence and the darkness all round us, he took me in his arms again, and told me who he was."

"Shall I trust you with his story? Shall I tell you his real name? Shall I show you, as I threatened, the thoughts that have grown out of my interview with him and out of all that has happened to me since that time?

"Or shall I keep his secret as I promised? and keep my own secret too, by bringing this weary, long letter to an end at the very moment when you are burning to hear more!

"Those are serious questions, Mrs. Oldershaw--more serious than you suppose. I have had time to calm down, and I begin to see, what I failed to see when I first took up my pen to write to you, the wisdom of looking at consequences. Have I frightened myself in trying to frighten you? It is possible--strange as it may seem, it is really possible.

"I have been at the window for the last minute or two, thinking. There is plenty of time for thinking before the post leaves. The people are only now coming out of church.

"I have settled to put my letter on one side, and to take a look at my diary. In plainer words I must see what I risk if I decide on trusting you; and my diary will show me what my head is too weary to calculate without help. I have written the story of my days (and sometimes the story of my nights) much more regularly than usual for the last week, having reasons of my own for being particularly careful in this respect under present circumstances. If I end in doing what it is now in my mind to do, it would be madness to trust to my memory. The smallest forgetfulness of the slightest event that has happened from the night of my interview with Midwinter to the present time might be utter ruin to me.

"'Utter ruin to her!' you will say. 'What kind of ruin does she mean?'

"Wait a little, till I have asked my diary whether I can safely tell you."

X. MISS GWILT'S DIARY.

"July 21st, Monday night, eleven o'clock.--Midwinter has just left me. We parted by my desire at the path out of the coppice; he going his way to the hotel, and I going mine to my lodgings.

"I have managed to avoid making another appointment with him by arranging to write to him to-morrow morning. This gives me the night's interval to compose myself, and to coax my mind back (if I can) to my own affairs. Will the night pass, and the morning find me still thinking of the Letter that came to him from his father's deathbed? of the night he watched through on the Wrecked Ship; and, more than all, of the first breathless moment when he told me his real Name?

"Would it help me to shake off these impressions, I wonder, if I made the effort of writing them down? There would be no danger, in that case, of my forgetting anything important. And perhaps, after all, it may be the fear of forgetting something which I ought to remember that keeps this story of Midwinter's weighing as it does on my mind. At any rate, the experiment is worth trying. In my present situation I must be free to think of other things, or I shall never find my way through all the difficulties at Thorpe Ambrose that are still to come.

"Let me think. What haunts me, to begin with?

"The Names haunt me. I keep saying and saying to myself: Both alike!--Christian name and surname both alike! A light-haired Allan Armadale, whom I have long since known of, and who is the son of my old mistress. A dark-haired Allan Armadale, whom I only know of now, and who is only known to others under the name of Ozias Midwinter. Stranger still; it is not relationship, it is not chance, that has made them namesakes. The father of the light Armadale was the man who was born to the family name, and who lost the family inheritance. The father of the dark Armadale was the man who took the name, on condition of getting the inheritance--and who got it.

"So there are two of them--I can't help thinking of it--both unmarried. The light-haired Armadale, who offers to the woman who can secure him, eight thousand a year while he lives; who leaves her twelve hundred a year when he dies; who must and shall marry me for those two